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
