I think dance is an incredibly powerful tool for expression, self-exploration, cultivating creativity, building community and just general increasing of joy and well being. I have always found dance to be an incredibly joyful and pleasurable experience. I think most children at a very young age discover dance and the joys of free movement. Social standards, among other things, can stifle a young person’s desire or freedom to explore dance. I think society views dance as far lower on the hierarchy of important or worthwhile activities compared with sport or academics (as most arts are viewed). From an education standpoint I see an enormous amount of potential for enriching a student’s understanding of the world and themselves through dance. The potential for cross-curricular study is also quite vast. Because dance is so closely linked with culture you could study dance in terms of it’s cultural and historical context. Participating in learning a culture’s dance brings about a visceral and deep understanding and appreciated for that culture. During the last Pro-D day I participated in a seminar where we learned Circle Dance. I was given a deeper understanding of how dance can teach connectedness and our ability to express through movement. In circle dance you are confronted with the faces of your fellow dancers and you often hold their hands. Moving in unison in this connected way is quite powerful. We were asked to create a circle dance together at the end. This was also very impactful. I felt we built something together and with a very distinct purpose. We chose one quality that we would try and embody and express through our dance. This is something I would love to try with students. Dance is a beautiful way to get kids moving and enjoying an active lifestyle.

Gymnastics was so fun! I have never been able to do a cartwheel and I actually get really dizzy doing rolls and spins, but I still had such a blast. The Disney music, this amazing cohort and excellent instruction from Stephen were probably all huge factors. Anyway, after reading the chapters this week I was feeling very daunted by the legalities that teachers face, and especially P.E. teachers. There are so many risks to consider while teaching physical activity and gymnastics seems to be one of the most accident-prone of all. I think the obvious ways to avoid risk are being really vigilant about teaching safety before each class, getting consistent routines in place around the way the kids behave on and around the equipment, ensuring you are able to see the entire space as much as possible and creating a stop signal that allows the students to finish what they’re doing before stopping.

Something that I took away from this class was the range of activities and movements you could teach your students with little to no equipment. For the younger grades, especially, you could teach all those travelling movements (skipping, hopping, leaping, side-stepping), the spinning movements and balancing movements without anything other than mats. I liked the idea of creating our own tableau after we learned the movements or creating our own routine. I would be excited to try something like this with students during Practicum. I really appreciated this lesson, as many schools do not have access to all the equipment we saw in the gymnastics space on Tuesday.

Today’s class was such a wonderful experience and a really awesome example for us to learn from in terms of teaching outdoor education. I feel like I learned an immense amount from Cristina, Christine and Lisa about what I need to be aware of and think about when planning for an alternative environment activity. There are a whole new set of requirements when bringing a group of kids into the outdoors and we have to be aware of all the safety issues and risks. I appreciated being taught what to tell students if they got lost outdoors and also how to organize the activity in ways that quell parent and administrator concerns. We must enlist the help of parents, other teachers, support staff and even older students in order to have a good adult to student ratio. We also need to make sure we are aware of the liabilities and waivers that need to be signed before taking kids for a lesson outside. Furthermore, we must have sufficient knowledge of first-aid or have someone on the excursion who does have this knowledge. Teaching an outdoor education class, or simply teaching any class outside, is such a valuable and worthwhile thing for us to do. I feel much less nervous about doing it after today’s class.

After reading the chapters for this week, there is so much to consider when planning a unit or even a lesson. I think routines, organization, clear communication and relationship building are some of the most important strategies for enhancing the learning environment for students. Especially for the younger grades, routines are so important. They reduce time wasted on classroom management issues or confusion. They get the kids into an activity and learning much faster and more efficiently. This ties in with organization. The ways you organize your students for activities has a huge impact on their comfort levels, feeling of safety and also their engagement in the exercise. The clearer our instructions, the quicker we can start playing and getting active. It reduces confusion and also helps with relationship building between teacher and students. The respect that comes from those clear interactions will help us be effective in engaging our students and keeping them excited about P.E.

After reading the chapter on assessment and seeing the way the group on Tuesday used a rubric for assessment of their activity, I have a new appreciation for the difficulty and complexity of effective assessment in P.E. It’s much more difficult than I had expected. It seems that particularly in P.E., assessment is quite a challenge. I originally felt like I would want to assess based more on effort and participation- that is what seemed fairer to me based on my experience. I want to avoid giving good assessment only to those who are more physically fit or physically literate than others. However the chapter outlined some issues with weighing your assessment too heavily on participation and effort. They suggest a balance is required between assessing skills and participation/effort. I can see why this makes sense, but I am still struggling to find the best approach. I also leaned towards the idea of assessing based on improvement. Again, the chapter pointed out that students who were already competent in an area would not be graded well because they didn’t have far to improve. So this isn’t fair either. As the readings and the lecture in class suggested, using a diversity of assessment will be important for accuracy and fairness.

I liked the criteria used in the group’s rubric on Tuesday. It was really helpful to see them create a rubric for a lesson they had planned. It sounds easy to do and a lot more challenging when you sit down to do it. I especially liked how they incorporated “a good attitude” into their rubric. I think it’s so important for kids to know ahead of time what the expectations are and if they see the inclusion of criteria focusing on attitude, teamwork or helping others they will learn that those aspects are equally as important as physical skills.

After Tuesday’s class I thought about the question, “Do I need to be an ‘expert’ to teach PE?” and although I think perhaps my answer would have previously been a yes, my thinking is changing in this area. I saw the ways that Group 1 did their team teach, as new teachers, and coming from varying backgrounds of physical education or physical literacy. The ways in which they tackled the objectives, came up with many different ideas to help us learn target games and have fun while we did it made me see that you don’t need to be an expert in PE, but perhaps just an expert teacher. To me, that means being open to learning, taking risks and overcoming challenges in order to educate learners. In my case, I am open to learning how to teach PE and I think many of us feel like it will be a stretch out of our comfort zone. As we have learned, it is entirely too common among educators to shy away from teaching PE for the very same fears many of us probably share. Seeing Group 1 dive head first in to teaching a PE lesson was really encouraging and motivating for me.

It also made me think of the many ways in which movement can be joyful, as one of our guiding questions asked. There is joy in movement and sharing those experiences of movement with others. And that idea doesn’t necessarily have to only be applied to team sports. I think we all experienced, during our target games lesson, how fun and joyful it was to learn a skill together, practice together, support one another, motivate one another and share small victories (even if it was just hitting a disc with a bean bag!). I am excited to expand my understanding of PE, as well as my students’, and to build my confidence about being qualified to teach it.