PhysEdSummit 5.0 Student voice, participation and leadership in schools
The physedagogy team have been hard at work and last weekend the PhysEdSummit 5.0 rolled out around the World. This initiative aims to provide quality Professional Development to PhysEd teachers anywhere you can get wifi with free online sessions that allowed you to either actively be involved during a session (ask your questions, share your experiences or take polls or share resources etc) or to go back and watch the sessions and contact presenters via a variety of social media avenues. The opportunity to get involved was very impressive and as we are scattered all over the place, the timezone changes meant that at any time, there was a good variety of people online taking part or now catching up with sessions missed.
I have been fortunate to meet a lot of PE people and one of my heroes is Rick Baldock (@baldyr55). Rick is currently the Professional Learning Coordinator at ACHPER (South Australia) and also works casually at Flinders University. He does a lot of work in reading and commenting on PE academia and current practice and works to solicit the best practice around to share with his colleagues and PE teachers. Rick is a very strong supporter of Don Hellison’s Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility Model and we collaborated to discuss the importance of explicitly modeling and teaching personal and social responsibility to our students.
More and more schools are adopting standards that focus on Social and Personal education and it seems that the rolling out of this program is left between the PE and mentoring teachers. TPSR is one model that could be used to align the teaching and thinking around this standard with 5 specific outcomes that are addressed including respect; caring/ self control and the ability to transfer these skills beyond the classroom.
Rick and I developed our google presentation with ideas around current big-model practice in PE at the moment – Game Sense/ Sport Education and TPSR and it would be worth saying here that I have not had training in the TPSR model but have had conversations at length with other practitioners as well as a lot of reading of academic papers on this program. I don’t use this model in my class but have found through my conversations that what I do do in my classes take a lot from this model as well as hybridisation of other interpersonal and personal learning lessons. The key take away for me here is that the student learning has to be explicit. As PE teachers (or not PE teachers) we have to explicitly teach students about respect (of each other/ of the teacher/ of the equipment of their opponent and beyond the gym into their non-PE lives) and they need you to model it, have opportunity to try it out and to make adjustments under different pressure and different games and leadership roles to see what this looks like. If we are asking them to do this and assessing the standards but not explicitly teaching it then I feel we are doing our students a dis-service.
Our session touches on some of the above discussion points as well as Rick sharing his knowledge on the TPSR model with lots of examples. If you are interested, please do take the time to check it out here.