Managing Oneself for Successful Futures

The first unit of the year for Year 11PE is Self Management (SM). Students are learning about what self management is and why it is important, and we have now started to discuss some strategies students can use to increase their self management. Although I have not taught this unit before, so I am struggling a little to create engaging lessons, I think we are off to a good start!

Last week we began the intro to SM by students brainstorming on this Lino-it what they think SM looks like, feels like and sounds like. This started conversations which helped me to formatively assess student understanding as well as a reflection for students about what they know. I want to refer to this throughout the unit, to see if students can build on their brainstorm.

After this, we watched the below video and then discussed the marshmallow test and the ideas discussed throughout, and the relevance to their lives. I really enjoyed seeing the students nodding, watching the lightbulbs go off and hearing the 'hmmms' and 'ahhhs' as we discussed the importance of SM for their lives and careers.

To conclude our intro week, students put themselves into groups and I gave each student a scenario which may happen at school, then asked them to create a skit, acting out their response to that situation (e.g. an assignment is due tomorrow and it's a family birthday, working in a group of people you don't get along with). This also started interesting conversations about what positive self management looks like at school.

To review the ideas from last week, and start to begin thinking about strategies for SM, below was our lesson on Monday morning. Their major task was to pick one of the latter slides as a small group and define/explain one of the strategies, to share with the rest of the class. This helped to provide students with an intro to the strategies, which I have started to build on this week.

We have explored SMART goals and self control so far. Students have begun to identify the goals they would like to work towards, with the knowledge of SMART goals. Soon I will be introducing the students to their assessment, which is based around creating goals to improve their self management in physical activity.

After the introduction to and discussions around self control, see below, we then went and played netball. Aside from four students, the rest of the class thought we were simply playing netball for the fun of it, but there were key messages within the game. Before starting to play, I gave four students a card with a task to fulfils throughout the game, but they couldn't tell anyone else what their task was. The cards were; mutter under your breath, cheat, contact as often as you can, and disagree with the ref. 

I was careful to choose students who I knew would act out their tasks well, without other students getting suspicious. This worked so well. I was able to see how people responded to the situations where we had blatant cheating, when someone was going out of their way to push their opponent, and someone told the referee his call was incorrect for example. Holistically, I was incredibly impressed by the self control the students showed, and their self management overall! This has made me so excited for the next few weeks in 11PE!