Crane / Tharby / Allison Making Every PE Lesson Count

Six principles to support great physical education teaching
1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-78583-726-5
Verlag: Crown House Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Reihe: Making Every Lesson Count series

Written by James Crane, Making Every PE Lesson Count: Six principles to support great physical education teaching provides realistic and practical strategies that will help teachers make abstract ideas more concrete and meaningful in both practical and theory PE. PE provides a unique opportunity for some students to flourish and become professional athletes or achieve excellent academic outcomes. However, if you ask any PE teacher, their main aim is that all students leave school with a love of physical activity and lifelong participation in sport. The benefits on physical, mental and social health are undeniable. The place PE holds in the curriculum is therefore fundamental to society in that it acts as a vehicle to promote resilience, determination and perseverance. Writing in the engaging style of the award-winning Making Every Lesson Count series, James Crane articulates the fundamentals of great PE teaching and shares simple and practical strategies designed to challenge students across all aspects of the subject. In an age of educational quick fixes and ever-moving goalposts, this precise and timely book returns to the fundamental questions that all PE teachers must consider: 'What can I do to help my students thrive in the wide world of physical education?' Making Every PE LessonCount is underpinned by six pedagogical principles - challenge, explanation, modelling, practice, feedback and questioning. Good PE teaching is littered with all these principles, not as a checklist or plan as such, but to ensure that teaching is well structured and thought out. This book aims to bring the evidence around effective teaching linked to the six pedagogical principles to life through the lens of a physical education teacher. It focuses on all aspects of PE in secondary schools with reference to real-life examples from a huge range of sports and physical activities and classroom theory. James links his findings back to the subject throughout and offers reflective questions for teachers to sharpen their practice. Making Every PE LessonCount aims to synthesise the latest research on teaching and learning and link it specifically to PE. There is a huge amount of evidence available for teachers, and this book acts as an practical guide that will successfully bridge the gap between the world of academic research and PE teaching.

James Crane went to school in Cyprus before moving back to the UK to study Sports Coaching and Physical Education at University. He is now Assistant Headteacher at Durrington High School and Deputy Director at Durrington Research School. James is a keen sportsman having competed in tennis, swimming and athletics at regional levels, and has also represented England Colleges at an international level in football.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crane, James

Tharby, Andy

Allison, Shaun

Leseproben

Chapter 1 Challenge
Challenge can be described as the provision of difficult work that causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy struggle. This can be problematic for all teachers, but there are unique issues that make this especially difficult for PE teachers. During any one lesson, PE teachers will have up to 32 students in their teaching space, all of whom will have different prior knowledge of the activity, different levels of tactical understanding, varying degrees of physical capabilities and understanding of the key principles within that activity and different misconceptions. Alongside this, their level of interest in the sport or even the specific activity will vary widely, ranging from the super-keen county-level athlete, who has always been enthralled by sport, to the surly teenager who appears to have a complete aversion to the set task, almost to the point of hatred. It is our job to synthesise all of this information and then push each student to keep them in the sweet spot of the struggle zone. Challenge is slightly different from the other five principles. For example, questioning, explanation and modelling are clear tangible elements of a lesson that are direct in their purpose, and it is clear when the teacher is modelling, questioning or explaining. While there are specific teaching strategies that can be employed to ensure that challenge is appropriate for all the students we teach, the principle is more about an approach to teaching. Challenge is a long-term venture and should run through everything we do as PE teachers – like Newcastle United runs through Alan Shearer. It’s about the culture we create in our teaching space and the expectations we have of the students we teach. The objective is always to try to keep students in the struggle zone, as shown in the figure on page 10. This requires students to be thinking hard enough to support learning, but not be so stretched that they reach cognitive overload and slip into the panic zone, where learning will be limited. At the other end of the spectrum, the work should not be too easy, resulting in students remaining in the comfort zone. The best PE teachers create this culture by getting to know the students they teach, taking a genuine interest in their progress, making them believe that they can achieve beyond their own expectations and then supporting them – through the other five principles – to meet these expectations. Their lessons are places of intrigue, warmth and safe challenge, where students feel secure enough to push and test their own thinking. So, let’s explore some strategies that we can put into place to grow this culture. Challenge Strategies
1. Curriculum
The first thing we should endeavour to do, as secondary PE teachers, is ensure that we have a challenging and interesting curriculum. Largely due to the limitations surrounding space and the added complexities when selecting activities, such as time of year, teacher specialism and available equipment or facilities, curriculum is a contentious issue in PE. When thinking about the construction of the curriculum, we should always consider: is it giving students enough opportunities to make informed decisions about maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle? Is there enough depth so that students can understand and apply their knowledge of rules and strategies while developing their motor competence? This coupled up with identifying which sports to teach and how to sequence them – and justifying why they should be taught – proves to be a complex problem. Although there is no silver bullet when it comes to curriculum design, most schools have some common activities that feature in Years 7, 8 and 9. By ‘activities’ here, we mean sports, drills, exercises, practices, etc. These activities roughly follow a familiar model of learning the key skills and techniques in Year 7, applying and refining them in Year 8 and then exploring them in their full context in Year 9. This does not mean that a full game will not be covered until Year 9, but that the focus of that full game in Year 7 or 8 will be on skill development. For example, in football you may learn the technique of short passing in Year 7. As you move into Year 8, you may learn how and when to use different types of passes under pressure. The Year 9 development may be how to use variations of passing effectively in a game situation. Although this creates an element of continuity – motor competence and understanding and knowledge of rules and strategies are expected to improve over time – it doesn’t create a coherent curriculum. The challenge of curriculum planning is having coherence within revisited activities (drills, strategies, techniques, etc.) across terms or year groups but also between different sports. My colleague, Ryan De Gruchy, did this in a highly effective way. He explains the process as follows: First of all, I identified the common threads running through all activities taught in Key Stage 3 as: performance, sporting values and key knowledge. I split this further into the composite parts of each thread. Performance is made up of skills and techniques, decision making and fitness. Values is made up of leadership, attitude and teamwork. Key knowledge is made up of tier 3 terminology (low-frequency subject-specific words), sporting knowledge and analysis. The performance threads are very dependent on the practical activity and, in essence, are about improving the learner as a performer in that activity. However, sporting values and key knowledge are threads that run through the curriculum chronologically regardless of practical activity. These threads were then intertwined into the curriculum and explicitly taught to students across all practical activities. For example, the thread of teamwork starts in Year 7 with developing communication and listening skills in term 1, moving on to cooperation and problem solving as a team in term 2, before using teamwork skills to tackle complex problems in term 3. The curriculum threads were then directly and explicitly embedded into the assessment model used at Key Stage 3. We should scale up our Key Stage 3 curriculum to ensure students are being exposed to challenging materials. In table tennis, for example, instead of teaching the forehand and backhand push shots as standalone components, why not teach students about generating topspin, backspin or sidespin to put pressure on their opponents. Provided we scaffold their learning carefully, most students will rise to the challenge. This could be through the physical development of the shot for your practically able players. However, even if they can’t execute it yet, everyone can develop their understanding of how to use spin to put their opponents under pressure, when to use the variations during game play and how to make decisions during the game. Some may need more time to perfect the push shot, but they can be learning about the skill and benefiting from repeated exposure to it in the meantime. When asked to describe what she had been learning about in PE, Lucia, a Year 8 student at Durrington High School, responded: Miss Cann has been teaching us table tennis and the use of topspin on the forehand side to try and put pressure on our opponents during games. When I was playing a game, my opponent was just pushing the ball over the net, so I was able to use topspin to generate more speed, giving them less time to react. I was also able to move them around the table until I could use the topspin shot from a cross-court rally into a down-the-line winner. The student response demonstrates an understanding of how to outwit their opponent but also shows knowledge of how to make effective decisions in real time. Had the school not reviewed the Key Stage 3 curriculum and scaled up the content, this knowledge and performance level would not have been evident. The important thing here is that students are being exposed to more demanding concepts. This should also be the case during Key Stage 4. By exposing students to material that is just beyond the expected level of the GCSE specification, this hardest content will make what they have to remember for their exams seem easier by comparison. John Fuller, a deputy head teacher and PE teacher at Durrington High School, and Tom Pickford, director of PE and sport, both do this at specific points in the curriculum. John outlines a specific point in the AQA GCSE PE Paper 2 unit on arousal: When teaching arousal and the inverted U theory, to show greater breadth around arousal theorem we discuss both the drive and the catastrophe theory. This ensures that students are aware of the wider discussion around arousal, allowing them to make more informed decisions when it comes to the Paper 2 exam. The discussion sparks interest but also allows me to question the deeper topic of sports psychology and how that directly impacts sports performers, such as Roberto Baggio at Italia ’90. Tom has also amended the Paper 1 curriculum to allow for more content beyond GCSE to be embedded and discussed: ...