This is an area of planning and physical education I feel passionately about. Last year I created "
A Proposed Draft Conceptual Map for Physical Education" to help explain some of the thoughts I was developing around making concepts explicit in PE.
This year both our Elementary schools are going to attempt to draw up a
conceptual matrix to use in physical education, from Early Year 1 through to Grade 5.
The goal is to get both Elementary Schools on the same page, having the teachers teach big picture concepts explicitly (that have real world application) along side the schools adopted PE curriculum, while teaching through an inquiry lens.
Sounds easy don't it?
Creating Learning Journeys for Physical Education
What 'learning journeys' are there in Elementary PE? Meaning, what subheadings can everything we do in physical education be grouped under?
I initially went with dividing the sports/games into the more traditional areas of: Invasion games, Net/Wall games, Striking & Fielding, Fitness, Individual Pursuit, Swimming and Dance/Gymnastics.
The problems with this is there are too many learning journeys, we are really looking for 4 or 5 tops, without being too ridged e.g. an invasion game is an invasion game and there is no wriggle room. Plus it's too old fashioned, not conceptual enough, not big picture enough.
I looked at the work I did last year with my
Conceptual Map for PE. I had divided everything I did into 4 main areas: Relationships, Ethics, Coaching & Feedback and Health, Fitness and Social.
As a reference this time I used Guy Claxton's Building Learning Power and started to reexamine my conceptual map.
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On the image above the blue pen is possible learning journeys, the green pen are major concepts that fall under each of the learning journeys and in red is Guy Claxton's Building Learning Power concepts.
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As you can see from the image above I changed/adapted some of my original headings. Having worked with my conceptual map all of last year I had a good idea of what worked and what needed to be improved.
My headings now read: Relationships, Ethics, Health & Fitness, Coaching & Feedback and Elements of Movement or Movement Concepts (still haven't decided which one I like yet). Could these work as Physical Education Learning Journeys?
Using headings like relationships rather than invasion games gives the teacher ore options to choose what sport/game does justice to a particular concept e.g. a lot more wriggle room.
At this stage we now have the Learning Journeys, though these may change...
But having the Learning Journeys lets us draw up the start of the matrix:
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The Physical Education Learning Journeys
Conceptual Matrix (Blank) |
All we have to do now is fill it in :)
To be continued...
