Welcome to the comments, opinions and reflections of an 8th year Health, PE and OUED teacher. I have taught in Auckland, Adelaide and mid 2023 sees the move to Levin. Feel free to comment or contact me through Twitter, always keen to connect and share!
Well, I've had a hiatus from teaching and blogging, but I'm excited to get the ball rolling again. I've moved over to Adelaide in South Australia, and next week I start part time teaching here. I'm looking forward to learning a new curriculum, and being back in the classroom! The New Zealand teaching journey is likely to continue in the future, but for now I need to get used to people pronouncing h as 'haych', and learn the rules of Australian footy!
Closing the first 5 years, 2 schools and country of my career encouraged me to check out which posts had the most views. Although this blog is a place for me to store my reflections and an artefact for my teaching evidence, it's also for me to share, connect and learn with others. Therefore, I do like to follow the statistics behind how many people view my posts and where they view them from. According to my view count, these are my top 10 most read blogposts to date. I'm intrigued to see what the top posts from my Australian chapter will be!
And I'm back! After a few weeks skiing in Japan, we got back into it today, starting our Summer School block course.
In preparation for the full on week, we were given nine readings to read and create thought provoking questions for prior to arrival. Each of us were then required to create an activity based on one of the readings, to share with our peers today.
I thought this was a great way to put the research into practice, pulling out some of the key ideas from the text. Particularly when it is beautiful outside and we are still in holiday mode, it has been really difficult taking in the texts, as they are quite long and full on. The activities today were a fantastic way to revise what we had already learnt and pick up some other bits and pieces others had taken away from their reading which we may have missed among some of the jargon.
I kicked off the day with my activity first. My article (Kirschner & Merrienboer, 2013) was really interesting, and I was thankful I easily thought of some activities. If you would like to read it, click here. Check out my basic lesson plan too.
I began with a simple game of Chinese Whispers in two small groups, and then the class came together to play. When they were in small groups, there was slight error from the first person to the last, but considerable error between the first and last person when the class were together as a whole. Similarly, there are many legends in education, which we have come to believe true, however, how does one know if that 'idea' is credible? Correct? Made up? Or if what we know it to be now, is even remotely related to the initial idea years ago? The article explores three apparent legends, which I created three small activities for.
The class was split into two groups via email, then given instructions in person. Group 1 had three questions to answer (see the screenshot of the Google Form) in two minutes. Group 2 answered the same questions, but needed to listen to music and engage in an online chat at the same time as answering them. As expected, generally the students who were multitasking (Group 2) had shorter answers than those in Group 1, as you can see below, because of the divided attention between three things. This does not mean to say their answers are of any less quality, however they were attempting to do multiple things at once, so spent less time answering the questions. Legend 1 suggests students are digital natives, thus always need digital technology, and because they have technology all the time, they are effective and efficient multitaskers. This simple activity suggested otherwise.
Group 1
Group 2
Everyone were then asked to push three things of different weights, with the same force. Very quickly, they could see that the greater the force applied to an object, the further it moved, but if the same force was applied to different weights, the lighter object would move further. I then told them this is related to Newton's 2nd Law of Motion: The Law of Acceleration. To follow up students watched the below clip from 0.33-1.05, explaining the law a little further. To conclude, and revise what they had just learnt, the class were asked to record a brief description in their own words of what Newton's 2nd Law is, and then listen to a peers recording. I followed up with some probing questions and explained the relevance to the three learning styles many are familiar with - legend 2; students can be categorised into kinaesthetic, auditory or visual learners. Because of this widespread belief, many teachers, myself included, attempt to include a variety of activities to cater for these learning styles, when in fact no one can be boxed into one style of learning.
Finally, I gave everyone two minutes to find as many songs as they could which included my name in the lyrics. As expected, a few immediately had the country or the state return from their search, many chose the first link returned in their search, and most had visited three or more websites. To my surprise no one knew about search functions in Google such as -country or "Georgia in lyrics", to control and reduce Google's response a little. This was perfect to highlight we all have different understandings of how to effectively and efficiently research, and this was something huge they didn't know. Therefore, our students must know little about how to research effectively. So, legend 3 emphasises students need to take control of their own learning and be self educators, but how can they do this if we aren't even knowledgeable on how to find answers to things we are unsure of?
We have four more days of summer school including a reading and then it is game on with planning next week. Really excited to see the kids!
Another one of the biomechanical principles our seniors are learning about is Levers. Levers are found everywhere, including parts of the body - hence our learning in PE. Students will be able to make reference to levers when analysing and critiquing a movement for their assessment.
A lever is made up of a fulcrum (otherwise known as an axis), an effort (or force), and a resistance (the load being lifted). There are three different classes (or types) of levers, which is dependant on where the resistance is in relation to the fulcrum and the effort being applied. An easy way to remember the classes is to visualise a seesaw, a wheelbarrow and an arm (1st, 2nd and 3rd class levers respectively).
To teach this, we started with a basic intro to what levers are, and then played badminton forceback. Students were in pairs and attempted to hit the wall behind their opponent to score a point. Initially the students could only hold the badminton racquet on the shaft - right below the head of the racquet. Students quickly became frustrated as they weren't able to hit the shuttle very far, as they didn't have as much force as they possibly could. Then moving their hand to the end of the racquet handle to play, this illustrated how a longer lever produces a greater force. We were also able to make reference to other biomechanical principles throughout ie widening the BOS to increase balance/stability, and turning the body to create the largest force possible (force summation).
We then went into the classroom to delve a little further into the 3 classes. We begun by watching the video above and breaking levers down simplistically, making reference to badminton forceback. We then watched a Ted lessonwhich provides some more of the science, theory and philosophy behind levers, to encourage students to think more broadly about levers around them, rather than just their bodies.
Finally, students created their own simple levers old school style - pen, paper, scissors, glue and pins. They started by creating 3 levers, 3 loads and 3 fulcrums, which they then constructed into the three different classes of levers. The pin was used so the students could actually move the lever by applying an effort (their finger), and then asked to explain the three components of the lever and three classes. Students were asked to visualise a seesaw, a wheelbarrow and an arm while creating their levers.
Although a little tedious with the cutting out and sticking bits together, students were able to explain their creations to me at the end of the period - demonstrating their understanding and application of what they had learnt. I think they enjoyed having the practical, discussions and then creation as something different to Google Docs, and I was impressed with their understanding. Will definitely be using this lesson in the future!
The second half of our unit with the Seniors, is biomechanics; getting our heads around the biomechanical principles and then applying them to movements. Today's focus was balance and stability. Balance and stability have three key concepts students need to understand and be able to interrelate; base of support (BOS), centre of gravity (COG) and line of gravity (LOG).
Put simply, our BOS are the points of contact with the ground, and the area in between. The wider this base of support, the greater balance and stability we have. COG is the centre of the mass of the object, this may be on or outside an object depending on the makeup and placement. The LOG is straight through the COG to the ground. If this hypothetical line falls out of the BOS, this is when something becomes unstable and loses balance. Thus, a widened BOS, ensures a lower COG and the LOG is less likely to fall out of the BOS.
This afternoon 12PE replicated some poses with 2, 3, 4 or 5 people, then were asked to identify where the BOS, COG and LOG were and explain why. If they could not replicate a pose, they needed to identify why they weren't balanced/stable and how to increase their balance and stability. We attempted to create a class pyramid, but unfortunately collapsed as I was trying to capture the moment and the bell had gone! So hopefully we can attempt this in the future, as this clearly demonstrates the balance and stability principle. I'm looking forward to experimenting with more of the principles!
If you are interested to learn more about balance and stability, check out this clip. The YouTube channel RBHS PE with Mr Dalton whom created this video, has created various clips that are useful to describe other components of HPE, if you are an educator like me!
