8/2: Reflection - 12 PE Progress

12 PE Progress

8th February 2017

This year is my first time teaching Level 2 Physical Education and I was excited to see a lot of familiar faces from Core PE last year. Going along to my first lesson I thought that this class would be the easiest to form relationships with, having taught most of them before. Although I have a good relationship with most of the students in the class I noticed in my first lesson that they were rather awkward with each other.

Our first lesson was only 20 minutes long due to a '6 period morning'. I decided to use this time to learn more about my students and for them to learn more about each other. I decided to start off with an activity called Connections that I learnt on a PD course last year. This activity starts with someone sharing information about themselves. They choose what they are willing to share. While sharing they aim to make a connection with someone else in the room. When a connection is made that person says "I can connect with that". They then explain the connection, introduce themselves and share something new about themselves.

I have used this connection activity a few times with different classes and it has always worked really well, but this time it was just plain awkward.  No matter what question I asked the 12 PE class, in or out of the connections activity they were very reluctant to share in front of each other. The time they seemed most comfortable was when they were talking in their small friend groups.

Since that lesson we have spent 4 lessons completing a variety of ABL activities. The purpose of these activities were aiming to loosen them up and get them communicating with each other. Pictures and examples of those ABL activities are below:

Leap Frog 

Hidden Pathway

River Crossing

The way they were awkward in class, with the boys and girls keeping to themselves, I was worried about our first assessment of the year, 2.4 (Ki-O-Rahi). Even throughout the first couple of lessons of ABL activities the girls would work with each other and so would the boys. I trying to help them grow their confidence levels and start working together in a range of contexts.

By the end of our 4th lesson I was really proud with the progress the class had made. They were more open to communicating with each other and were working together better as a class. Even the segregation between the boys and girls was slowly disappearing. Fingers crossed that this improvement continues and the class keeps blossoming!