Physical Education Teachers' Experiences in Promoting Life Skills using Differentiated Instruction

Physical education (PE) is a strategic medium for teaching students life skills. Therefore, teachers' understanding of the comprehensive concept of life skills is important to help them organize, integrate, promote, and even develop the life skills of their students. This study explores teachers' experiences promoting life skills in PE with differentiated instruction (DI) used a qualitative approach. The participants were two elementary school teachers who had graduated from the teacher mover program and had implemented the Independent Curriculum. Participants' experiences were explored using nine open-ended questions, from conception, usefulness, and problems to constraints and solutions. Interview data were analyzed using thematic procedures. The research findings imply that teachers already have concepts and well-integrated PE life skills, such as analytical and critical thinking, communication, and simple product development. Teachers promote students' life skills through DI that accommodates students' learning needs with diagnostic assessment through content, processes, products, and learning climate. The constraints that teachers experience include teaching collaboration and time management with various cultural backgrounds from students. The novelty of this research is that it is the first research investigating teachers' experiences of integrating life skills in PE using DI so that with different learning needs, teachers can also accommodate various life skills needs of students, such as critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, and communication. The teaching of life skills from the concept of the Independent Curriculum has been well implemented. However, to ensure a more comprehensive and sustainable integration of life skills dimensions will need further discussion on the development of learning tools and models as well as life skills integration training for PE teachers.