This week I attempted to put my inquiry project to use and had both my PE 10 and PE 11/12 do an inventing games unit. Over the span of four days, the students invented games that were very genius in nature and their peers seemed to have a lot of fun playing the different games. Based on my observations, the grade 11/12s had no problem doing the unit, in fact they seemed to enjoy it because it gave them a lot of “free time”. My grade 10 students on the other hand did what was required of them, but they seemed to be going through the motions. I explained to them that this was the testing of a new concept of teaching and that most of my colleagues are also trying it out at their practicum schools. At the end of the unit, I asked them for feedback and they all thought that it was not as enjoyable as actually playing traditional games. Upon conferring with other colleagues, one had the exact same response from her grade 9s and a few others will report back once they have tried their inventing games units with their classes.
I think one problem that has been brought up before by other UBC BEd students and former BEd students is how much they disliked the amount of theory that the program teaches us about. At the retail store that I work at, I get a lot of teachers as customers and they all say very similar things about the program. I wonder if there is a way to actually take away theory and actually test things so that every year, the new teacher candidates will learn things that are not theoretical, and instead will learn things about what was tested by the previous year’s teacher candidates. All the theoretical things taught to us seem so interesting, exciting and new to us, but to the students, it seems like we’re taking away their enjoyment of PE. I believe that if we are to be true to our goal of developing life long activity in our students, we need to take away theory and use previous application experiences to guide our teaching methods.
A couple of thoughts/reactions come to mind. You talk about “free time”. Is free time good in a P.E. class or in any class for that matter. I think that student work time, be it individual, in pairs or in groups is an excellent opportunity for learning if it is structured with a goal in mind and engages them in meaningful learning. It needs to focus on effective and maximal the use of instructional time. If it is simply down time where the students are not engaged or challenged to go to the next level because they are finished, I question whether it is a good thing.
In this vein, a couple of things that I would like to see you try to implement and work on for the last couple of weeks include:
I would like to see you create more lessons where you either do more instruction yourself, where you take the lead, or where you clearly structure their activities. Learning activities can be student entered (meaning that they take the responsibility for some or most of their own learning) and still be teacher created, directed, structured and delivered. It’s kind of like you are the puppet master and they are the puppets and the organization that you put in place allow you to pull the strings to guide their learning.
The second thing I would like to see is to for you to plan PE class where students are physically active with an instructional purpose and direction for the vast majority of a lesson. It’s OK for them to actually get “a glow on” and expend a lot of physical energy during a class.!