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.

This last week went by very quickly, there was a lot of excitement happening at the school with spirit week, Senior boys provincial basketball game, and the anticipation of the arrival of spring break.  I felt like all of my classes were performing exceptionally well as a whole.  The only problem I had was with my senior PE class, this is the class that I just picked up and have the least exposure to so far.  The first week that I had them went smoothly, because it was well organized and combined with the other three PE classes in that block.  This week was a bit of a roller coaster ride with the senior PE class.  The week started out well with our dance performances with guest appearances by two other teachers/teacher candidates.  The students were well behaved, very supportive of each other, and engaged in what was happening.  The next day I introduced the inventing games unit, and for the rest of the week we invented games from the “target games” from the TGFU model (Click here for my criteria that I used for inventing games).  I started the unit by teaching them my invented game called “disc bocce” (Click here for lesson plan on disc bocce).  Surprisingly, the students were really into the game and were having more fun than I expected.  The actual inventing games aspect took a little while for all the groups the get settled down and get working, but for the most part, they were all engaged in inventing their games.  On the final day before spring break, I had them teach each other their invented games and they were rowdier than usual.  I’m not sure if it was because it was the day before spring break, or the fact that target games are less active by nature and they wanted to move, or I just have not 100% earned their respect as their teacher just yet, or a combination of all of the above.  It just disheartened me a little bit because I thought senior PE was going to be easy to control because they are older and should be more “mature”.

It was definitely interesting trying out the inventing games model.  This was a model taught to my PE cohort by the actual inventor of this teaching model (Dr. Joy Butler from UBC).  She strongly believes that this is the way to go in order to motivate students to play and have fun while learning at the same time.  It was funny the students reactions when they found out that they were the one’s having to invent the games and not that I invent a bunch of games for them to play.  For the most part I think Dr. Butler is actually onto something by creating this teaching model.  I was very pleased at how all the groups of students came up with games completely unique from each other.  One group even took away the sedentary nature of conventional target games and added a role that required a lot of moving around and tossing game objects.

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.