22/7: PENZ Conference 2018

PD: PENZ Conference 2018

22nd July 2018

July 9th to 11th 2018 marked the 60th National PENZ conference; Together, Towards Tomorrow. Across the three days I was able to grow my professional network and continue professionally developing myself. Below are some of my highlights and takeaways from the conference.


Session 1: Together, Towards Tomorrow Keynote - Wayne Smith, Margot Bowes & James McIntyre
I found this a refreshing keynote to start the conference. The key theme of the keynote was the development of the theory behind skill acquisition. Wayne Smith discussed the theory, Margot Bowes discussed how it can be implemented (where King's College was used as an example) and James McIntyre focussed on a primary lens. Overall the keynote challenged the old school technique approach found that can still be found within Physical Education. Two of my key points from this keynote session can be summarised in my two tweets pictured below:

Session 2: Presenting Our Scholarship Journey - Mallory Bish, Rob Paterson & Alex Smith
The first round of breakout sessions involved the three of us presenting about our Scholarship Programme and our journey over the past three years. The aim of the session was to share what had been working for us in the hopes that others may be able to takeaway aspects to trial with their own students. We shared info about our school, the outline of our programme, exemplars of student work, example of the process a student goes through, student feedback, criticality within our PE programme from Y9-13 before moving onto the Dragon's Den. The link to our presentation can be found here.

Feedback from teachers after the session was overwhelmingly positive. Some of this feedback came through the form of a Facebook post and tweet from Carl Condliffe (NZ PE Teacher). The feedback received allowed us to believe that we had met the aims of our session.

Session 9: ‘A Good Akina Man’ - Hastings Boys' High
Hastings Boys' High identified a need to help develop and change the character and feelings students related to school and their high school experience. They used to have an identity unit for four weeks in health at the start of Y9. This idea was also sparked from seeing the success of Gisborne Boys' High. The HODs and SLT came together to create a list of values that they wanted to instill in their Y9 students to create a year long integrated underlying theme.

Term One's unit was about respect; what is respect, why do students respect certain people, how do they show respect etc. They then instilled respect for the school through the idea that they are now apart of the school and the school is now apart of them. Students looked into history of all the houses, school song, school haka, colours etc. This linked nicely to the Health & PE curriculum by connecting to what was their old Hauora unit that got students to learn about their own personal identity.

I really liked this idea of an integrated identity unit and building respect for the school and its culture and traditions, while also acknowledging the individuality of each student. We could easily incorporate this into our Y9 program, especially with the linking of PE & Health for 2019. Students could look at why they are attending King's and the history of King's to develop a sense of identity and belonging.


Session 13: How do you know what learning is happening in HPE? - Chris Hurston
In this session Chris shared how he was using technology and apps such as Plickers, Google Forms & Seesaw to build reflective practise in his juniors. This reflective practise came in forms of students recapping their learning from prior lessons, getting students to assess their level of understanding against rubrics for self assessment and peer assessment. Chris also shared the importance of having a visible programme for parents and students alike to check in and see outlines of term topics, discussion points, assessment tasks, showcase routines/videos, short video clips of lessons, reflections and next steps. He used the app Seesaw to share this information with parents and students. This was the part of the session that stood out the most to me as I have been focussing on visible learning for both my students and parents/guardians. I wonder whether we could try incorporating this app or could use Schoolbox more affectively?

The takeaway key question form this session was 'what are you doing in your practice to enhance reflective practice?' When reflecting on this question myself I know that I have been focussing on challenging my juniors to reflect on what we are learning, why and how these skills can be transferable. I have also been focussing on creating more self directed learners in my IGCSE class.



Overall I think this is a range of takeaways from this years annual conference. It will be interesting to take these key ideas forward, particularly with the development of our new connected Health & PE programme for 2019 and how we can ensure this learning is visible to both students and parents/guardians alike.