An Ecological Analysis of a Sport Education Season

This study provides an ecological analysis of a sport education season. Through the examination of the tasks and accountability operating in this season, it was determined that the high level of enthusiastic student engagement was due to the presence of three vectors, all of which make positive contributions to sustaining the program of action. These vectors include the teacher’s managerial task system, the student social system, and the content-embedded accountability inherent in the curriculum model. Sport education provides a multidimensional program of action, in contrast to more traditional physical education settings, where teachers either push students through the curriculum with strong external accountability as a way of achieving and sustaining order, or retreat to a curricular zone of safety and negotiate minimum student work for cooperation in the managerial system.