I thought this week did really well with invasion games! They implemented the TGfU model in such a way that we did not even really noticed how well it worked! (Or at least I did not). They provided a safe environment for us to play and build on our skills. The idea of keeping students in their ZPD – Zone of Proximal Development was well executed this week. Zoe, Jenny and Vivian did a great job of keeping the games simple while building on our skills. Their main activity showcased this as they continuously added various aspects to the game, from just running from one side to another while on team stays on lines to block, to passing a ball to each other to get to other side while the other team is allowed only one step from the lines.
Their explanations of how these sets of skills play into other sports and everyday life was very well thought out. While playing, I was not as aware of how this built on our skills and our physical literacy; I was too busy having fun and participating. I think that this is what we should all strive for as future educators. Being able to keep our students in their ZPD’s while pushing them a little further each time, without them even noticing because they’re having too much fun, is how I think it should be. PE should be a fun place! I look back at my own elementary and high school experiences and think about the fun we had. I think about how the games we played slowly built on our skills. Our teacher was able to break down the skills needed while reinforcing the concepts of fair play and teamwork. And looking back at it now, many of the skills were transferable to other games we played! I think this week’s group teach gave us an ideal example of how to apply the model into a class!
Playing the three games at the end of the last class really solidified my understanding of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU). My biggest take away from that experience was how much fun I had. I thoroughly enjoyed and was equally engaged in all three of the games, even though I knew that the first two were played to prepare us for the third game. I will definitely incorporate this model into my teaching practice because it is fun, it helps to develop skills for a more complex game, and the skills developed can be transferred to other games in the same category. In the TGfU model, I found step five to be very interesting. Some sources call this Skill Execution and others call it Application of Skills. In this step, students identify and practice the skills they need to improve their performance (Ophea, 2014). The Teacher Candidates that taught the striking and invasion games made sure to follow this step. They stopped us in the middle of our games to ask us what we needed to do in order to be more successful in our objective. I found that this really helped me to refocus and play more strategically.
On the Ophea website, Individual Pursuits was included as a category of TGfU. I am curious to know more about how TGfU can be incorporated in a yoga or gymnastics lesson. I also wondered whether TGfU could be a useful model for a dance lesson. Hopefully we will learn more about this in upcoming classes.
References
Ophea. (2014). Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) Approach. Retrieved from http://www.playsport.net/about-playsport/teaching-games-understanding-tgfu
This week the group teach was led by Jennie, Carrie and Travis. They did a great job at teaching us striking games. I believe the game we played was called Apples to Buckets. I had a lot of fun and will definitely be implementing games similar to this one when I teach striking games to students. One of the guiding questions from this week was what value embodied learning has. I believe it has a great value because many people are visual and active learners, rather than being told or reading about what they need to do. I learn a lot better personally from being active and actually experiencing something, rather than sitting and having someone explain it to me. This week was the first that an assessment was incorporated and implemented into the group teach. It was helpful because it gave me a guideline to follow to see what I was doing well, and what I could do to improve. The rubric that the group supplied us with was straightforward and easy to understand.
One of the questions from this weeks Guiding Questions that resonated most with me was: “What are ways we can incorporate team building, life skills & leadership games into our PE classroom?” I believe to do this, a teacher needs to build relationships with her students and make an effort to get to know them. This will enable her to see which students can work well together and which ones she can aid in improving their cooperation skills. Creating an environment where students feel safe and included is important. If students feel safe, they are more likely to take risks and want to do better in PE which is an overall great life skill to have. To ensure that all students voices are heard and their needs are met, teachers can encourage students to have weekly reflections (similar to this blog) to express their experiences in PE. Having open communication is important to gauge how students are doing, whether it be one-on-one verbal acknowledgement, breaking off into groups and discussing the day, or through a blog.
Last Tuesday’s Group Teach team introduced striking and batting games to the class. It was awesome to see how everyone’s energy spiked with the conga line and the warm up activity. Although I was a little wary due to my limited dance abilities, I could see how positive this could be for an elementary class where kids could dance around and be silly and goofy without being judged. I also appreciated how we were able to practice the basic movements of batting and pitching before moving on to the main activity.
I like what Steve says about how we are all on our own physical literacy journey. We learn at our own pace and we improve at our own pace, and that is what we have to keep in mind for our students as well. This is what makes the idea of assessment so tricky. Thinking back to my high school days, I remember assessment only ever being summative and never formative. I was never given feedback to improve my learning or to identify my strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. I only remember doing beep tests and push up tests at the end of the term to determine my grade, but throughout the term we never had activities directed at working on those movements. Looking back on it now, I can understand how both forms of assessment are useful. Students should be able to receive constructive feedback on their performance so they can improve upon it before being subjected to a summative assessment.
I thought Vivian, Zoe and Jenny did a fantastic job with Invasion Games last week! I particularly enjoyed getting to see Vivian’s talents when she was teaching us the dance routine and stretching exercises during the beginning and end of the presentation. I also enjoyed our reading discussions and thought the different models were explained to us very clearly and the discussion questions that were given to us were quite thoughtful. During my elementary and high school experience, I felt like the Sports Education model was the most common. There didn’t seem to be any emphasis on social and personal responsibility or physical fitness outside of school.
However, while I appreciate the groups effort to create a sense of bonding and teamwork during their games, I do have a small concern with the last invasion game that was played. I didn’t really like the idea that if one child was tagged or dropped the ball, the entire team was out and had to start all over again. I think this could potentially be a bit shaming for children who are not very athletic. I also think there might be a slight struggle for very athletic children as well. Even if a child is quite socially intelligent, it may be difficult to be so close to gaining points and having that be prevented by only one or two children. A possible solution may be to have the team go back to the halfway point of the gym instead of the very beginning or having the team do some sort of additional task before being allowed to cross the final line. Overall though, I thought the presentation was quite fun and interesting and I feel like the games shown gave us some great ideas for the future.
In the reading summary and discussion this week, we reviewed the different pedagogies for teaching physical education. The pedagogy I found to be most effective and the one in which I hope to implement when teaching my Physical Education class was the TGfU or in other words, Teaching Games for Understanding. This pedagogy focuses on learning and performing sports skills in a variety of settings. The end result is athletes who acquire a strong knowledge and recognition of the game and their own abilities. I found the six-step process that TGfU activities follow to be most helpful in understanding this pedagogy in greater detail. Step 1, the game, was the step I found to be most interesting and unfamiliar to me. Step 1 involves having the teacher introduce a modified version of the game that has clear objectives and follows the basic rules and concepts of the formal game. I was unfamiliar with this step because in my previous experiences in physical education, my teachers would often have us students jump straight into the game without learning the fundamental movements and rules. My teachers assumed that we would learn these basic rules, movements and tactics through continuous playing and practice. However, this in turn caused me to lack the game appreciation and tactical awareness (steps 2 & 3), I needed to gain, in order to apply in playing the game. I will continue to review and familiarize myself with this six-step process and apply it when teaching physical education.
On another note, I wish to highlight an experience I witnessed during my first day of practicum in my Grade 1 and Grade 2 classroom. The teacher of this class starts every morning with a thirty-minute walk in the forest next to the school. I think this is a great way to start the day as it keeps the students active and is a great source of energy for the day ahead. Moreover, I noticed that the students were able to focus better and were more energetic once they returned from the walk. The teacher tries her best to implement physical education throughout the day such as taking breaks from sitting and listening in order to stretch and move around. I look forward to learning more about her physical education techniques and to see if she is incorporating the strategies and knowledge we have learned in class thus far. I now know that I must always have my running shoes nearby, ready to be slipped on as required!
Picture: Natural artefacts Grade 1 and Grade 2 students collected from their nature walk
This week we learned about Striking and Batting games through Jennie, Carrie and Travis’ group teach. I am completely blown away by their lesson, it really set the bar for the upcoming groups. From start to finish they kept the group engaged with alternative ways of getting through the lesson. The conga line method of getting the groups to quickly line up and exit will definitely be a tactic that I am going to use with future physical education classes. The warm up activity of stop and go dancing, transformed my morning grogginess into a more positive energy. The instructions, demonstrations and extension options were clear and easy to understand. As someone who never truly enjoyed physical education class, this lesson got me very engaged and the hour actually flew by!
When thinking about the different assessment strategies that can be used to effectively gather student information, I felt that a mixture of formative and summative would be the best way to accumulate thorough evaluation records. Formative assessment will help build each students’ physical literacy as they use that constructive criticism as a tool to improve their skillset in the current activity. Afterwards, a summative evaluation report will be a great way for students to reflect on how well they improved after using the information from their formative assessment. Since I lack a strong physical education background, I always felt that solely using summative assessment unfair in the sense that it does not give students the opportunity to work on their problem areas before a final summative assessment. I appreciated that Travis came around to my group and pointed out areas to improve that I was unaware of. Instead of becoming discouraged with my performance and the activity itself, I was able to enjoy it a lot more with the formative observations along the way.
It has been said once, but it deserves to be said again: this week the group did a great job at showing us how to teach invasion games. TGfU was a great edition to this class as well, because it will help us in the future with breaking down lessons in a way that helps our students understand the ultimate goal.
We also gained a lot of great knowledge when discussing curriculum and different theories we can apply to our teaching styles. I believe that is necessary to combine different curricular approaches that will assist teachers is modelling a healthy and active lifestyle for our students. Students need the encouragement to find what works best for them in regards to fitness. As I said in our group discussion this week, I don’t particularly like volleyball, but the fact that I was able to get a chance to try running, basketball, badminton, as well as a variety of other games and sports in elementary and high school encouraged me to pursue the fitness lifestyle that works best for me in adulthood. As well, I cannot emphasize enough how important I believe it is that we encourage our students to eat healthy when in school. From someone who came from a home where eating healthy was not even a consideration, I think it is essential that children are given opportunities to see what a healthy diet looks like and how they can achieve a moderately healthy lifestyle at home or at school. At the very least this given students more opportunities and ideas about how they might eat healthy in their adult lives.
Teaching PE was quite fun. It made me a lot less nervous about teaching PE to real elementary students. Teaching PE made me take note of a few of my bad habits that I will work on before teaching. I realized that I have a tendency to hurry as I worry too much about time limits. I now see that clarity (ex. boundaries) is just as important as time to play the game. I also realized how often I use non-gender neutral terms, specifically “you guys.” I am glad that I have time to shift my word use to more inclusive terms. Preparing for the PE lesson was a great learning experience. It was wonderful seeing all the resources and pre-made games that are easily available. As someone that is more drawn to bottom-up teaching for games, I was happy to see there were plenty of resources.
We were fortunate to have such a wonderful group of “students.” I am looking forward to seeing what teaching PE to real elementary students will be like.
