Play with Purpose
Alex Sporticus A games-based approach can be mistakenly considered as a game-as-teacher approach. This is because children can learn from playing the game. The mistake is not that children can learn from playing the game. Of course they can. Children in PE can learn: nothing at all something without us something from peers something […]
A Spectrum of Teaching Styles
Alex Sporticus “Teaching needs to be deliberate as we don’t want to succeed at random, but we want to gain a deeper understanding of our successes and failures.” (Mosston, 1966). Mosston and Ashworth’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles (SoTS) offers PE Teachers, both novice and expert, a clear framework of teaching within the subject. […]
Traditions of PE vs. Traditional PE
Alex Sporticus Traditional PE. “Traditional“. A description of the way we have always done PE against more contemporary approaches. A qualifier that is used as a pejorative. Employed indiscriminately – within the academic literature, on social media and in discourse around PE – as a substitute for practice we don’t like. I have used […]
What PE Is & Isn’t
Alex Sporticus “The aim is not for us to teach them to leave their chairs, so they can be better when they return. Our aim is to help them find a realm where they can experience some freedom, adventure, grace, excellence, strength, beauty and friendship away from chairs and to keep returning to that […]
The Bad & The Best
Alex Sporticus A couple of weeks ago, Edutopia published an article entitled 5 Fun Gym Games to Get Kids Moving. I found the subsequent commentary on the article, mainly via Twitter, absolutely fascinating. Whilst I could understand many of the points made from a range of perspectives, the conversations around the article made me consider how I’ve changed my thinking […]
Students & the System
Christine Ruffolo Amongst other things, COVID-19 revealed how fragile the American educational system is, and how unadaptable it is to changing and evolving times. Designed to churn out compliant workers, it conflicts with the world around them — a burgeoning economy of self employment (one marked by passion, creativity, and innovation), as well as […]
Rethinking ‘Broad’ & ‘Balanced’ in PE
Alex Sporticus I dislike the guiding principles of ‘broad‘ and ‘balanced‘ when it comes to thinking about the PE curriculum and the selection of activities and sports within it. They are vague, they don’t help the design process and they don’t really apply to an individual subject but to a school curriculum (for a […]
Ten Thoughts on PE Curriculum Change
Alex Sporticus “How you view the nature of the world and change – either as stable ‘things’ and ‘entities’ or as a ‘flowing river’ and a ‘flaming fire’ – ultimately influences how you choose to lead and manage change.” – Iverorth and Hallencreutz (2016) Physical Education is resistant to change, or so it […]
Performance and Learning in PE
Alex Sporticus “Finally, given that the goal of instruction and practice— whether in the classroom or on the field—should be to facilitate learning, instructors and students need to appreciate the distinction between learning and performance and understand that expediting acquisition performance today does not necessarily translate into the type of learn- ing that will […]
20 Mistakes Made in 20 Years of Teaching Physical Education
Alex Sporticus Physical Education is not inherently good. Children and young people will not automatically improve their movement, health, academic success or their pro-social behaviours just by participating in the subject. To achieve that we need to become more intentional with how we shape PE, what we fill it with and how we offer […]
Harm Free PE
Alex Sporticus How can we improve the provision of PE? My initial response to that question as a novice teacher was what could I add. What new sports can I include in the curriculum that children might enjoy? What new initiatives, like the Daily Mile, can I implement that will get children moving more? […]
Guest Post #6 – Toward a Useful Physical Education
David Zundel We have widespread ill health. And in the US 42% of us have become obese. PE didn’t help most people. Entertainment, porn, and sports show us buff physiques to consume. We prominently reward athletes. And advertising sells us convenient food. We train people to external direction. Our received ideals of fitness come from military preparedness. And […]
Meaningful Experiences in PE
Alex Sporticus Guiding Principles of Meaningful PE Movement has the potential to enrich human existence and Physical Education can be a site that contributes to this by creating meaningful experiences of movement. Meaningful experiences are those that hold ‘personal significance’ to the learner. PE Teachers who subscribe to the creation of meaningful experiences, are […]
Justifying School Sport
Alex Sporticus In the last few week I’ve had numerous conversations about school sport. Due to Covid-19 it has been missing and schools want it back. But why? Whether it was a Headteacher of small primary school in rural Somerset, a Head of PE in a large inner city comprehensive, a Director of Sport […]
Movement as a Way of Enriching Life
Alex Sporticus “It is our vision and not what we are viewing that is limited.” Nick Sousanis, Unflattening. A key part of the PE Teachers role is to improve the knowledge, skills and behaviours needed that will allow children to access different forms of movement both in the present and in their future. That […]
The Physically Educated Individual
Alex Sporticus With every government initiative in education there are unforeseen consequences. The current drive to build character through sport (and other activities) is having, in my opinion, an unforeseen negative impact on curriculum PE. Staffing, finances, facilities and time are being redistributed from PE provision to school sport provision. Now this might not […]
Teaching Kids Weightlifting
Christine Ruffolo A PE teacher on one side of the country texts her trainer pal on the other: “I was thinking of getting this textbook for my weightlifting class.” “Why do you need a textbook?” “So I have something to reference and know what to tell the kids.” She sent a link to […]
Asking Students Better Questions
Alex Sporticus RECTIFYING A WEEK OF INEFFECTIVE QUESTIONING The PE Teacher has four clear ‘verbal’ ways to shape the learning of their pupils within lessons; instruction, feedback, question and silence. A skilled PE teacher will use all four, all of the time. Making judgements on which one to use depending on needs of the pupil in […]
Affective Movement
Alex Sporticus The art of teaching, at its very core, is constant decision making and problem-solving in a dynamic environment to assist the individual or the collective to flourish. As a secondary school teacher of PE I believe I am faced with two key puzzles to solve. The first key puzzle is how can […]
The Politics of Movement Ed
Chandler Stevens There’s a strange power dynamic inherent in most movement education and coaching (obviously extending out to therapies as well). I’ve been curious about the politics of the relationship between professional and client ever since my first exposure to somatic education. It was the first time I ever felt like I knew something […]