Drawing Out Student Learning Outcomes

Ensuring learning outcomes are explicit and clear increases chances of  student success in PE

I try my best to introduce student learning outcomes at the beginning of a unit in new and different ways. I have been very lucky to have Ross Halliday, head of PE and Sport at Caulfield Grammar School co-teaching with me over the past several days. 

As part of Ross' self-initiated professional growth plan, he was given approval to fly over from Melbourne to co-teach and collaborate with me. Together we have been doing some exciting things in PE and I have benefitted just as much as Ross has from this experience. Ross blogged about our recent tuning in activity done with all the grades from 2-5 last week. It is an excellent blog post as it breaks down what are learning intentions were for the students and also includes video as well.

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I firmly believe that making student learning outcomes very clear and explicit at the start of a new unit is imperative as it helps to tap students into the important expectations and what they need to be able to know and do. I wanted to quickly summarize how student learning outcomes were made explicit at the start of my Athletics unit. 

We started off by watching an inspirational Olympic video and asked the students to think about the following question, "What are the key ingredients for success in Athletics?". After watching the video, they went for a 'walk and talk' session with their elbow buddy and discussed their answers to the question. I recorded all student answers from grades 2-5. At the end of the week, using student generated answers, I created a visual that captured their thoughts and ideas related to what success looks like in Athletics. See picture below.

Using the student generated answers I made immediate links to the actual student learning outcomes from the PSPE scope and sequence that I use to help plan my units. I created an additional 2 visuals at this point that highlighted the important student learning outcomes in grades 2/3 and in grades 4/5 for Athletics. Included in these visuals was a jpeg of the key question asked from last week along with the student answers. Adding this jpeg into the student learning outcomes visual will help make immediate connections to prior learning. 

I have these visuals ready for the students and will be the first thing introduced when they come to the second lesson of Athletics this week. Some of my classes have already seen them. As you can see, there is a difference between the grade levels (2/3 and 4/5). Can you spot it? As well, I purposely recorded the student learning outcome, "I can be the best I can be" twice to make a strong point that Athletics is about being the best that a student can be. Winning first or finishing last doesn't matter, it's about how hard you try and improving upon your personal results. All in all, a great start to Athletics at Nanjing International School.