Welcome to my very first blog post! My aim for this platform is to reflect on what I have discovered over my time as an educator and holistic health advocate, pose questions and do my best to help change attitudes towards an immensely important area of learning. While I don't claim to be an expert by any means, my passion for health, physical education and wellbeing runs deep. I hope this makes up for any lack of experience!
So where to start? Well, recently I have been having an enlightening time revisiting previous presentations and initially wish to do my best to put them in blog form. One of the first professional development presentations I ran as a health & physical education lead looked at changing negative student attitudes towards physical education. While my understandings and beliefs have deepened over time, many of the same themes remain present today. For this post, I will primarily be focussing on the "physical" aspects of the curriculum area. Think of these as the aspects that involve movement enjoyment and skill acquisition. In the New Zealand curriculum, Health & Physical Education are composite and form a synergistic relationship. Still, the physical aspects of the curriculum are often those that come to the forefront when mentioned by students or non-practitioners. So why are some students so hesitant to be involved in physical education? As an educator, you experience student anxiety in other curriculum areas too. “I can’t do maths”, “I hate writing”, the list goes on. We are all unique and have our own strengths and struggles. One of the big differences for students compared to other curriculum areas, however, is that the learning you do during a movement based physical education lesson is often much more visible and on display. This absence of privacy to build up your skills can be a huge deterrent from participating in learning experiences. But where does this anxiety come from in the first place? Well, it could come down to a number of different factors. After brainstorming with staff, some of the common barriers they saw came from: - Students feeling vulnerable and embarrassed at their skill level
- Students with more developed skillsets dominating practical learning experiences
- Historical negative (movement based) experiences outside of the school
- Inherited attitudes from whānau (family) towards Physical Education
- A preconceived perception that you have to be a “winner” to participate Just knowing your students will give you an indication as to why, but one of the more common reasons I have found stems from some form of feeling inadequate. Just like in mathematical problem solving, scientific experimentation and all other learning areas, students need to first develop skills to deal with challenging situations and can experience success from there.
So how do we achieve this in Physical Education? There are four principles that I live by when planning any meaningful Physical Education lesson. I call them the CARE principles: Collaboration
Accessibility
Relevance
Enjoyableness
I will break down each of these principles to show you how they can positively impact student attitudes, starting with collaboration:
Collaboration is a huge part of Physical Education. Look at any game, sport, activity, training, lesson etc. and one thing that should be at the core of its success is collaboration. Encouraging key skills like communication, teamwork, encouragement and other collaborative practices can greatly contribute to positive experience in physical education and its absence can lead to the opposite. Are you setting up lessons so that only a few talented students excel, or are you structuring them so that they can use their talents to support those that are still developing? Also, look at your own collaboration with your students. Do they get the opportunity to give feedback? To come up with their own success criteria? To influence their own learning?
Accessibility is next up: Making Physical Education lessons accessible is a huge aid for student participation and effort, particularly for students that struggle with physical activity and fundamental movement. As is a trend with this post, it is very similar to other curriculum areas in a sense that it is widely beneficial and time saving to implement lessons that have a low floor and a high ceiling. Having one-off games and activities don’t help students build their skills, so a helpful suggestion is to plan consecutive lessons. Even if the majority of students have already developed a particular skill, they will get opportunities to refine the skill while others catch up. Better yet, have you thought of using students with a skill mastery to teach others? Let's dive into relevance now: A common complaint that students have is that PE isn’t relevant to them. You will have students that may never enjoy physical activity or sports, but what may be important to them is seeing the benefits of living a healthy lifestyle. This is where the "Health" connection needs to be made explicit. Visiting or revisiting different health and wellbeing based concepts so that students can make logical connections can make the physical aspects more enticing and worthwhile. Relevance can also deal with time and what current events you might be able to associate different physical activity with.
The way you structure your lessons may also have an effect on its relevance to your students. Try find easy ways to track student progress following lessons and look into how you can offer different skill building opportunities either simultaneously or in succession/rotations. Finally, we have enjoyableness: A lesson, game or activity can be made or broke by how you sell it to your group or class. Be imaginative, participate yourself, create backstories, reward attitude and perseverance and look for rules or incentives to ensure there is as much involvement as possible. Popular culture references or gathering of student voice can be great ways to show your own willingness to understand what is enjoyable to them. I recently completed a unit based entirely on console gaming, where students looked at reaction training (amongst other movement based tasks) and engagement was at an all time high. While this may seem less concise or direct, that is the entire point. "Enjoyable" is subjective and may require some divergent thinking to cater to student needs. Using the CARE principles isn't a major shift in workload, it simply requires awareness. The following is the extent of how I incorporate the principles into termly planning.
As educators, we encourage our students to be their best selves in all aspects of their learning and lives. Showing that we value them as learners can help them overcome anxieties stemming from feelings of inadequacy.
Mā te wā e hoa koutou, until next time!
Pou Tom
Ora HPE