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Starting school – opportunities for PE to shine.
Happy Summer! It may be a Summer that is usual for you – or maybe something totally different. Maybe some things are the same but others not-so-much. When we start school in a few weeks time (whatever that looks like depending on where you are…)it will be really important to spend some time connecting with your students and your colleagues as the journey of the Summer months may be radically different and may have affected people in new ways. This may be a return to a new normal and we need to be ready for the very many ways that could look. This past few weeks I have been fortunate…
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End-of-Year Professional Reflection 2020
2020 hasn’t been the easiest of year’s to work with – with bushfires in Australia that really affected my emotional health to Covid-19 and the closing of school and the completion of Semester 2 through eLearning while living with my family in my parents home in Australia – it has been a weird year. I have been asked to complete an end-of-year reflection for this 2019-2020 academic year. I would like to do that but also to include a few other significant learnings that I believe will take me forward as an Educator at ISB for (hopefully) years to come. Firstly, the Tripod framework has been adopted by ISB to…
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Finishing Strong
eLearning can suck the marrow from a love of teaching and being around young people all day. This week has been a long week, but with the close of our academic year remaining online, it has been important to regroup and try to reach out to my students who have not engaged in any form of PE eLearning since we started in February. I want to be clear that I am not in any way judging my students or blaming them, I am frustrated because I feel I cannot reach them, my emails go unanswered, my content goes unread, parents are not responding, and I feel sad that I have…
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Day 20: Region Challenge Unit
Region Challenge Unit Recently our team came together to discuss eLearning in the run up to the end of the year. With Week 15 or 16 starting this week, and with a changed school calendar to accomodate changes with breaks, holidays and assessment, we had to revamp our current plans with something different. We have noticed students dropping off in engagement and we wanted to try and bring them back in and not overwhelm them or their families. We also have a very small number of students returning to school, and wanted to think about how to grow their communities and give them things they could do together within the…
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Week 14 or 15… further thoughts on eLearning and end of the year.
May is the start of our 14th or 15th week of eLearning. To be honest it is so normal now that it has blended together and with the knowledge that we won’t go back to our campus this academic year, we now look with certainty at closing out the year in eLearning and starting our planning around what next academic year will bring and how we can prepare our teachers and students (and families) for this. Beijing has allowed all schools to do some reopening. This has included Grade 8 and Grade 12 students, parents and staff on campus but only under strict protocols that have included taking your temperature…
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Day 18: Challenge Unit
Region Challenge Unit With more eLearning to come, our department has had to work out how to complete the academic year. If we were in school, we would be working on Olympic Day classes or Track and Field focus and much more direct instructional teaching as students start to tire and are not as interested in Inquiry or student-led long units – they need limited choices and more support to get them through May. eLearning is looking to be somewhat the same! What? This unit is designed for us to focus on Student Engagement and Activity by offering them a different activity under week-long themes and then hosting ‘live’ Zoom Region Challenges…
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Day 17: Bunker and Thorpe
Dr Ash Casey has shared a blog post on peprn.com about Games for Understanding which prompted some great conversation on twitter this week. [6 Minute Read] Bunker and Thorpe challenged teachers to think beyond the traditional notion of ‘how it is done’ (technique) and instead give serious and more sustained consideration to ‘what to do’ (decision making) and ‘when to do it’ (skill execution). https://t.co/ambK66JmyK pic.twitter.com/zPslHIl8AJ — Ash Casey (@DrAshCasey) May 1, 2020 Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) follows a specific model and steps and although I embrace fully the process of teaching decision making through tactical awareness and using the game rules, environment, equipment to make the game more…
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Day 16: Running in Chinese Races
For the last three years, I have been racing in Beijing in whatever races suited me on race days that worked with our family schedule. There seems to be peak times to race that avoid cold Winter and silly-hot and sticky summer. It is almost impossible to ride outside from mid-November to March-ish and then once June rolls around any outside training has to be started by 4:30am to be sure you are done by 7am as it starts to get hot. Our second year in Beijing, I found some WeChat groups that advertised for Foreigners in Chinese running events. I went along to a few of these and it…