I hope that your school year is off to a great start. It was nice catching up with you on Friday inservice. Thank you for all your hard work in looking at the transfer goals for the department. Please be sure to comment on the existing goals or add your own. This is full brainstorm mode meaning that nothing is off limits yet – we will pair it down later. Please try to get into the document by Oct 31.
Meaningful PE: A new spin on differentiation.
We want children to walk through the doors of a gym or dance studio or enter a field, hiking trail, bike path, or body of water and be filled with a sense of excitement, joy, and adventure rather than dread, boredom, or fear. Sadly, there are still students in our classes that feel dread, boredom, and fear. Meaningful PE can be a philosophical solution to finding something for everyone in class.
Start by recognizing that we all come into experiences seeing them through our own lens. As people who have made the choice to teach HPE for a living our lenses are likely significantly different than many students. We must keep this in the forefront of our minds as we work with students to meet them where they are and work on influencing them towards a better life rather than pushing them through our lens.
Start with having each student create a map of their physical activity experiences that have shaped who they are. This should just be something to help us better know our students and their past experiences with movement.
While doing this we need to recognize our own biases so students can recognize their biases regarding movement and physical activity.
Students have developed conditioned silence. How can we get them to speak up about their needs and wants and work together to achieve them? Yes standards, objectives, skills, and fitness are important and there are some things that we have to teach and have to cover in the student’s best interest however they are not the biggest things. Self care, empathy, compassion, love, respect, adventure, curiosity are much more important in the grand scheme of things.
Students are afraid of being wrong, feeling awkward, for failing in front of others we need to allow them a comfort level especially early on till they get to know each other and trust each other as well as us I think the meaning will be especially important in the beginning of the year as we build relationships and trust in each other.
Meaningful PE groupings provide for differentiation during gameplay or student practice opportunities, levels are selected by student choice and at times by the teacher.
- Practice Group: focuses on students who are not ready to compete yet but instead want to practice alone or in a small group
- Cooperative Group: focuses on working together for success over winning
- Recreational Group: enjoy competing but a lower skilled or more relaxed level
- Competitive Group: most skilled and competitive students
Portrait of an Eagle video to the community ties nicely to the idea on Meaningful PE.
Bedard's CVPE Blog 