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Author Archives: Brendan Jones

Dear Colleagues

Posted on by Posted in Leading, Physical education .

Source: https://goo.gl/xeFiVh

 

Today I sent an email to my faculty, overviewing my past few busy professional learning days.

It occured to me that it was “long enough to be a blog post……”

So here it is 🙂

 

Dear colleagues, ( *Blog note* I always have problems with a suitable salutation when I’m in a rush….)

This is a quick update after the last few days spent at the PDHPETA conference and then the Central Coast  HT Network meeting.

So settle back and enjoy…. 🙂

PDHPE Teachers Association Conference

This was actually pretty good, with the main takeaways being:
– Evidence based resources abound and should be our focus when selecting material to support our programs

https://positivechoices.org.au/and http://www.lovesexrelationships.edu.au/​  and https://www.blackdoginstitute.org.au/education-training/community-and-schools/free-school-resources are some examples

– The Strengths Based Approach is king! Writing all our units with this in mind will be a priority

– Busting the “one size fits all” way of teaching will be our goal.

– Building in the social elements of Physical Activity, rather than just competition or skill achievement, parallels current trends in society and tends to reflect young people’s motivations for more engaging and effective PA  (this was evidence based too)

– When creating driving / inquiry questions for theory units – if the answer can be Googled, think again.

– Student Self assessment and peer assessment in conjunction with Teaching Games for Understanding https://goo.gl/XExPxu and Games Sense https://goo.gl/L84rPb are powerful models for differentiated learning in PE

Central Coast PDHPE HT Network

Similar agenda to the conference, but it was good to see where everyone was with programming the new syllabus. Some are further along than us, some have not done as much. Everyone’s approach is different, but there were some good leads to follow up.

We  had a NESA Liaison Officer talk about decluttering our programs by taking into account what NESA wants from us (and doesn’t want). Like we have to teach all outcomes in the syllabus, but don’t have to assess all of them. It was good to hear the rules and think on how they can be leveraged to benefit us.

On your behalf, I have entered into an gentleman’s agreement with <another school> to split the programming load for our schools.

We will program Stage 4, and they will program Stage 5, and we will share our work between campuses. We have a shared expectations vision to work out, but I reckon this is a win as we will only have to work in depth on one Stage, saving us time and allowing us to drill down deeper into quality units. Thoughts?

We also discussed a joint campus plan for Sport – essentially adding a third option to our school sport afternoons – Social Comp. It would mean in addition to existing outside sport and school based sport we offer teams in seasonal social comp sports (OzTag, Basketball, Volleyball, Ultimate Frisbee, for e.g.) and play each other at a neutral ground. It’s a thought bubble at the moment and there’s plenty of talking to go yet (I’d love your thoughts , <Sport Organiser>) , but it sounds (to me) a promising prospect.

I’ll talk to Senior Exec about the partnership first (loosely referred to today as Team Mega!), and then get on to booking a day to get us together and start the programming pen work.

Phew, I’m tired just thinking about that again.

See you at school,

Brendan

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Part 1: First Steps to New Thinking.

Posted on by Posted in Uncategorized .

Think Different

This post is the first in a series of posts about my faculty’s journey toward implementing the NSW K-10 PDHPE syllabus, released earlier in 2018.

The aim of this series is twofold – blogging always helps me reflect on what I do, so it’s a therapy for me. The second reason is that should you read this and it gives you an idea on where to go on your journey, then I count that as a win.

It all started when we found out we had six months to implement the “new” syllabus in Years 7 & 9 at the beginning of the 2019 school year.

This caused a great deal of consternation, as most other subjects had been given 12 months to do the same job. Maybe it’s because (WARNING!! CONTROVERSIAL STATEMENT AHEAD) PDHPE teachers get stuff done in half the time of other faculties?

Anyway.

As soon as I got my hands on the syllabus document, I dived in. And was struck by how hard it was to make sense of it. There seemed to be a lot of layers piled one on top of each other, making a very dense thing to come to grips with. Propositions, content strands, skill domains, content descriptors, advocacy for inquiry based learning and learning across the curriculum all combined to making it “fit” scopes and sequences, assessments and eventually units of work a heavy cognitive load. The more I tried to understand, the more confused I got. I wanted to believe!

I even asked to be connected with the team that wrote the syllabus, because to me there was a link missing between the concept and final product, and I hoped someone on the team could give me an insight that might reveal that key to me.  Unhelpfully, I was told that the identity of the team was confidential. Oh well.

I realised that old thinking (i.e trying to transpose the current syllabus over the new syllabus) was not going to work. This was going to need new thinking. New thinking was obviously what the new syllabus writing team possessed, but owing to the fact I couldn’t access their thinking (CONFIDENTIAL), I was going to have to train my own new thinking.

*Tip – working on it solo is not possible, and indicates a death stress wish.

With this in mind I took advantage of every group workshop I could – my Department of Education provided an opportunity to unpack the Propositions and the Syllabus. My local Head Teacher Network also arranged their own collaborative programming day, independent of any “official” professional learning session, so great was the perceived need for understanding and action. Even there, old thinking was the starting point, and much frustration was evident. It was there that it became obvious that cookie cutter, one size fits all programming wasn’t going to be a viable option. Context is everything. I always throw that into educational conversations, and it never made more sense than in this situation. Every school is different, as is every PDHPE faculty, as is every teacher. While the group came up with some promising leads, it wasn’t the complete solution some (well, me) was hoping it might be.

So it was about here I really started freaking out.

I mean, if I couldn’t understand it, or find a path through it, then how was I supposed to lead my faculty through it?

New thinking had to kick in. I had to find a way for it to make sense.

I went new traditional. I went new outside the square. I went wacky. Surprisingly, wacky produced a promising lead. One night I happened to be watching Bruce Willis, Milla Jovovich and Gary Oldman in the movie The Fifth Element when my mind walked away and I went Classical Greek. The Four Elements (Earth, Water, Air and Fire) struck me as a way of organising the syllabus into chunks that connected directly to programming. It kinds works!  I’ll write about that path another time.

Anyway, we end up at today. Today we were given a day (our faculty was generously released by our school from our normal duties via a complex arrangement of in lieu lessons and casuals) (NO FUNDING FOR SYLLABUS PREPARATION TIME YET – I’m looking at you, DoE) and I led my faculty through a much shorter version of my frustrating story so far. Naturally, my faculty encountered the same cognitive load, the same puzzled looks, the same frustration. It’s going to be a slog, in the 4 MONTHS we have left, but we’ll get there. We have to.

The highlight of the day was connecting with Kelly Pfeiffer, a wonderfully giving Head Teacher (Teaching and Learning) at Dubbo School of Distance Education. Earlier in the year I had sought out recommendations from the Twittersphere and the PDHPE Facebook groups I belonged to for a Project Based Learning practitioner with a PDHPE background. Kelly was recommended and we started a conversation which has resulted in Kelly agreeing (if you’re reading this Kelly, I hope you are still agreeing) to coach us on using PBL as part of our new thinking. The faculty were hooked and I think this has given us some solid directions to pursue, including the skills based work we can include in our programmes that not only prepare the student for an effective PBL experience, but are the future proofing skills and talents we want our kids to leave school with and use in the worlds outside the gates.

So that’s it for now. I hope your journey in moving from old thinking to new thinking is successful. New thinking can be hard, especially when the inclination to stick with what you know, or what currently works for you, is a comfortable fall back position.  Look around and choose your resources carefully. Surrounding yourself with new thinkers makes it a whole lot easier.

 

 

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I love it when a semi hatched plan comes together

Posted on by Posted in Learning, Mobile technology, Physical education, Technology, Uncategorized .

Ever since I started PE teaching I think I’ve tinkered with a way to make practical skills observation authentic and manageable. I always seemed to end up with reams of paper and time intensive teacher centered activity as the result. With the advent of mobile technology, I’d hoped that the solution would be closer, but up to now, no. It was always an issue of equity and access – we didn’t have class sets of school provided mobile technology for the kids to use. The kids were reluctant to use their own mobile devices as class tools, for whatever reason. School provided wifi didn’t stretch to where I needed it most – the playing fields. There wasn’t a really simple method of getting the data collected and then analysed.

Today, after semi hatching and sort of plan, the perfect storm of tools and environment came together and it was cool. Really cool.

To set the scene, Year 7 are working on a unit to do with kicking and improving the way we kick a ball. I wanted a way to gather some baseline data, and then use that to guide what each kid could work on, after reviewing their own data. Faced with the prospect of unwieldy tick box observation sheets (things that I find never survive a Year 7 PE lesson very well) I came up with a little trial project idea thingy.

Recently some old iPads become surplus to requirements at my school. I was able to get my hands on 6 of them. Testing that they picked up our extended wifi on the school oval was successful, so they became the observation tool paper replacement. I created a Google Form Peer Observation survey that was based on a Health Active Kids kicking rubric. I put that kicking rubric on my trusty visible learning whiteboard, and added a QR code that when scanned, went to the Google Form.

The Healthy Active Kids Rubric

 

The extracted Kicking Rubric

Kicking Rubric turned into an observation survey


 

Lesson time. I started by showing the kids the whiteboard with the features of good kicking. (We had already spent a previous lesson breaking kicking down and practising the skill).

My trusty visible learning whiteboard, with kicking points and QR Code to survey

 

 

 

I then let the kids loose in small groups, each with a ball and an iPad with the Google Form survey loaded after scanning the code. My only instruction was that everyone had to be observed by a buddy, and the observations entered on the iPad.

Straight away I noticed one thing. The dynamic of the class changed right away. My role went straight to one of tech support and advisor and the kids willingly stepped up and ran the observations themselves. The data collection was taken seriously (and on first glance, very honestly) and although we ran out of time before everyone was observed, the kids were keen to make sure everyone had their data recorded.

My plan is to give each kid their own observation results as feedback and let them identify what they need to work on. We will then develop practice routines bring about skill development, then using the same observation, see if they have improved over time. Differentiation as its purest!

What impressed me most was the data that this produced, and the implications for individual learning into the future. This is potentially a rich vein of information that can be leveraged for future teaching and learning, reporting and assessment.

 

Data samples

 

This was also the product of a serendipitous series of events and situations that may not be available to everyone outside my context. This is what frustrates me the most when it comes to recommending this type of activity because I know not everyone has the access to the tools. I know, because I was in that situation days before.

My take away from today- peer observation can be a powerful experience for both the kids and the teacher. And if you get a chance to try something new, don’t waste it.

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To have a comeback, you have to have a setback

Posted on by Posted in Change, Learning, Physical education .

I had a bit of a set back today. On reflection, I can pin it to a few things.

Me, thinking that something like a school sport afternoon would be easy to plan for and carry off. I planned activities and decided to follow a routine that normally sees me through most practical PE lessons without too much grief.

Me, thinking that my years of practical PE teaching experience would help me wing it through any tricky spots I might encounter. I mean, I know how to wrangle kids and get them travelling in the right direction, at various speeds, right? I’ve done so for pretty much most of my career to date.

But I was taken completely off guard by a factor that I didn’t realise carried as much weight as it eventually did.

Mindset.

I introduced my plan to the combined Year 9 and Year 10 group for the hour of activity that was left after setting out expectations for the Term. Heads started turning, whispering and concerned looks started amongst the troops.

One brave kid spoke up and said “But that’s not what we usually do”.

“Interesting response” I thought. Without missing a beat, I carried on with the message that this was what we were doing today and let’s get going.

At the end of the sport period, as I put the gear away, I reflected on the experience that I, and some of the kids, had just been through.

75% of the group made the most of their time and engaged, at various levels, with the activities.

The other 25% actively tried to disrupt the lesson. Actually work actively to stop the lesson, in some cases.  As I circulated to get them back on task, invariably the response I got as to why they didn’t want to buy in was “this isn’t what we usually do, so I don’t want to do it”

I have seen what School Sport groups usually do as part of past casual observations. This is a sport afternoon where supervising staff (usually nominated by their faculty head and often with little or no experience of supervising students in practical lessons) have run sport by rolling out basketballs and allowed them to “play”. Staff roles were in effect to supervise, rather than facilitating movement. Staff have been offered training for running these sessions, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

This was the very reason I went in with a different set of activities and a different mindset. The activities I chose involved movement and opportunities to do things differently. And thinking about it, that was probably where I went wrong, mostly.

Change can be good. Change can be necessary. But too much change, too quickly, can be overwhelming for some, so their natural reaction is to resist. And I saw that first hand in some (not all) of the students. I had too many resistors and it crippled my plans. It made me think of this:

 

 

Source: https://medium.com/@ruth_obe/growth-mindset-a3b13566a78d

As I mentioned on Twitter:

I definitely agree with Nathan’s reply.

So I’ve got some baseline data now on how some of these kids think about change. It only wasn’t about movement, or me (well, maybe a little) – it was more about too much change, too quickly. I didn’t know what the existing social and movement landscape for the students was about before I charged in with my change. I know I will need to tweak what I do to reduce the fear of change and coax more students on board my vision for the sport afternoon next week. I’ve got some ideas, and I’m not afraid to listen to the kids and include their thoughts and feedback in my plans.

As I said to Nathan:

So how do you react to mindsets (student or adult) that resist the work you try to do?

By the way – the title of this blog is a quote from Mr T. No one ignores advice from Mr T.

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Newton’s First Law

Posted on by Posted in Games for Learning, Inquiry, Learning, Physical education .

“An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force”(That pretty much sums up my view on teaching – every now and then we need some unbalancing to shift us out of our inertia as practitioners.)

I guess I should start this reflection on a couple of moments from my year with some context.

I haven’t been Head Teacher of my faculty this year. I’ve been filling in as ICT Co-Ordinator at my school, which has been a nice (but very challenging at times) change from being a curriculum leader.  My teaching load has reduced a little to accommodate the change of role, and all of classes are still PDHPE classes.

I’ve used the year to play around with some ideas on combining technology with a student-centred learning routine that used a variety of delivery pathways. Some worked, some didn’t. I’ll mention a couple where the process or the outcomes surprised me.

Episode 1 – “We all make choices in life, but in the end our choices make us.” – Andrew Ryan, Bioshock

I’ve always liked the idea of using game mechanics as a vehicle for engaging students with units of work. I play games, and they get me to engage in learning cycles not unlike the ones I want my kids i class to follow. Not gamification though – I’m still suspicious about the use of that concept in teaching and learning – it’s the fairy floss of games based approaches in my humble opinion – starts off great but can lose its appeal quickly when kids discover that there’s a finite amount of interest you can devote to tangible (and ultimately, relatively valueless) trinkets or badges. I’d really like to explore real life loot boxes or special powers that kids could win and use at school based on their progress through an RPG game called Learning, but I haven’t figured that out yet. It needs more adults to be gamemasters for that to happen, most likely.

More context. Most Fridays this year I’ve attended what we like to refer as guild meetings (we have a tag #TMFoghorn) at our guildhouse – Foghorn Brewhouse. By we, I mean like minded educator guild class people like Dean Groom and Lorraine Hawdon from the International Football School at Kariong. Our chats have given my plans real shape. All welcome. Fridays from 4pm.

Anyway, back to the game mechanics. Dean and Lorraine at IFS talked about using episodes to organise units of work – like following campaign mode in a game, with project work as the product. I’ve always liked the idea of choose your own adventure learning – covering outcomes based content and skills with an element of self-determination over the pathways you take. The first step and ultimate destination are the same for all players, but the individual pathways from inside the first door could vary.

I tried something along these lines, using a Google Form – well, a Google Form in multiple sections – that behaves like a choose your own adventure book. Fair warning – it’s a first go –  check it out if you want.

How can we stay safe in a world with drugs?

Episode 2 – “Laziness pays off sometimes” – Brendan Jones

Just this week my own lack of preparation actually paid off. If you’re a beginning teacher, don’t tell anyone I said that. Lesson plans rule, OK.

I was caught up in things at school (as you do) and realised that I’d forgotten to prepare for a Year 7 practical lesson. I’m not usually the “roll out the ball” type of PE teacher, but it was looking like the easiest solution. But, no – let’s ask Mr Google if he has any quick ideas on a ball games unit activity that I hadn’t done before. Fortuitously I rolled the dice and came across this…

I only watched the first 30 seconds, but an idea was hatched.

I used @thepespecialist ‘s idea (hat tip), using a gym ball and a variety of large and small, heavier and lighter balls. I also made a few modifications in scoring i.e. simplified to “your team wins if you can force the gym ball over the other teams throwing line”. Very simple.

The kids played and were literally 100% engaged. High fives all round, end of story, a half decent activity. Well not so fast. The coolest bit hasn’t been mentioned.

As per usual, using a game sense approach, I initially let the kids play with a basic set of rules to make sense of the game, intending to stop and talk refinement of their performance. When we stopped, I introduced the word “momentum” to our conversation. I was interested to see if (a) the kids had heard of the word and (b) how they might apply it to this setting. Not expecting much of response, I heard one Kid 1 say “momentum is when the weight and speed of something is added together and it affects moving”. Then Kid 2 said “it’s got something to do with Newton’s Laws, hasn’t it?” Another one goes “Once something builds up momentum, it can be hard to stop”.

OK

That was unexpected

So then I asked “How does momentum apply to this game?”

Quick as flash Kid 1 says “Well the big ball will stay at rest unless it’s acted on by the ones we throw”.

Wow.

Kid 3 says “For every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction, so if we hit the big ball with the little ball they will bounce off because of that”

Wow squared.

Another one goes “We can use momentum to stop the big ball too”

Games resumes, and the student talk in the game from then on was all about changing the momentum of the big ball, about what balls were more effective in affecting momentum. Not to me, mind – they were talking to each other.

I asked some kids later where they’d picked up their knowledge (because they had to have been exposed to this knowledge somewhere before my lesson) and one said “we learned about this in Science a while ago, but it never made sense to me before today…”

I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on what this means for instruction and learning, but it instilled in me a renewed desire to try and connect PE with other subjects in a meaningful way. Build some cross curricular momentum, you might say.

Merry Christmas, and keep disrupting.

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Future focused learning space? Lose the desk.

Posted on by Posted in Change, Leading .

I was pretty excited this year – I was getting my own room for the first time in about 30 years of teaching. It was an old Art room, at the arse end of the school campus. No-one wanted it, but I saw the potential of making it into a space that kids would be comfortable working (and hopefully learning) in.
Luckily it was scheduled for a refurb, so over the summer break it got a fresh paint job, new vinyl on the floor and a general spruce up.
I learned later that it wasn’t actually exclusively mine – I would be sharing it with another class ( a Japanese class, actually), but it was mainly mine, so I didn’t really object. The teacher knew I intended to try some new things. I mean, what could possibly be wrong with that?
I phished around for grants to put in some furniture, but had no luck. No even our own DoE Futures Learning Unit were willing to take up my offer to be a demo room in our region. I planned to scrounge some old couches, or hit up Gumtree for some bargains, but as of yet I haven’t had any luck.
I’d obviously mentioned to colleagues that I intended to get couches etc for the room, because not long after the teacher of the Japanese class sought me out and expressed their concern at not having the room set up “normally”. This both amused and saddened me. But it didn’t shake my resolve to do something a bit different.
So I had to make do with an assortment of tables and chairs that were available. I quickly realised that it was in the arrangement, not the type of furniture, that made all the difference to the kid’s disposition in my class. We went for islands of work spaces – tables of small groups. I consciously avoided creating a “front of the room”. The projector and display board are on one wall, but I don’t focus on that as the front.  I move around a lot, so there is no focal front in the room.
I put together some visuals on SOLO taxonomy explained and an adaption for inquiry learning that modeled a learning cycle I wanted the kids to adopt. they went up on the walls as stimulus and guidance.
I also made a decision about the teacher’s desk. I wasn’t going to have one in my room. I had a laptop stand near the projector. That was the only place I repeatedly visited if I demo something from my laptop. It’s been 7 weeks now, and I can honestly say I don’t miss it.

Things were looking sweet.

So imagine my surprise when I went into my room yesterday – AND THERE WAS A TEACHER’S DESK AT THE “FRONT” OF THE ROOM.
I think I even exclaimed “WHAT THE HELL?” in front of the kids.
There was only one thing for it. With the help of a few kids, we lugged the desk out again and hid it under the stairs. Like a commando mission.

 

I did this for two reasons. One, I had no use for it. Secondly, I wanted to prove a point to whomever decided to put it in there. I think that teachers assume some symbols of their practice (like desks at the front of the room) are so ingrained and traditional that they need to be there to “be” a teacher. I disagree. I find without a desk I feel free-er; I feel compelled to move around and spend more time with the kids. If the teacher (and I’m sure it was a teacher) that put it there wants to know where it is, then I’ll take it as an opportunity for a professional dialogue.

Maybe that’s just me. Are you anchored in your room? Are you prepared to ditch the desk?

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Meddling from the back seat

Posted on by Posted in Inquiry, Learning, Pedagogy, teacherstuff .

I wrote the majority this from the back seat of our family car, returning home after our annual trip north to visit friends at Crescent Head.
I’m in the backseat because both my sons have wanted to sit in the driving seat on the way home – Dom is a “P” plater, and Matt is a learner. Their licenses have speed restrictions on them, so, sure the trip is slower than if my wife or I were driving but they both wanted the experience in a new situation. Which both made me proud and made me think a lot about helping them on their learning journeys.


As we were traveling, and being freed from driving, I had the opportunity to tweet along in a #pechat about Inquiry Learning in PE, and I was interested to see what people had to say about the conditions of learning that best facilitated inquiry based approaches. Watching people talking about allowing the students to sit in the drivers seat, and then maybe throwing questions about their investigations to the teacher sitting in the back seat seemed to be a very poignant observation. And what I was actually living at that moment.
When we got home I got to thinking about the ways teachers run their classes. I found a really cool article by Erica McWilliam called “Teaching for creativity: from sage to guide to meddler”. I love the idea of meddling in, rather than just leading, the kids learning. One passage from her work resonated with me:
“The Meddler-in-the Middle does not rush to save students from the struggle that higher order thinking involves, by giving them either the answer or the template for finding it. They allow their students to experience the risks and confusion of authentic learning by allowing their students to stay in the grey of unresolvedness, supporting any and all attempts on the part of their students to experiment with possibilities in ways that put their ignorance to work. Moreover, they do not presume that the highest achievers in the class are the best learners. Indeed, they anticipate that many of the students who are on the margins of the school culture may have more to offer in terms of creative effort.”
Meddling needs thought. Teachers are good at giving advice, maybe too much at times. I know if I run a commentary when Matt is driving, it works sometimes. Other times me just being quiet and letting him sort it out works just as well, if not better (for him). My takeaway from that is maybe listening to learners, and taking your cue from them, not always the other way will promote the sort of reflection and learning we want in learners. Advanced warning of hazards or roadblocks always helps, but doesn’t need to be the only thing we as educators have to speak about.
So this year I’m going to plan on how I can take more of a strategic backseat in my teaching, and meddle with the traditional learning process.What that looks like will no doubt be contextual and evolutionary. I’m keen, though, for my students to develop their own road skills.

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This game is unplayable in its current state

Posted on by Posted in Change, Leading, teacherstuff .

When a game become unplayable in its current state, the frustration felt by players is proportional to their level of investment in it. I’m both a player of games, and a player in the educational sector of my state. It’s surprising how similar these settings have been lately.

Recently I’ve been playing Battlefield 1 on PC, from the Beta release stage through and beyond the official release in mid October 2016. The Beta looked unreal and played well. Well, except for the occasional in game glitches and graphics driver crashes that you’d normally expect from a testing ground environment. I decided to sign up for the early release Deluxe edition and when it turned up, started playing.
I’ve made it to level 24 in the time so far, which is pretty good for a one dimensional player like me. More excitingly, I discussed on my work based Yammer network the possibility of forming a teacher based squad so we could co-op together. So far we have three takers – Darcy Moore, Nick Patsianas and myself. Hopefully we can get it to grow, because the multiplayer aspect of the game is the most interesting from both a gamer and an educational perspective.
Unfortunately for most of us, the game play experience has been disjointed and in some respects ruined by the gap between what we should be experiencing and what the reality of game play is. We were promised so much in the call to arms that is the official trailer

In an effort to rectify community disquiet about fractured game play, graphics cards makers and the game creators issue updates and patches to try and fix things. Patches and driver updates make a small difference for a short time anyway, but the issues seem to recur and for some of us the game is unplayable in it’s current state. It’s left us a bit deflated, and not sure of what we can do to improve the situation.

Co-incidentally I was scanning Twitter last last week and I saw the tag feed from the NSW Education Symposium 2016 . Great word, symposium. Sounds really important. Different to a conference I suppose. There were some heavy hitters tweeting from there – The NSW Education Minister, Adrian Piccoli; our new NSW Secretary of the Department of Education, Mark Scott and other glitterati of the cross sector education scene in NSW. Now, I’m not glitterati, but I consider myself to reasonably well connected to educators online, and I’d never heard of it. I did find out it was invitation only, so I asked the obvious question:

There were a few questions but no-one said yes. Special invite indeed.

I saw some tweets about the call to arms speeches that The Minister and The Secretary gave. Click on their names to have a read.
On reflection, I don’t see much difference between their call to arms and the BF1 official trailer. Each give a vision of what could be, which to date is very different to what the actual state of play represents.
I get that their speeches are meant to set the scene, to provide a framework for the future. But I would contend that these call to arms speeches are given too easily, and the structural mechanic needed to translate the call into actionable change is glitched. The thrust of the symposium was to overcome resistance to change and “make education great” again in NSW through cultural change in all education sectors. Ironically this call for seems to forget that equilibrium is systemically built in to education and appears to be immune to change. Take the HSC for instance – in my “if I were Minister” moments this archaic rite of passage that models out of date learning and assessment is the first thing against the wall in my education revolution. But change in this area seems to mean adding a literacy qualification, not re imagining what the (currently) final two years of senior school could look like. “That’s too hard, there’s too much invested in the current set up, it serves its purpose” would be their argument – interestingly these are the excuses The Minister used to encourage an assault on the resistance to change from some teachers.
Another facet of the symposium were the aspirationally cliched messages that were being tweeted out. I know not being there makes context for these difficult to convey, but I have to say it sounded like just another weekly educational chat that clogs Twitter with feel good back slapping. The rubber hits the road when the participants at #nswedu16 start producing the change that The Minister urges them over the top to achieve. I wasn’t at the symposium, so how will we know when the change reaches me? In fact some the calls for action were initiatives or directions that I’d heard of years ago, but failed to materialise. Most infuriatingly, one person’s identification of an aspirational target (cross sector sharing and professional learning) was the focus of an innovative project that I spent some time on, developing that very focus,costing a considerable amount of money, that was eventually shut down because ironically there was a lack of cross sectoral support for its purpose and thus existence.

 

What we need is real action that produces change. That won’t happen until our drivers are fixed and the final patch is applied.  I’m not giving up, but this game is unplayable in its current state.

 

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Uplink – Mystery Bag Challenge

Posted on by Posted in Physical education .

Today I gave two students in my Year 10 Physical Activity and Sport Studies elective class the Mystery Bag Challenge.
In the bag was a collection of balls (soft throwing balls, aero tennis balls, and AFL ball and a Handball), 2 hoops, some marker domes, 2 tennis racquets and some bibs.
While another two students warmed the class up, the Mystery Baggers had 10 – 15 minutes to come up with a game.
They created “Uplink”, and I’ll try to explain the rules as they eventually ended up.

Uplink

Uplink

Uplink
Set up
2 teams on a basketball sized court.
The hoops were hung from the basketball rings to create a vertical target.
2 soft throwing balls were chosen as game balls (see image)

Uplink balls

Uplink balls

Rules
The win condition – the first team to get the ball through the defending team’s hoop.
To start the game, both teams line up against the wall at the end of their defensive end of the court.
The two balls are placed on half way.
On a whistle, the teams send players running to the centre to gain possession of a ball (or both balls if you’re lucky enough)
Players can then roam where ever they want on the court, unimpeded. If you have possession of the ball, and you get tagged in the attacking half of the court. you lose possession of the ball and you get sent back to your defensive half as a reset consequence.
Players can pass as much as they want, wherever they want. They must not get tagged in possession in the attacking half.
To score the ball must be thrown through the hoop, and not touch the backboard
Variation: Instead of having the hoops placed in position before the game starts, the game starts with teams having to get their own hoops in position before they can start scoring. This can be made more difficult by including some penalty constraint – time limit, height limit of the hoop deliverer, etc.
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Like “Capture the flag” , players soon realise there are strategies to consider in both offence and defence. The game becomes a swirling, mass movement affair.
We trialled rules, and then stopped to evaluate them, and then made improvements, at least 3 times in the first 20 minutes. Once the final iteration was settled upon, the game then ran without interruption for 20 minutes.

All this from 15 minutes planning, with a bag of gear they’d never seen before. Never doubt your students ability to create, refine and improve their own games. I never cease to be amazed at their inventiveness.

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Cavete ergo discipulus – let the Professional learner beware

Posted on by Posted in Pedagogy, Physical education, Popular culture .

I have been watching PE Twitter recently with the jaundiced eye of a seven year user. (I don’t want this to become a “back in the day” rant, so I promise to watch my step). I still find enough joy in my stream to keep me hanging around, but I’ve noticed something happening that disturbs me. And it’s growing. To frame the issue, consider these questions.

How do you know what makes legitimate and sound Physical Education professional learning, based on referrals from Twitter? Where is the filter that screens out the dross and lets the quality through? Do we have a responsibility to rate and review social media promoted professional learning so that others may benefit from our successes or failures?

We are so often reminded by some that evidenced based practice is the holy grail for which we search in improving our practice, but how much of the professional learning and practice we see spruiked on social media (in particular Twitter)  would stand the test of being evidence based, or valid, or reliable? I see Physical Education tweets selling Youtube channels starring  “elites” of practice, with no credentials offered that they are. What are “elites of practice” anyway? And who decided that they were elite? The same goes for websites, chats and “masterclasses” hosted by and starring “legends”, “doyens”  and “experts”.

I’ll use a favourite pop culture reference that supplies me with teaching ideas – MasterChef Australia – to complement this view, and to also offer a potential solution.

When people cook on MasterChef Australia, they are judged and reviewed by a panel of experts in the field. These experts have runs on the board – they run successful restaurants or have worked in the the field of critique for many years and have a industry reputation.

via http://goo.gl/N6VW1U

When they review contestants, I contend that their evaluation and feedback is based on accepted practice, their expert assessment of quality and how well the contestant’s work met the brief that they gave at the beginning of the challenge. Objectives, expected outcomes, best practice, quality feedback. If you asked them to write a rule book for MasterChef Australia, I’m sure that would be the framework. Along with a bit of emotion wrangling for the cameras. Everyone that buys into the MasterChef Australia experience (competitors and viewers) accept that this is the way it is. It wouldn’t work without it. Although it can be seen to be subjective, the experts and their experience and reputation are the bedrock of the concept.

Not so on PE Twitter. I don’t see the review, judgement and feedback on what people put forward as quality professional learning, just because they say it is. Andy Vasily observed this too in a recent conversation we had 

So, what’s the solution? I have toyed with a Physical Education membership website that allows the community to review, judge and give feedback on professional learning that they have experienced. I thought about designing it so it included members ratings, comments and recommendations Like anything that runs like a popular vote, it could be subject to distortion. I also had a brainsplosion about an international review team of Physical Education experts that could be charged with official endorsement of professional learning. But who would want to do that? And how would we assemble this Justice League of PE?

via http://goo.gl/42Q4FM

So I guess that puts it back on all of us to be responsible online professional learning consumers to call out the charlatans, the self aggrandisers and reward the quality evidence based practitioners and researchers that will ultimate improve our practice, not cheapen it. What do you think?

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