Soziales Lehren und Förderung von sozialem Lernen im Sportunterricht: Eine Fallstudie

In today’s society, social skills are expected from every school graduate. Thus, a responsibilty to foster social learning is imposed on any school. Especially physical education plays an important role within this fostering since social skills is stated as one of the objectives in several curricula on physical education. Hence, the question arises, what teachers understand by social skills and how it can be fostered within the context of physical education. These questions have been investigated on the basis of a case study, in which both interviews and observations provided the data that has been examined. Although several (sports-) educationalists hold the opinion that social skills should mainly be taught intentionally – because functional learning is supposed to have negative effects – it has been found out that a large part of the social learning in the class under study is indeed functional. This functional social learning, however, does not necessarily have to have a negative influence on the students’ social skills. Rather, it has been found out that functional learning can have positive and desirable effects. An important factor of influence, in order to achieve these desirable effect, is the classroom climate as well as the affiliation between teacher and students. If both of these factors are learning-friendly, social skills cannot only be taught successfully when the fostering of these skills is intentional, but also when it is functional. As the variance between different classes under similar conditions is considered minimal, the insights of this case study can be relevant for other teachers too.