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Professional Learning Part 6 – Reflection and re-write
Window Shopper by Hindrik Sijens CC BY NC SA This year I have been blogging about the PE Professional Goals that I have set and my journey as I chronicle my way through the cycle of writing these goals, the actions needed to be taken to implement them, the student learning I have worked towards and then the lesson series and now I would like to share some of the reflections and teacher learning that I have taken away. This is not the end… I have the next phase of this work which is to teach it all again to a different Grade 7 class in the coming months and…
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Slow Progress – iPod trial
Undecided by Rafael Peñaloza CC BY NC SA Have you ever thought that things would run at a certain pace, but been amazed at the reality? That is how I am feeling about my iPod trial. I suppose because I read about the great things that other PE faculties and teachers do, I dreamed that all of this would suddenly begin for me here at UNIS. However, I am findng that it takes longer than I had originally thought. My post here is not intended to be negative or pessimistic, I am loving finding out what I could/should do with my iPods in class, but there are some hiccups that are…
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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…
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Collaboration
Earlier in our year we had a PD visit from Steve Barkley who is well known around the traps as a huge advocate for Peer Coaching and truly believes that this is the only way to move forward. I didn’t need to be convinced, I really do enjoy collaborative planning and teaching, so long as the people that I am working with are of a simliar mind set and are willing to work for the product/reward of the collaboration. I find that team teaching can be such a great learning curve and allows us the opportunity to be confronted with our own teaching fears but to also share great ideas…