Uncategorized
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Proposal for Scheduling – a call for research, experience and questions…
Image by M W from Pixabay Next year our Middle school schedule will change. Our Leadership team has done a very thorough job of research into scheduling; interviewing with other schools about what they do and Why they do it (and How they make it work); forming a working group to look at different angles; surveys to parents, teachers and students and meeting with scheduling guru’s and reading a lot of literature around what is best for kids and how we might make that work at our school. The knock-on effect for us in PE and Health in the MS is that we have some changes from our current model and we now…
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When – the magic of Timing – thoughts for ISB scheduling
I have just completed reading Daniel Pink’s book When – the Scientific secrets of Perfect Timing. A number of super book reviews can quickly tell you the summary or takeaways from Pink’s book like this one or you could go to his website to get a better idea of the book itself. The book is not about the WHY of timing but about the importance of WHEN we time things – starting with the idea of Time itself. Pink and his team have done a lot of research and present it in a well-crafted book with evidence, ideas and then at the end of each chapter some ways in which…
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From the Heart – Keynote thoughts for PE Institute 2019
Image from Gifer This week is Chinese New Year and our Beijing based school has a week off. I am in the midst of working on a few projects and the biggest thing this week is to try and accomplish one of our local bike shops FireCracker 400 which is supposed to be 400km of cycling in 7 days but I have amended this to be 325km of cycling and 75km of running in 7 days. I am still not sure whether I will make it – with air quality and temperature always an issue here and with the amazingness of snowfall in the week as well – a magical…
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Challenges ahead – Professional Learning- Goal Setting
Meaningful PE has become an area of focus for me this year. I feel that as a more experienced PE teacher that I have an opportunity to now delve into thinking and creating learning intentions that are about offering students the chance to make Movement meaningful beyond doing for assessment or just for doing’s sake. I have been yo-yo-ing backward and forward around the idea of how to be more Meaningful in PE and how to make experiences in PE more meaningful. Recently a class of my MS students completed a Tripod 7C’s survey about me and their experiences in my PE class. I waited with anticipation for the results. I…
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Professional Growth 2018-19 Part 2 – Teacher Reflection against Tripod Standards
This year I am working to on Professional Goals that are being drawn from new Standards that we are trialing at ISB as part of a Pilot group. The idea is that we have more ownership of our teacher learning but that what we choose to focus on comes from a series of data points – one being the Tripod 7Cs Standards, another from Student feedback (via a survey linked to the same Tripod 7Cs) and from Departmental conversations. I suppose there are lots of other data points such as self-reflection, student conversations, and diverse student needs, time and energy to this project as well as reading teacher and practitioner…
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APPEC 2018 Session Notes
APPEC 2018 at HKIS Steigen Socks have kindly offered 30% off their socks (!) to people who attended my workshops! Disclaimer: I have also received 30% off and love these socks to teach, race and give away to my PLN!. Put in Hamada30 in the Coupon box to get your discount. This year I am very excited and grateful to be presenting a range of new workshops! I have worked really hard to try and provide meaningful experiences for participants and to try and be authentic to the work that I do with my students but also to make sure that I am referencing the work of others that has come…
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Sending those Thank You Notes I’ve been meaning to write…
Article Link “People like getting thank you notes.” writes Heather Murphy. I read this article in July and immediately put it out to twitter. We really should be letting people know that their contributions, however big or small, are valuable and that we appreciate them. I am a lover and coniscer of cards and note paper. I hoard them. I positively shake with excitement when I go into a card shop – and when let lose in Papyrus this summer, I came away with lots of cards in box packs ready to send out in the months of Aug and Sept to thank people all over the place. Why I…
- Concept based learning, Criteria, feedback, Goal setting, peer coaching, Professional Development, Research, Teacher Reflection, Uncategorized
Discovering Meaning in PE
This post is long overdue. I have taken a hiatus from writing and this has been both good (giving me time for other focus) and bad ( I have genuinely missed writing about my thinking about and recording my work in PE). This week I have been enjoying listening, reading and dialoguing about the Purpose of PE for me as a teacher but also in connection with student learning and the ultimate goal of every PE teacher – How do we make PE meaningful so that every student in our care wants to come back to our spaces and then in time wants to create their own meaningful movement journeys…