I have now completed 3 weeks of my long practicum and I am really starting to feel confident as a physical education instructor. I have now expanded my course load to 2 full classes per day and I am currently team teaching a third class. My primary focus for this week was to teach to what I know. What I mean by this is that the units that I would be teaching are not necessarily activities that I have a high degree of expertise in, so instead of over emphasizing critical details relating to physical performance, I decided to implement two different strategies to ensure purposeful learning.

The strategy I used in my grade 9 tumbling class was to allow students to be creative by providing them guidelines and allowing them to elaborate through group collaboration. For this unit, students are introduced to tumbling and through group practice, the end goal is for students to design and perform a 2 minute tumbling routine. Performing a routine in front of a class can create a significant level of anxiety for certain students, so my focus has been on ensuring a safe environment in which bravery and taking risks is applauded. To date the lessons have been steadily improving as students adapt to my teaching style, and as I continually fine tune my lessons to ensure a fluid and safe progression through increasingly challenging tumbling maneuvers.

The strategy I have been using in my badminton 10 unit is similar in that it has an emotional connection, but different in that the focus is geared slightly more toward physical performance. The breakthrough in this unit happened during the final lesson of this week. up to this point the focus had been on “thinking like an athlete”, by trying to set your opponent up for winners. the breakthrough happened when I asked students to instead “feel like an athlete” by focusing on the feeling of connecting perfectly with the birdie and watching it as it falls inside the court for a point. To stamp home this point, I came up with the idea of a “one minute champion” in which students would spend the next 60 seconds hitting deep overhead clears into the far corners of the opponents court. This worked exceptionally well and the sound of whooshing rackets and the pop of the birdie could be heard throughout the gym. The physical exertion of students could be clearly seen by the end of the lesson and the smile on students faces was a clear sign of an extremely purposeful lesson.

For next week I plan to incorporate this “1 minute champion” theme into more lessons as it gave my students a window to be exceptional.  For every lesson I aim to provide students a specific performance target and their self assessment should be based on their effort during these 1 minute intervals.