TweetPost #2 – multi function pedagogy

My TweetPost  tweet this time sent me off to an interesting article on…no…see if you can guess what it’s about.
It was a “List” article. You know, where the author gives you a list of  ideas they think are useful. I normally give up reading these articles because they tend to be vapor (i.e mainly aspirational with little or no grounding in a practical sense), but this one was not too bad.
Anyway, here’s the game. I’ll list the list items, and you try to identify the topic.

• Start out slowly
• Fun is paramount
• Play and they will come
• Creative positive incentives
• Get the students involved
• Keep it varied
• Change things up to maintain motivation

So what was the topic?

In this case it was a list of “Tips for Keeping our youth fit”, something that PE teachers worldwide do as their day to day work.

But something occurred to me. Many #pegeeks puzzle over implementing games based learning (GBL) into their classrooms, thinking that they have to learn a new way of teaching to carry it off. I’d argue that the list above not only applies to good practice in keeping kids fit, but also for good PE teaching and also more generally good classroom  practice anyway. It also resonates for those planning to use GBL strategies with their students. Teaching games and movement in the physical sphere is core business for PE teachers, and I see a close relationship with what the “other” games based learning is all about. I say “other” because for some reason when most people think of GBL pedagogy, its mainly video games that get the most attention as the delivery platform for the experience.

I’ve recently been involved in work looking at the elements of GBL pedagogy, and concepts like persistence, challenge, investment, flow, reward and feedback are integral to effective GBL. Sounds a lot like the skill learning that takes place in PE classes too.

So #pegeeks, the next time you think about using a GBL layer in your teaching with your kids, realise that the elements to carry it off may just be the stuff you’ve been doing for years already.

Here’s the tweet. Thanks to @baldyr55 for bringing the article to my attention! Here’s the article

Physical Education Futures

Normally around this time of the year my out of school reading time is taken up with proof reading reports, the odd copy of Australian Mountain Bike magazine or a quick flick through the newspaper before work.

But after a recent discussion on Twitter with Dr Ashley Casey (@DrAshCasey) on Physical Education pedagogy, he recommended a book by Professor David Kirk called “Physical Education Futures”. “What the hell “, I thought, it could do me good!

I’m not going to review the book here, but in recommending it to Physical Education teachers I’m going to comment and quote extensively as a  way of explaining why I think it’s so important.

Firstly, for a guy that finished his last foray into post-graduate study quite a while ago, it was pretty hard going at times. Big words aside, the depth to which Prof. Kirk goes to lay out the background as to why PE is ready for reform is profound. But it makes sense.

Oh..and I didn’t buy it, I borrowed it from my excellent DET library.

If I read it correctly, Kirk suggests that current PE practice  is affected  by some tensions, including:

• That a typical PE program consists generally of “skill learning”  in isolation and that this disengages kids. This view of PE has developed and evolved over the time that PE has existed in schools.
• That the quest for academic acceptance has diminished the real world role that PE should play in schools

He also suggests that the future for PE has 3 possible paths.

1. “More of the same…. where the multi activity, sport based programs with molecularised teaching of techniques informed by the hegemony of biomechanics” is the short to middle future, supported by teachers and schools based in a traditional, Industrial Age logic where PE was meant to be a release from academic study and a way to socialise and school the body. He sees this scenario as seductive because it fits well with the expectations of our stakeholders, but it may not produce the best outcome for our students or us as teachers.
2. Radical Reform – moving from the “physical education as skill learning” to multiple  ideas of physical education( PE as sport, PE as exercise, PE as active leisure and so on) that takes into account and meshes with changes in society like the digital education revolution. It would need things like Playing Games for Understanding, Games Sense and Sport Education to become more the focus of PE programs in schools.
3. Extinction – without reform, Kirk sees this option as a possibility. “More of the same” could lead PE to reap what it sows, and be judged on its ability to change student outcomes. How many PE teachers would be prepared if “detailed, intensive testing of their work was mooted?” Although unlikely, extinction could become a reality for schools in hard economic time where funding is under review.

Kirk says that reform is a hard thing to do because of the fundamental form it must necessarily take. It also should affect not just teachers and schools, but the training institutions as well. He draws on 5 “foundational premises” for reconstructing PE, as put forward by Hal Lawson(2008):

1. New physical education programs must take forms that fit the new institutional forms of the school, in particular with “community- school” designs. Community school design means including play opportunities out of school time with some linked to regular day classes; conditions for genuine play – true choices, opportunities to experience flow, engaging in activities for intrinsic benefits, learning without reference to grades or tests
2. PE must end its quest to be treated just like other school subjects, and recognise and celebrate the things that make it a different, unique and valuable source of educational experience.
3. PE needs to be more astute in actively identifying the powerful forces that offer competing and often harmful lifestyles to young people, and take them into account when designing programs
4. PE needs to take on a “life course” development perspective
5. PE should exploit its power in offering programs that are stand-alone and combined social intervention strategies that help other agencies address urgent social problems.

Kirk offers a sixth, which is that PE programs in schools must be as tightly aligned as possible with the sort of physical culture that we value and wish to transmit and renew.

I found David Kirk’s book to be very valuable in the sense that I’ve had a feeling that my Faculty may not have been as effective in delivering “physical education” as it could have been. My searching for an alternative to what we do now has been given some direction after reading this book.

I’d be interested to hear if what I’ve tried to convey here has struck a chord with PE teachers, and what they see the future of their subject area is.

References:

Kirk, D (2010) “Physical Education Futures” , Routledge, New York

Lawson, H.A ” (2008) “Crossing borders and changing boundaries to develop innovations that improve outcomes” The Cagigal Lecture, AIESEP World Congress, Sapporo

The light bulb came on

A couple of light bulb moments have marked my first week back at work after travelling overseas on leave with my family.

Before we went to Italy, I set up a blog to record our adventures. When I say our, I was more interested in how my boys would use it. They were a kind of experiment I guess, because blogging for kids is an area I want to develop in my work with students, but so far my attempts at getting kids interested had not met with too much success. This ended up being an exercise in illumination for me, not so much in working out how to get my sons to blog, but in the other part of the process, that being the importance of the comments and feedback that they got. They were inspired to write when they knew their friends and family were reading, and commenting on their posts. The Topic/Blog/Feedback process became automatic when all three conditions were present. You could write about anything really, and as long as readers contribute to a discussion, the motivation to keep writing is there.

LIGHTBULB #1 – Feedback drives the blogging process for our social network driven kids.

Before I left, I created a quiz with Wondershare Quiz Creator The beauty of the software is that I can then pack up the final version of the quiz into a SCORM package and upload it to my school’s Moodle site. Once deployed, the quiz is available 24/7, it has a closing date and time and, best of all, the quiz self marks. The marks are then collected by Moodle and put into the course gradebook.

The quiz I created had stimulus material like video for some questions, a time limit and I included a feature that scrambled the order of the questions, and the answers within the questions to foil any cheating by kids as they took the test over the 2 days it was open.

The feedback from staff and students was interesting. Beside some log on issues, the staff were positive about the ease of administering the quiz. They were very impressed with not having to mark 130+ papers! The students I spoke to described the experience in positive terms, but by far and away the greatest impact they reported was the use of powerful stimuli like video, sound and image in the questions. For example, the students watched an advertisement used in Australia to highlight the effect of alcohol on driving. Some students (all boys!) commented that they hadn’t paid much attention to the ad on television before they saw it in the quiz. The question in the quiz suddenly showed them its meaning.

LIGHTBULB #2 Even exams can be transformed into powerful learning experiences by using appropriate technology.

Last one. So far my teaching with technology has been a hybrid affair, as it is for many people I suspect. Syllabus requirements, public expectations based on a traditional view of schooling and external exams of all pursuasions mean that many teacher’s classroom practice tend to be traditional, rather than innovative and edgy. Technology for me has been a way to engage students, but still seems to be additional to my practice, rather than integral to it. Browsing my feed of educator blogs, I came across this from Shelly Blake-Plock (AKA @TeachPaperless). This literally turned on a lightbulb for me, notably the casual ease with which he uses technology and the exciting possibilities for the classroom that this clever teacher discusses.  I think it’s charted a course for my future use of technology in my classes.

LIGHTBULB #3   Ask the kids, and keep it simple.

What lightbulbs have lit up for you lately?  Make sure you share the light.

It’s like algebra…

I’ve been meaning to reflect on the Staff Development Day (SDD) that took place on our first day back in Term 2, but the impending departure of the Jones collective overseas has left me with too few spare moments to sit down and write.

When the focus for the SDD was revealed at our executive meeting, I groaned inwardly. Quality Teaching and coding of example lessons were to be the main thrust of the day. I didn’t groan because I didn’t think it was important, for indeed I do. I believe that the quest for quality teaching is an admirable (indeed essential) cause for modern teachers, and an ongoing one.

My greatest fear was of  the impression that many teachers have of the QT framework. Whilst many, if not all, of the teachers I know are aware of what the QT Framework is all about, many worry about not KNOWING it. Like kids cramming for an exam, they make the mistake of trying to know ALL of it. I’ve never tried to know it all. I’ve cherry picked what I think are the kernels at the center of QT, tried a few things and watched what happened. I was worried that as soon as QT was mentioned, the pooh poohing would start.

I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, the day was quite good in one particular way, and that was when cross curricular groups were formed and we reflected on a lesson that we regarded as our “best lesson ever”. It was great to hear of what worked in lessons, as they were all good news stories. I shamelessly plugged a Laptop Wrap that I had designed, partly because it did engage a hard-to-engage class, but also because I wanted to introduce to the group, as a captive audience, the possibility that  tech was a viable engagement option.

One thing that became apparent was that Core subjects with external exams in the junior school (English, Maths, Science & HSIE) were caught between the rock that is external credentialing and the hard place of making examinable work engaging and significant. Many spoke of loving to have the time to ‘play and have fun’, but a definite timeline of teaching, assessment and exams didn’t allow them to stray too far off course for the exams. During my talk on the Laptop Wrap is spoke about how I could make it engaging because the work was posited in the real world, and had the kids create real world projects. To me, that significance leads to Deep Knowledge and Deep Understanding.

“But you don’t have external exams to prepare for” said the Maths guy. “Its’ like algebra…” he said. “Try to tell a kid they’ll use that in the real world, and they can’t see it, but its in the exam”.

This raised some issues for me:

• Striking a balance between exam preparation and engagement leading to Deeper Knowledge or Understanding is crucial for both students and teachers.
• How can teachers (and for that case, their employers) maximise the effectiveness of teaching 21st Century students, when they subscribe to 20th century ideals of format and structure
• And how do you put algebra in the real world?

I still reckon that last one is the toughest!

Geronimo!!!!

You know how when someone jumps off a tall cliff, or out of a plane, or just makes a big leap into the unkonwn they usually yell out something like “geronimooooo…” as they go?

That’s pretty much the way I’ve jumped into gadgets and technology since I can remember when. It’s not that I’m careless or fearless, because I don’t want to screw things up, just like anyone. But I’ve always thought that the only way I’m going to learn new stuff is take a bit of a risk sometimes, and just stuff  happen.

Today at a meeting about the state of play with new technology at my school, I think I reiterated this feeling to my colleagues, and went on to say that everyone should just get in and have a go. In my mind, immersion is the best way to learn something like technology. You can read all the manuals you want, attend as many classes as you want, but hands on, up to your elbows in gunk is sometimes the best way to learn.

What I noticed most about this meeting was that as traditional educators sometimes try to box new concepts into contexts that they understand, they can take all the excitement and innovation out of things. I thinkl we sometimes overthink situations  and end up  making new things fit existing structures, when it should be the other way round. That is, lets let the new idea create a new future, not a replicant of the past.

Iknow, I know… there is an argument that innovation and curriculum requirements for Boards of Study don’t always mesh, but hey, lets not throw up our hands and say safety first all the time.

Technology is a great opportunity to change pedagogy. Teachers should be ready to throw out a lot of the “old ways” and embrace the collaborative/engagement/innovation opportunity that it presents. Instead, we run the risk of smothering the opportunity in structure and control that takes away it’s  attractive, impulsive, flexible  features likely to appeal to kids.