#ACHPER15

motion gears team force by Ralph Bijker CC BY

The annual conference for ACHPER15 was held in Adelaide, Australia this year in April.  I made the trip to this conference for a variety of reasons, in no particular order:

• Rick Baldock and Shane Pill would be there and I learning a lot through my interactions with them online
• I wanted to present some of the work I have been doing and see how it resonated with other professionals in my field
• I was very excited to learn about best practice from the presenters and key note speakers
• to meet some of my twitter PLN in person and keep talking about the great #physed work that is going on including Mark Williams and Kylie Newbold
• I have some great friends and former colleagues in Adelaide (and who came in from Manila) to catch up with.
• I have never explored Adelaide!

This conference had a variety of academic and practical sessions and explored all kinds of topics and ideas that are the tangents that make up Physical Health Education at the moment.

There are a lot of takeaways for me from this conference and I want to spend sometime considering them and taking time to share here.  I want to recommend this conference and organisation to all PE teachers in this area (and beyond) as a great resource for sharing and connecting.  There is excellent work going on and people out there to support us in our learning and growth as PE teachers.  It is important that we model life-long learning for our students and our own children and friends and part of this is connecting with others who can shape and challenge us to be better teachers and for us to embrace some change in our lives to really mix up our own teaching practices.  It is also worth saying that I think some of the work we discussed doesn’t fit into where I see myself going as a teacher and you need to filter what is going to work for you but also be very mindful of where PE is going as a profession (you cannot pretend that what you might have been teaching 20 years ago is still valid with the advances in education, technology, elite sport changes and best teaching practice – some is, a lot isn’t).

We are living in one of the biggest changes in modern times – the technological revolution – and we must consider how PE teachers  we are all working to battle sedentary behaviour and how we are ensuring that this generation are aware of the importance of motion to their life expectancy.  PE teachers are the voices that need to be louder and heard in our schools – at meetings, when we are talking to senior leadership or having a chance to be involved in Professional Development with our colleagues – more PE people need to stand up and share what we know and what we are learning from our academics and researchers – we need to be a part of making solutions work in non-PE classes so that everyone is moving more and working more effectively and that we are Happier as a result of all of this!

Thank you to ACHPER SA for inviting me to come on down and to all the people who came and said hello – twitter is awesome for connecting us up – but the meet ups in person are just so valuable, feels like you know people already.