This week I wanted to address a situation that is related to my inquiry. As stated two weeks ago I planned to test my inquiry question out on my PE 10 class. What I thought worked well was allowing students to create their own activities/drills/games in my volleyball unit. However, there seems to be reluctance from the students to want to try the TGFU model of teaching. The TGFU model that I tried implementing was creating mini games for students to learn game concepts. I am finding it difficult to implement my inquiry because it is about motivation and the TGFU seems to be demotivating a very motivated group of students. I plan to try a different approach to my upcoming unit of basketball in two weeks. What I plan to do is to have the students to get into teaching groups and to teach each other the skills and rules necessary to play the game. I will shorten each unit to one week and each day will look as follows:
Monday – explanation of expectations, dividing class into 6 groups, assigning topics to each group, work in class to create 20 minute lessons
Tuesday – groups 1 and 2 teach (total of 40 minutes teaching time), last 20ish minutes of class is scrimmage time
Wednesday – groups 3 and 4 teach (total of 40 minutes teaching time), last 20ish minutes of class is scrimmage time
Thursday – groups 5 and 6 teach (total of 40 minutes teaching time), last 20ish minutes of class is scrimmage time
Friday – whole class game play
Instead of being evaluated on how they do their skills, I will mark them on their understanding of the skills by what they teach to the class.
I think that the UBC inquiry classes have not prepared me well enough to try and implement it into practice. I feel like I need more guidance and flexibility to try different models of teaching before deciding on what my inquiry question should be. I felt like they really forced us to pick a teaching models even before we begin to do actual inquiry. I would like to have had the opportunity to try many teaching methods and models to come to my own conclusions before deciding to choose TGFU or inventing games models as my main focus. Of course I will continue to try these models, but now I feel like my inquiry is not going well and I may have to change my inquiry question.
I don’t know that I would say that your inquiry is not going well. Sometimes doing any inquiry project/learning can be challenging until the “inquirer” has a base of experience to draw from. Usually, we start out in an new environment basically trying to survive day to day. Everything is new, we have little in the area of prior learning to draw from and as a result, the pace of each day seems faster than we expected. Once we begin to develop this base of core learning, the idea of designing an inquiry project suddenly seems more doable.
Having said that, I’m glad to hear that you are sticking with it; re-designing and trying to come at it a different way. Many times, if we are thoughtful and reflective, we can learn as much or not more when things go somewhat wrong rather that going perfectly right. We can do some analysis of the situation, think about what we thought had potential an what we would try to change and then try again. That’s the way it should be. good on you that you are doing this rather than just giving up.