It is essential to look at PE from a very different lens as we move forward in the 21st century. Times have changed so rapidly in education and with these changes, we are often challenged to think very differently toward the subjects that are taught in schools. I have always believed that the art of teaching physical education must change to better reflect the needs of learners in the 21st century. I agree that keeping kids active is an essential component of our practice, but there are a number of other very important considerations we must reflect on when teaching physical education. Giving our students a clear, concise, and consistent way of describing and defining success is paramount within any PE program and often times this means that we must teach outside the box of sport. We must foster and build upon our students' abilities to critically think, to find problems/obstacles, and to overcome these challenges. Arming students with the skills necessary to conquer adversity is what being successful in sport is all about. More importantly, teaching the skills necessary to overcome adversity not only helps our students in PE and in sport, but better prepares them for life, both in and out of school. If this isn't our ultimate aim as educators, I am not sure what is! I am always on the lookout for innovative thinkers and am very happy to have made a great connection with Nathan Horne, the founder of i-Physed. Nathan is one of these excellent educators that not only thinks outside the box and outside the realm of physical education, he shares what he does on an ongoing basis in order to make others better at what they do. He recently put together an excellent presentation on 'Critical Thinking in PE' and took an in-depth look at using the TGFU model to better promote inquiry in physical education classes. I have embedded the You Tube presentation and recommend anyone reading this blog to watch it. Excellent job Nathan, keep up the good work!
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Will be creating my first PYP PE with Andy logo later this week using this picture. It's fun experimenting with different formats. Challenging, but indeed fun!!
I think that there is a lot of merit in getting our students to reflect on their own performance whenever possible. Often times this can be done by posing important reflective questions at the end of a lesson or in other quick and efficient ways. Paper and pencil are not always necessary when doing these types of reflections. When having my kindergarten and grade 1 students create dance moves in a repeating pattern, I wanted them to reflect on how well they thought they had done, so I created the visual that you see in the picture above. As the class concluded and the students were lining up to leave my movement composition room, I simply asked them to tap the self-reflective poster that I had posted on the door. They either had to tap 'Super Star', 'Good', or 'OK' as they passed through the door on the way back to their classroom. In their next PE class, we will further discuss how they did and what was difficult for them. This is a great activity not only for mainstream students, but also ESL learners as the poster is very visual and speaks for itself. I'll use this self-reflective task more often in my future classes. Have a similar strategy that you use in your PE classes? If so, drop me an email and I would be happy to post it on my blog. Have a great week! I want to believe that excellent learning is taking place in the 'How we express ourselves' unit in both PE and in the classroom. I have documented this journey on my blog and the feedback that I am getting from both classroom teachers and my students has been extremely positive. However, though continued teacher reflection, I know that there are still a number of ways in which a unit such as this can be improved upon. We are definitely moving in the right direction and the use of the 'Creative Cycle' has played a pivotal role in enhancing all of the learning experiences in which the grade 3 students are engaged in. For the visual learners , the process journals allow them to collect and record their thoughts using words, illustrations, and sentences. These process journals also allow for great differentiation, especially in regards to the ESL learners that I have in my classes. Essentially, the creative cycle is broken into 5 stages; Inspiration, Planning, Creating, Polishing, and Presenting. I have designed the process journals in a way that allows the students to reflect and to provide feedback at each stage of the creative cycle. Not only will they record how they make their way through each stage, they will also record any problems that they've experienced at each stage and what was done to overcome these problems. I have included example student work for stages one and two in order for teachers to see the variety of responses in the journals. I will show more examples of later stages of the process journals in the upcoming weeks. I have not had this much fun teaching dance in a long long time. Getting the younger students moving is never a problem as we already know, but getting them to think and create specific movement is more challenging. If you read my recent blog post Just Dance, you saw how I used Just Dance videos from You Tube as an instructional tool in my PE classes. I can say will full certainty that 99.9% of my students were fully engaged in dancing and simply could not get enough. It was great to take little breaks from time to time to discuss important concepts related to dance. The students were able to share their ideas with one another and recognize that timing and patterning were a big part of all the dances that they had seen and copied. At this point, it was easy for me to introduce the word 'Synchronization' to them. Most of my students are now very familiar with this word and know its meaning (YES!, even my kindergarten and grade 1 students). As a follow up to my students copying the Just Dance videos, I wanted to do a formative assessment task geared around getting them to demonstrate their understanding of simple patterns in dance. The way I went about this was to take screen shot images of the most popular dance moves from the 6 Just Dance videos seen in class. The students themselves had selected and named many of these dance moves themselves in earlier classes, so it was easy for me to choose which moves to use. So, after taking screen shot images of the most popular dance moves, I created formative assessment sheets for both kindergarten and grade 1. After having one last go at the Just Dance videos, I then handed out these assessment sheets. As you can see from the pictures of the assessment sheets below, I included images of all of the different dance moves on the sheet. The assessment task itself was modified, of course, for both kindergarten and grade 1. For grade 1, as a starting point they had to select 3 different dance moves from the images on the assessment sheet plus they had to create 1 or 2 dance moves of their own. Once they had done this, they had to perform these moves to music and repeat the moves in a pattern. After this, they had to choose another pattern with all new moves. Nothing was recorded on the assessment sheets at this point. I am saving all recording on assessment sheets until next week. For kindergarten the task was modified. On their assessment sheets, there were fewer dance moves to choose from. What they had to do was to select three dance moves from the Just Dance images and create a pattern. They practiced this 3-dance move pattern and then created a new pattern. They practiced these patterns to different types of music. The music I played had different beats and rhythm, so I was observing how well they changed up their movement and whether or not it matched the music being played. A super successful lesson that you should try out!!
I strongly support the use of graphic organizers whenever possible in PE as it provides visual stimulus to many of our learners that are more visual-spatial in nature. Graphic organizers are not only great for our visual-spatial learners, but also every other type of learner in our classes. Some would argue that using strategies such as this in PE take away from time being active, but I would respectfully argue that if we are to teach essential and enduring concepts that are critical to 21st century learners, we absolutely need to look at PE through a very different lens. As we are in the middle of an excellent integration with a 'How we express ourselves' unit, all of my students from kindergarten through to grade 4 are working at creating different types of routines as a summative assessment task in PE. The venn diagram that you see in the picture above was used to initiate discussion related to the 'Creative Cycle' that we have been emphasizing in my grade 3 classes. When I think of the creative cycle, I see so many other opportunities to use this process in other units as well. I have learned a lot from an amazing visitor that came to our school last week. If you want to be inspired to make change in how you teach, please watch the embedded You Tube video below. Ewan McIntosh is a front runner in creating much needed change in education. His ideas, opinions, and suggestions will make us all better teachers if we listen, learn, and take initiative in trying his strategies. In order to get my students thinking about creativity, especially in regards to putting together a final routine, we used the venn diagram to stimulate discussion about copying versus creating. I was leaving the ultimate decision up to them, but to kick start the conversation, I had the text on the venn diagram covered up. I introduced the idea of artists copying artists to get ideas and then uncovered the following question; What is best to copy? I then asked them the following question and uncovered this as well; How best can we create? We focused on the key concept 'Perspective' when answering these question. Everyone has their own perspectives that need to be respected and listened to. As you can see from the picture below, the students came up with some excellent answers. They ultimately must decide to what degree they will copy and to what degree they will create when deciding on their final routines (which will be summatively assessed). All of their work will be documented in their Movement Composition Process Journals. I will blog and give examples of these movement composition journals tomorrow. Please check out the wonderful answers that the grade 3 students came up with. Lots of thinking and lots of creativity.
As this week unfolds in the 'How we express ourselves' unit in grade 3 at Nanjing International School, continued reflection is taking place in the classrooms. Each grade 3 teacher is having their students reflect in different ways about the movement composition unit in PE which is great. As you can see by the pictures below, John Rinker asked his students to reflect in their 'How we express ourselves' process journals. He took the key questions that I had asked in PE and had them answer them in their journals.
This continued reflection in greatly enhancing the learning that is taking place in this unit. I have included a few pictures of the students' work from their process journals. I read through most of the reflections and am happy to know that they are grasping what they are learning in PE and applying it in further unit of inquiry related work happening in the classroom. This strong integration is a direct result of the authentic collaboration which has been taking place on our teaching team. Thanks John, Marina, and Georgia! As mentioned in previous blogs here and here, for single subject integration to be successful classroom teachers also have a big role and responsibility in doing their part to support the efforts of specialist teachers trying to make important links to the UoI. Often times this can be achieved through whole group discussions and by allowing students to do written reflections once they return from their single subject class. There is no doubt that the learning taking place in the unit of inquiry is greatly enhanced by taking this route and is necessary in order to deepen the students' conceptual understanding that the teachers are focusing on.
My last blog was about the students creating a 22-second dance routine to Shakira's Waka Waka using the 'Creative Cycle' that was introduced to them in week one of their 'How we express ourselves' unit in the classroom. It was decided in our collaborative planning last week that the grade 3 teachers would have follow up discussions and reflective writing sessions once their students returned from having created their short dance routines in PE. We took video and photos from their dance sessions and the classroom teachers used these as tools to initiate discussion and reflection with their students as an important follow-up. Marina Gijzen was recording her students feedback and reflections on a Keynote presentation during this activity and shared this with me immediately at the end of the day. For me it was an excellent indicator that we are on the right track in PE with the 'How we express ourselves' integration and that the kids were able to demonstrate important conceptual understanding related to this unit of inquiry. I have attached photos below of what Marina sent back to me. As you can see, some excellent learning had taken place and will serve as a visual tool when we take the unit further this week. Although I love to dance, I would be the first to say that I certainly don't set the world on fire with my moves. I simply am not a good dancer! No ifs, ands, or buts about it. All of the people that have known me well over the years, know for certain that I love to have a good time and to dance. I have one classic dance move that I have continually busted out over the years. Please see video below of my latest dance video that has gone around a few circles! It's all in good fun of course, but the point I am making is that even if you cannot demonstrate dance moves doesn't mean that you cannot teach a dance unit well. There are loads of resources on the internet that can be used as instructional tools in movement composition. I take full advantage of accessing as many of these resources as possible and for any other teachers that struggle with dance, you should as well. My sons first introduced me to Just Dance videos on You Tube a few months back. We have had lots of family fun dancing away to these videos and I decided to use them in my movement composition unit. In fact, I had an excellent conversation about dance with Joey Feith and Nathan Horne about dance as well. They have both used Just Dance as well and have documented it on their great blogs here (Joey's website, Nathan's website). I used Just Dance videos last week for all of my classes in movement composition with spectacular results. The students absolutely loved it and by using these Just Dance videos as an instructional tool, I was able to step back and really have a look and assess the variety of levels the students were at with dance. It was great and I am glad that Joey and Nathan recommended it to me as well. I have embedded 5 Just Dance videos that I used for my classes last week. Simply click on any of these videos to have a look. If you haven't tried them out with your students, please do so as you will not be disappointed. Breakdown of the Lesson It was important to discuss the central idea of the 'How we express ourselves' unit first before letting them dance away. In my last blog here, I explained how I kick started the lesson with posting key questions and I posted a picture of the visual organizer that I used to initiate discussion with my students. The second question that I posted was 'What do the 6 different dance videos have in common that make them all very good performances? My aim was to teach them about synchronization and patterning and hopefully my line of questioning helped them to achieve this. Once we concluded our discussion, I got them to experiment with a number of the Just Dance videos that you see above. After each video, we paused to have important discussion and it didn't take long for them to come up with answers to the second question that I posted. They definitely were beginning to understand that synchronization and patterning are both an important part of good dance routines. Using the 'Creative Cycle', I then gave the students their task which was to create a 22-second dance routine to Shakira's Waka Waka in groups. They had about 20 minutes to use the entire creative cycle to come up with their routines. After the students performed their short routines, we had a closing discussion about the creative cycle. I photographed what we came up with and shared this with the grade 3 classroom teachers to help them take this further. Movement composition and creativity obviously go hand-in-hand and fit perfectly under the umbrella of the 'How we express ourselves' transdisciplinary theme. As we are well into the grade 3 movement composition unit, the students have been creating a number of short mini-routines that vary in length from 20-45 seconds. What I am trying to accomplish by this is to slowly build up their understanding of the 'Creative Cycle'. I wrote about the 'Creative Cycle' and how we are applying it to the movement composition unit here. In the last grade 3 PE class, the students had to use the 'Creative Cycle' when putting together a 22-second routine to a small part from Shakira's Waka Waka song. Before getting them started it was necessary to have a discussion about the central idea for the 'How we express ourselves' unit. The central idea for this unit is 'A work of art is the product of complex processes'. In order to get them thinking about the central idea, I posted the following key question on the board to help stimulate discussion; How is your unit of inquiry connected with our movement composition unit in PE? As you can see, 'Reflection' was a huge part of what we were doing. The students not only had to reflect on each stage of the creative cycle, but to also reflect on how movement composition, in general, links to their unit of inquiry. Feedback was also a huge part a the students were constantly giving feedback to each other throughout the class.
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AuthorKAUST Faculty, Pedagogical Coach. Presenter & Workshop Leader.IB Educator. #RunYourLife podcast host. Archives
September 2022
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