PhysEdsummit 3.0 – A wrap!

Title Slide from our Presentation (CC BY NC SA Mel Hamada)

The PhysEdsummit 3.0 has been running for 12 hours and this morning (10am Japan time) Mark Williams and I were very fortunate to share our session on Inquiry, Teaching Games for Understanding and Physed.  If you didn’t get the chance to see it, you can find all in the information linked here.

I want to share that I do not believe that I am an expert in this area. The ideas here are not ones that Mark and I have created, we are advocates of this model of teaching and we have taken the time to research, read and put our ideas into practice in our departments and we have also met and connected with experts in these fields (such as Shane Pill, Dr Ash Casey and Dr Stephen Harvey to name a few).  It is important that you do a little reading or talk to some people implementing TGfU and Inquiry/Generate Essential Questions and decide to work on a unit that you are super comfortable with (for me that was Invasion Games) and then go about it.

Mark is super knowledgable on Essential Questions and developing Concept for student learning and I borrow his ideas as I am considering the scaffold to MSHS classes.  It is important that you talk to your Department or if you work solo, consider the natural vertical scaffold of your students – at YIS we try and have a conceptual strand that runs from Kindergarten to Grade 10 – for example in our Invasion Games we look at Community as the overall concept and then we go from What is a Community?  What can I contribute to a Community?  Leading up to Leadership and Problem solving in Communities for our older students.  What is to origin of the problem in this situation? Game?

We then use questions to guide the small sided games we are playing that relate to the conceptual understanding of the game and link these to the greater overlying Conceptual questions we are investigating in our units.  One of the goals I have this year is to work on my Net Games TGfU and to become more confident with a variety of activities and questions for guiding this work with my students.

It was really great to share a session with Mark and to have a great range of people online sharing in our presentation – from pre-service PE teachers to administrators and experts on TGfU and Inquiry – thank you to everyone who came out and had questions and also some of the answers or more resources.

I am going to be attending the APPEC (Asia Pacific PE Conference) in November in Hong Kong and to present on TGfU and Visible Thinking Routines, and hope that Mark and I will be able to team up to talk Inquiry again as it is clear that this is an area for further conversation and discussion.

Thank you to the PhysEdagogy team for allowing us to take an hour to share and to all the work that was done in the lead up to this session.