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  • Blog,  feedback,  Goal setting,  peer coaching,  Professional Development,  standards based grading,  Teacher Reflection,  Twitter,  Voxer

    Professional Learning – Part 6 – Putting myself on the line

    ISB MS Professional Development – Peer Observation Task 2016-17 This year our MS Admin challenged us to invite a colleague to observe a lesson via video of our lesson and sharing.  You can read the overview of this process above.  As a new teacher in this school, this is a bit of a big ask.  I have blogged a lot about my Professional Development work this year and you can go back and read up about Data and how I am trying to use this in my student learning. If you team teach then the opportunity to challenge each other and push and to share your observations is very powerful…

  • Blog,  collaboration,  feedback,  peer coaching,  Professional Development,  Teacher Reflection,  Twitter,  Voxer

    Professional Development – Part 7 – Notices /Wonderings

    Mel Hamada in G8 Badminton Class at ISB This week I have been watching and thinking about my teaching practice.  I have blogged about this a lot already but you can read the last blog post here that explains what I am currently doing. I will say that I was very nervous about what I would see watching these videos.  I always find my voice the most interesting – do I really sound like that?  But once my nervousness and feeling of worry were over, it was interesting to watch the lesson from the camera lens perspective, rather than from what I see while teaching.  It was so powerful to…

  • ACHPER,  Blog,  Concept based learning,  Professional Development,  Teacher Reflection

    ACHPER Net Games Article – Links

    ACHPER Australia invited me to write an article in their November 2014 issue about our recent Net Games unit in PE.  In that article I refer to System cards that we used for student inquiry. I would like to encourage other PhysEd teachers who are working on concept based or inquiry based lesson content to contact Rick Baldock (@baldyr55 or ) with their work, it is important that we continue to grow our global community full of good learning and sharing – this will empower and help us to learn from each other!  Rick is an amazing supporter of groups and individuals and I thank him for his patience and amazing editing…

  • Blog,  feedback,  Professional Development,  Technology in PE

    PE – online course – what would it include?

    Dreaming of Cycling by Marja von Bochove CC BY Asking a teacher to keep on learning should be an easy sell – but often it is difficult to make the time to get back on your bike…. Online courses are nothing new.  I completed my MA online through a University in NSW, Australia, it was hard work but I relished in being able to complete my studies and not have to attend workshops and lectures and waste time travelling.  I missed some aspects – the ability to discuss face-to-face with my classmates and to talk things out with my teachers, but as I was living in Tanzania at the time, this…

  • Blog,  formative assessment,  MYP,  peer coaching,  pegeeks,  Teacher Reflection,  Technology in PE

    Screen-casting in Gymnastics and Dance

      Dancing Troopers by Kalexanderson CC BY NC SA I have mentioned on twitter about using technology in my Gymnastics and Dance classes and thought I would delve a little deeper into this in a blog post. Last year I began my Gymnastics unit with Grade 7 students.  This unit really focuses around Floor routines using balances and other tumbling and so I pitch it to the students with the importance of Team work and also on giving lots of feedback as the routines are very aesthetic and require students to think and be more aware of presenting themselves and on proprioception within their routines. I was using the typical…

  • Badminton,  Blog,  collaboration,  formative assessment,  pegeeks

    Mastery and Failure

    Last year I worked with Simon Mills to design a Badminton unit and after much debate and discussion, we decided to go with a very different approach to our unit.  We had both worked in Japan and we had watched Japanese students working in PE using so much skill repetition to master skills rather than practice them.  And so we decided to see how our students would cope with skill mastery as the focus of our learning. We used a basic “How to learn Badminton” type book that started off with warm up skills and we used these series of skills as the backbone of our unit.  We didn’t know…