-
Checklists, Rubrics and more…. How might this look for a PE teacher?
It has been a very unsettling year for me so far. I have come from a place of feeling very secure in my own understanding of Physical Education and the Middle Year’s Program (MYP) with a evolution from teacher to presenter in this field. I enjoy knowing that I have worked hard and tried a lot of new pedagogical model ideas out in my quest to really hone in on how students learn tactically in game play as well as delve more deeply into the social and emotional learning that we must be mindful of in our performance environment. The focus should and always is about student learning in…
-
Spontaneous Dance Mob
Our Grade 9 students all take PE at the same time, so we have 65 students and three little spaces to play. Our PE department made the decision a few years ago to do Dance at the same time as to share the Gym and our Dance room and avoid the Turf during the winter cold and usual rainy seasons. This has been a good decision as it allows our students to mingle out of class groups and for us to really share the work that is happening in our unit. This unit focused on What makes a Great performance? and we look at a whole host of important features…
-
Articulating a #Physed curriculum ELC – G12
School Architecture, 1921 by Learn From. Build More. CC BY SA This Monday is one of our first in-school Professional Development days and within this day there is a block of time for Heads of Dept (HoD) to run PD with their Dept. A quick poll and Start of year discussion with my team indicated that we needed to take time to continue the Articulation of our YIS PE curriculum and Monday seems the perfect opportunity to apply 2 hours of time to developing this plan. Yokohama International School has a very unique problem for an International School – it has very limited space. A lot of the sorts of…
-
MYP Next Chapter for PHE – initial thoughts jumping in…
Cliff Jumping by Barney Moss CC BY Last August, Yokohama Int’l School (YIS) transitioned into the MYP‘s Next Chapter. Our PhysEd department has set itself the task of taking 12 months to digest the four new criterion. We are finding this is not an easy task, as the new criterion at first look appear straightforward but half way through the year we are finding this task rather daunting. I would like to share some of the work that we have been doing and ask others to comment on the way in which they are using the four criterions in their schools. Below are the four PHE Criterion. I have listed…
-
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…
-
MYP #PhysEd and the inquiry cycle – Net Games for HS students
Mastermind by Steve Berry CC BY SA YIS have adopted the MYP Next Chapter this year and this means that our PE Department are starting to sort out how our criteria have changed under the new guide. My colleague, Alex, and I are quite into semantics, and can quite easily engage in conversation about what words mean and how we ensure our learners are truly connecting their learning to their assessment and feedback through the use of the key command words. So far I am enjoying the fact that the new command words (eg. describe, explain, justify) are the same words that are found in other subject guides, this ensures…
-
Are we asking our students the right questions?
Sensitive Noise/obvious 2 by Milos Milosevic CC BY Last year my PE team at YIS got really into deep conversation about how we assess our students. YIS is an MYP school and so we are required to assess specific criterion and within these criterion we have strands that need to be assessed regularly each semester. At the crunch times (report writing times…) students were being hit up with many homework assessment items and in the PE and Health department, we were finding students weren’t always coping with what was being asked of them in these weeks. This lead to our decision to stop giving homework to students, unless the…
-
What is physical literacy and how is this affecting my curriculum thinking?
Surfing Jedi by Pedro Vezini CC BY NC SA As I enjoy doing, a fabulous conversation emerged on twitter the other day between a group of us in the South East Asia/Australian region. The start of the conversation was an ongoing chat we’ve been having about looking closely at what we do with our ELC or ECC or Early Childhood aged PE students and what colleagues are doing in their classrooms. The focus has been looking at a Perceptual Motor Program (PMP) and I was learning a little from others in this field who are implementing programs to support students and working with professionals outside of teaching to help set up…