- APPEC, feedback, Goal setting, PE mission statement, Professional Development, Teacher Reflection, Twitter, Voxer
Core Values, Advocation, Professional Growth, Networks and Literacy. A call to action.
Sunset at Yaquina Head by Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington CC BY What do you stand for? How are you core values visible to your student/ department/ community? Are you delivering on the mandate of QPE? What makes you say that? This past weekend I was humbled to give one of the Keynotes at the Asia-Pacific PE conference in Hong Kong. This is the third annual conference hosted at HK International School and saw a lot of Educator’s from Asia, Australia and also now from the USA and UK in attendance. The last few months I have really been delving into who I am and what I stand…
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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…
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PE Minutes – Survey Results
PE Minutes are precious and I haven’t met a Physed Teacher who wouldn’t like to have more of them each day or week or month with their students. A few weeks ago I asked the PE community online to share the number of classes and the minutes/week they had in their PE classes from Early Learning to Grade 12. In the Gallery above, you can see the results of the survey. Now, the sample size isn’t huge, with some emails and Twitter sharing I had about 30 people respond for themselves or their departments. I would like to share these results to let others think about what their PE…
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PE Specialist Teachers, PE minutes and more
One on One – 02 by Brian Carson CC BY NC SA “Sports teachers have a previously unsung role in the academic development of children.” In the July break I came across a number of articles surrounding the published findings of Dick Telford’s research into the effect of having a specialist PE teacher in ES classes. He and his research team “looked at two things: the effect of physical activity and the value of having specialist physical in primary school.” Now, before I tell you the results, let me also tell you that not many schools in our World have the ability to employ a full-time ES PE teacher. Some…
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All teched up, where to from here?
Ultra-modern Cabot Place by UGG boy UGG girl licensed CC BY Last post on our iPod Trial at UNIS… The school year is almost done and so finishes our iPod trial in the MSHS. Before I go into the end products, it is important for me to thank Ed Gilbreath and the Tech team (especially Mr Long) for the opportunity to trial mobile tech in PE and for my own professional growth and learning during this process. I would also like to thank Clint Hamada for his never-ending patience and wise sage-like advice at times of despair and for sharing our home computer with 4 iPods and related issues. And…
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#PEHangout 2 – Concepts
I am very excited to share our second PEHangout via Google Hangouts. If you missed the first one you can check it out here. We are all now getting the hang of this technology (almost) and it was really great to start talking about Concepts with the panel. Alex Thomas, Jarrod Robinson and I (with support from an internet-down Ken Forde) chatted a bit about what we get up to in our PE lessons and started circling the really big topic of Concepts and how we see this within the contexts of our classes. It was clear by the end that we felt there are three areas that we focus…
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#PhysEd – what is it? Time for change!
083of365[NTR23] by NTR23 licensed CC BY NC SA Like other #PhysEd teachers connected on twitter, I have also pondered @jessicaolien‘s article “Dodgeball Should Not Be Part of Any Curriculum, Ever” and read about the first 100 comments associated with her article and have been left scratching my head. I have read @PENathan‘s blog post “Being a #PhysEd role Model” and also watched/read and listened to most of the articles, podcasts and videos that he mentions (small World sometimes!) and I am left feeling there is a serious disconnect between what I see going on in many PE classrooms and what I read about what other’s experiences were in their…
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Mastering skills in Badminton – enhanced by Tech!
I have written previously about a Badminton Unit I trialed last year with Simon Mills where we focused on Mastering skills starting with basic and then moving to progressively more difficult skills as the unit went along. I should add that these skills came from a book (yes a book!) from our office – Badminton: Steps to success. This unit was harsh – we expected students to Master a particular skill before they could progress and we pushed them hard on peer coaching and had frequent teacher assessment as part of this unit. This year I am taking my G8 students a step further. Many of these students were a…