Well, this year, for the first time in a long time, I’d never taught any of the students in three of my five classes. Two were year 9 and one was a year 7 class. For year 7, that’s par for the course, but for the two Year 9 classes, their only knowledge or experience of me as a teacher will predominantly have come from others – either siblings or friends – evidenced by comments such as ‘don’t you give lots of detentions for such and such’, ‘I heard you give lots of homework, is that true’. So my first class had greater significance than ever before. Rather than set out my class rules/expectations, our first lessons were focused on students developing/setting the expectations, giving them some ownership over the culture we are to develop int he classroom.

Our first activity was to work in small groups and discuss what they thought were reasonable expectations for each of them in this class. This was followed by a class discussion and developing a set of expectations for behaviour and work ethic that would set the standard for the year.

Here’s what they came up with:

Student Expectations

• Do your best. Work to the best of  your ability at all times.
• Listen when someone else is talking
• Treat your classmates with respect (this probably covers number 2 anyway)
• Submit or complete work on time
• Ask Questions when you don’t understand something
• Come to class with everything you need

The only thing I had to add was:

• Try new things and expect to make mistakes.

I thought this last one was important to add to get the students thinking about the role of mistakes in learning and because I want to try and foster an atmosphere  where they aren’t afraid to make mistakes. Hopefully, this will help them take more risks in their learning and experiment more with their projects and tasks.

The second part of the lesson was to determine what were realistic expectations of the teacher. Again, students had time to brainstorm their thoughts and then report back to the whole class. This is where the activity got interesting and required some light hearted negotiation. Students’ suggestions included ‘Give no homework’, ‘Don’t give detentions’. The most interesting and provocative though was “You need toteachus”. My response was “I can’t guarantete you that I’ll teach you as much as you want” This really got them going. “You have to teach us, that’s your job”, “that’s what our parents pay fees for” (we are a private school). I countered that my job isn’t to teach them, but to help them learn. Well, this seemed to spin a few heads as their were lots of confused looks in the room. It’s the first time that I’ve ever had that discussion with junior years and proved that it is a really worthwhile task to do with your class. Let them set the expectations and negotiate with them how the classroom will work to provide a positive learning environment.

Here is the final teacher expectations:

• Have realistic work load expectations and time frames.
• Treat students with respect
• Encourage students in what they do
• Give meaningful feedback on your work (this was my addition)
• Listen to students’ ideas

So, a few final thoughts, who sets the expectations in your classroom? Do students have a voice in their learning environment? Will you be teaching the students, or helping them to learn.

Our year 9′s start with a unit of badminton. In the past, we’ve spent a lot of time playing games and practicing specific skills but little time on strategy. We don’t have specific courts marked out for badminton, so make do we what we can create in the space available. I have managed to string together 6 courts which means the class is active the whole time.

Before starting this year, I did a quick search for some resources online and found a fantastic wiki with TFfU resources for a wide range of sports. I found the Badminton resources particularly helpful in getting my class started.

In the first lesson, the students experiemented with different types of shots. After a quick warm up with one ‘bird’ between two students, they then had to rally just with underarm shots and then with just over arm shots. Because asking questions plays a big role in developing understanding, I asked questions like, ‘what was easy about playing an underarm shot at the front of the court?’, ‘What was difficult using one at the back of the court?’, ‘What was the flight path of the bird when hit underarm?’ and ‘What impact will that have on a rally?’. I asked similar questions for overhead shots in order to get them observing the flight of the shot and to work out how and when they could use each shot in a game.

Today we had the second lesson and it was based on progressions found on the TGfU wiki for Badminton.  Our first activity, used one tennis ball between 2 players across the net. The idea was to move the opposing player around the court trying to get the ball to bounce in open space to win a point. The video below gives a good idea of what the students had to do.

Activity 1 – Tennis Ball

This game provided a great basis for asking the following questions (taken and adapted from the TGfU wiki mentioned earlier).

1. Why is it easier to catch some throws than others?

2. What strategies did you use to try and make it difficult for your opponent to catch the ball.

Activity 2 – Singles with a racquet and bird

We progressed from this game to using a racquet and bird and asked the following questions:

1. When was it easiest to hit the bird? Why?

2. What was the most difficult shot to return? Why?

3. How and when can this shot be used effectively in a game?

Activity 3 – Doubles

The third activity was to play a doubles game, using any type of shot to try and get the bird to hit the ground. It was really good to see the students starting to think about he type of shot they would play and already working out strategies to create space on the court.

At the end of this activity, these are the questions I used:

1. What was the main difference between playing singles and doubles? Answers included a lack of space in doubles, harder to hit it away from opposition players etc.

2. What were the challenges of playing doubles? Answers included, getting in each others way, working out a common strategy or knowing what the other player was trying to do.

3. What different strategies did you use on the court to manage the space? Most teams said one player at the front and one at the back but a couple set up side by side.

4. For each of the two strategies we then explored how you could create space to attack – Question: How can you create space when players are side by side/one forward, one back?

We also discussed the types of shots players could use if they were forced out of position by the opposition and they were able to identify using defensive lobs or hitting the ball long and high to give you time to get back in position.

All of this was achieved in a 45 minute lesson. It was great to see the players starting to think and then putting the strategies they were developing into action. Make sure you check out the TGfU wiki http://tgfu.wetpaint.com/ . They have many great ideas that you can use in heaps of different sports.

Every now and again something on Twitter catches my eye and gets me thinking. A year or two ago, someone shared a link to an article about Teaching Games for Understanding (TFGU) that got me exploring it more and more in my own Physical Education classes. Just recently I found this video about using Teaching Games for Understanding for teaching striking games.  As we are doing striking games with year 8 at the moment (with a focus on Softball and Cricket), I thought I could apply this really well to teaching Cricket and some of the strategies and decision making that takes place. This morning I tried it, and I’m very pleased to say it worked really well and we’ll do it again next week with a added modifications.

Because this video is focused on students who are a little younger, I used a similar set up but changed the rules to be more specific to cricket. I used ropes to set out the four playing fields and had sets of stumps in each one. I used the markers at the end of the ropes for the batters to run around to score runs and, instead of a hula hoop, used a marker to show the bowler where to bowl from.

With 6-8 students in each game it provides greater involvement in the game meaning students practice their skills more which is also a benefit, however the biggest benefit is the way the smaller games, with limitations added allowed for students to think about strategy/tactics and how to use their skills to be successful in the game. It also allowed me to group students together who were of similar skill levels which can be difficult in larger groups.

I used the following rules:

• Bowlers had to attempt to bowl with a straight arm, but after a few goes could revert to underarm if they wanted to (many didn’t take this choice which surprised me in a co-ed class)
• Players had to hit the ball so that it stayed in their quadrant. Balls hit outside their quadrant on the full were out.
• Players could score fours using the normal geographical boundaries of the field.
• Players had to rotate fielding positions as batters and bowlers changed so they learned the different skills/decision making issues at each spot.

The first time everyone batted, we played hit and run to keep everyone moving through quickly. However, the second time through, the players could choose to run when they felt like it. They had to make decisions on whether they’d hit it far enough to make it around the marker and back, how far it was from a fielder etc. This decision making was much more easily introduced in this form than ‘normal’ cricket because they had a smaller playing field to work in.

Other observations of the lesson today (and in comparison to other cricket lessons):

• More students were actively engaged than usual.
• When fielding, players had to think about where to stand to cut off runs or to give themselves the best chance of getting a player out if they wanted to get a bat themselves
• Batters were actually choosing which balls to hit to avoid hitting it out of their quadrant
• Bowlers who were able were trying to bowl in areas that would entice batters to hit it out of the quadrant or to where their fielders were.
• Students were asking and answering their own questions about how to get players out, or how to succeed.

I encourage you to have a crack at using something similar.

What we see in Masterchef is home cooks who aren’t trained chefs given a task or challenge to complete but with very little instruction on how to complete the task. They have to create a meal or dish to serve in the specified time frame. Its not totally free play, they are given guidelines for what they can create and often a restricted number of pantry items to cook with but choice as to what they will use and create with them. Classic project based learning tasks.

The contestants demonstrate problem solving skills in deciding what to cook and how to overcome the limits they have to work in. At the end of each episode they present their dish to the judges for feedback on it success (or otherwise). This feedback isn’t only from the head judges, often its front the people they cook for in challenges and gives them a timely insight into what worked and what didn’t, or what tasted good and what didn’t. But the judges don’t just wait until the finished product, they move from bench to bench using their professional experience to guide their ‘students’ when they feel they maybe goin off track.

When they aren’t cooking we are often shown pictures of them reading books to learn new techniques, favours that work well together and about cooking food from other cultures – self directed learning.

This to me, is a great model for classroom learning. Create tasks that will incorporate problem solving, self directed learing, something to create tasks (that hopefully is meaningful), that they can present for feedback – not just for marks but for what they know, have learned or the usefulness of what they’ve created and that allows them to improve what they are doing before they’ve gone too far the wring direction. Scaffold the tasks to in a way to give direction but not to stifle creativity or independent thinking, and that allows students to work to a level they are capable of achieving.

The final piece that I haven’t mentioned is the Friday night ‘master class’. An opportunity for the professionals to demonstrate some techniques or dishes to their pupils. To share with them something they know more about than the students. And, more importantly they bring in other experts to their kitchen to teach the things they don’t know as well as they do.

This is one area that we teachers can really learn from. We shouldn’t be afraid to call on others who know more than we do to teach something. And that digest have to be from outside our school, we could use an IT teacher to demonstrate skills, an art teacher to teach design or even someone from our own faculty will have different expertise in different areas to me. To be honest there are probably students who could give masterclasses on many things to. Off the top of my head, in my year 10 class I currently have students who could give master classes on web design, photoshop.

The challenge now is to learn how to devplop the tasks, how to scaffold, write rubrics, as well as re-educate myself, other staff and most importantly the students on how to work in this environment. Easy right?

So, what will I need and how will it work?

Obviously, you need an Xbox 360, but you’ll also need a steering wheel with foot pedals (like the one above). Without this, the activity won’t really work. These are a little hard come by at the moment (I have been lucky enough to dig up 2 older ones from friends), however, word on the street is that later in the year Forza 4 (a racing game) will be released with a new steering wheel included, which will be a great bundle to get (now to find the funds!!). You’ll also need to choose a car game – and unless you want a lot of negative parental feedback – make sure you get one that doesn’t have violence or the like in it. I chose to use Project Gotham Racing 4 which is a straight up car racing game.

A lot of people who’ve played racing car games might straight away be thinking that racing car games are all about speed and that’s correct, but for this unit we’ll be using a few restrictions on our the way we play. So, how will it work?

Step 1: Choose a driver. Let them drive two laps of a race track and time how long it takes. Choose a track that isn’t too easy, but at the same time, don’t choose a really hard one because most people in your class probably won’t be too experienced at driving. While they are driving, have one student time them, one to count the number of times they break the speed limit (which I set at 80 m/hr) and a third student who will count the number of crashes they have.

Step 2: Using the same driver, drive another 2 laps of the same course and have the same people gathering the same statistics. The difference this time, is that the driver has to send 1 text/SMS message from their mobile phone per lap.

Step 3: Using the same driver, follow the same procedure as the first two steps. This time, you might like to add different variables such as having passengers sitting “in” their car with them who will provide distraction and/or you could add a stereo and require them to change radio stations/or songs on each lap (if you use speakers you could have them change tracks on their ipods while driving).

When I trialled this, it was clear to everyone that during step 2 and 3, there were more crashes and also a lower speed as they were trying hard to be safe while distracted.

This opens up loads of opportunities for discussion with students over the next few lessons. What I think would be particularly useful, would be to gather statistics in a google form similar to this one HERE. This would allow you to gather all the statistics together from your class and then graph it and analyse it. You could even compare it to statistics gathered by the Road and Traffic Authority.

One of the barriers to overcome, depending on your school’s policy, will be the use of a mobile phone to send SMS/text message and how you will check they sent it. I’m hoping that I can use a school number, otherwise I might just have to get them to type a message into a note on an ipod touch and check it at the end.

Another barrier may be that you will only have one person driving at a time. Thankfully, I had access to 2 steering wheels which made it easier, but with 2 laps per step and 2-3 minutes per lap, it will take a bit of time. Having two consoles makes that a lot easier, but you could also do step 1 over a few lessons leading in. That may help to connect the students with the topic before introducing the other factors.

Anyway, for around $600-700 you could have a really good tool for teaching Road Safety. And while that seems a little expensive, it actually does provide a very realistic view at the dangers of driving while distracted. I think a lot of parents would be happy with a program that keeps their children safer on the roads. I know I would.

There were a few raised eyebrows when I announced that I’d put the students into groups but they seem to be working ok, I’m not sure that’s the problem. Maybe I needed to give more scaffolding of the steps students needed to complete each lesson, although I thought it was pretty clear. Maybe they need greater direction on what information to include but I don’t really want them to be spoon fed from me. Is it ok to still lecture the students and walk them through what they need to know if the idea is for them to choose their pathway through the task?

We’ve been using Edmodo for the delivery of information and for the students to share with me what they’ve learned each lesson. At the start of each lesson, I’ve allowed 5 minutes or so for students to review what they learned the previous lesson and to plan what they need to do this lesson. We finish each lesson with an opportunity to organise what they’ve been doing, share it with their group and reflect on what they’ve learned and what they still need to do. This part has been the most disappointing. So far only 2/3 of my class have uploaded what they’ve done to edmodo as a record of what they’ve done. Of those 2/3 only two or three have done it in each of the 4 lessons we’ve had so far and almost all of them have been so brief it’s difficult to know exactly what they’ve done and what they actually know.

I’m hoping that once they get through this research phase and onto planning how to present what they know about healthy living and what they can do to help young people live a healthy lifestyle, student engagement and enthusiasm will take off.

I keep wondering, is it normal that a first project task goes like this? Do the students normally enjoy working like this? What could I change to engage them better? to get them reflecting on/recording what they’ve learned more accurately? Have I structured the lessons clearly enough? Hopefully it’s just as the students get used to working working collaboratively and taking responsibility for finding what they need to that this will struggle.

On the positive side, a number of students have taken the step of using edmodo to share information and resources they have found with the whole group and not just their small group. I like to see students who don’t view their learning as a competition but rather a chance for everyone to understand what they are doing.

What are your experiences? Am I being realistic expecting it to be all roses from the very first go? What should I change? I’d love to hear your ideas and feedback.

I put a call out to a few of my twitter PLN for a driving question for my project. @BenPaddleJones came up with “How will you ensure you never end up on the biggest loser”. Considering the Australian series has just finished, it struck a chord. The number one issue of faced is time – it’s been hectic to get this thing of the ground because from the time I started planning it, to when I intended to teach it was only 24hrs!! Ridiculous. Anyway, after a quick chat with Bianca only 2 hrs before kick off, I managed to buy myself 48hrs – which brings me to now. What a whirlwind that conversation was! She explained how the hook lesson will work, how to do circle time, how to set up my groups and started me thinking about the possibility of using a narrative and that I could ‘gamify’ my unit. Wow, so much to do but it certainly got me excited at the possibilities starting to build for this unit. (I think I may have frightened my faculty a little with my enthusiasm!)

I went with a narrative that channel 10, in conjuction with the ‘biggest loser club’ is after a team of health experts to create a plan for educating school aged children on healthy living. Students will be put into groups to create a research investigation of the syllabus information, create a presentation and will finally present their plan to a panel of experts (their classmates, PE teachers and hopefully a personal trainer or health professional). They’ll gain XP for completing tasks and will have the opportunity to unlock extra hidden achievements throughout the unit (time permitting)

Tomorrow is ‘D’ day for delivery and explaining it to the class. BUT, there’s still time to improve. I’d love you to have a look at what I’ve come up with so far and leave me some feedback on ideas that I might be able to implement. You can check out the document below.

I must finish by giving credit to The Molistic View’s willingness to share his experiences and his project through his blog. It’s given me plenty of ideas as well as an idea of what to expect. Thanks.

In the start The students thought some of what we were doing was interesting but they found some of it to be ‘too hard’. Through a number of conversations with the students it was communicated that they’d just prefer to have me give them the information – effectively, to stand out the front of the class and lecture. It wasn’t the type of feedback I was hoping for after planing activities that I thought to be engaging, interesting and helpful in developing good learners.

While discouraged, I wanted to make sure I kept on with my plans but I made some modifications and being very careful in what things I chose to do. I’ve continued with that for the past 12 months and the students have come to accept the method allowing me to ‘push’ a little further.

Last night, we had parent-teacher night with the parents (and some students) from that class. It was very encouraging to hear one of the more vocal opponents of technology admit that he can now see the the worth in what we are doing with technology and that he’s finding it helpful. It was quite unexpected, but welcomed.

It’s given me the encouragement to keep pushing ahead with trying to be innovative in my teaching – not just with technology. It might take some time but the changes will be worthwhile.

However, I recently stumbled upon Mindmeister, which is an online, collaborative mind mapping tool and thought that it had great potential for use with my senior classes. It gives the students the opportunity to create mind maps that they can share and collaborate on in real time and, when complete it can be downloaded in a number of formats including PDF to print and put in their study notes. There’s also an iPhone App that means those of my students with an iphone can take their revision notes with them! (I must check if there is an android app too!)

Knowing that many of my Year 12 students use mindmaps to organise their information for revision I thought I’d give it a crack. Initially, when I told them about it a number of them were hesitant and I heard things like “I use mindmaps but I much prefer writing them by hand – that’s how I learn”, and “having more than one person working on something at the same time makes things too confusing”. I cast those comments aside and went ahead. To make it easier I created enough mindmaps on my account to have 2-3 people working on each one, and invited them to collaborate on it. The advantage of this, is that I also have access to what they create so that I can easily check what they’ve done.

I’m really pleased by how the lesson went. The first 5 minutes the students spent talking among themselves working out how to using mindmeister and once someone worked something out, they showed the others so that before long they were all working on their mindmaps. They also overcame the problems of becoming confused by delegating parts of the mindmap for each other to work in, and what sections of the information to work with. Well within the time I’d allocated the students had completed the first stages of the mind maps (I plan to work on adding working examples to each of the sections in the next few lessons).

I’d recommend if you are going to use it, that creating the mindmaps yourself and sharing them with the students works well. Not only does it allow you access to their work but allows you control over who will work together in groups so that the groups can be balanced.

There does seem to be some limitations to Mindmeister that may limit it’s use – ie with the free, basic membership you can only have 3 mindmaps on the go but it does seem that you can get an educational license quite cheaply for 12 months if you are going to use it regularly. However, these limitations aren’t so significant that you wouldn’t use it. Also, for every 10 people you get to sign up you get 3 months premium free! So, if you create the mindmaps for your class you get the free bonus!!

The advantages as I see it are the collaborative nature of the tool, the ease of use for the students and the fact that it can be downloaded in a variety of formats (and even ebbeded after publishing) to add to their physical study notes or to share with others. On top of that, the class were engaged and worked solidly for the whole lesson hardly stopping to take a breath. That’s never a bad thing.

My first experiences of mindmeister will certainly have me coming back for seconds and I encourage you to have a go too.

I’ve had a handful of Heart Rate (HR) monitors sitting in my PE storeroom cupboard for a number of years now but they’ve only come out a handful of times. These are the most basic of Polar HR monitors that allow you to measure HR, set target HR zones and nothing much else. I’ve only really ever used them until now for measuring the effects of exercise intensity on HR once or twice a year.

However, today I pulled them out with my elective Physical Activity and Sport Studies class as we’d been talking about the National Physical Activity Guidelines (NPAGs) and thought it would be a good way of assessing whether different sports achieve moderate intensity. We’d put figures on what a moderate HR would be and the students were to check HR’s regularly and at the end of a 10 minute period we would discuss whether the physical activity would achieve the NPAGs.

What I realised straight away, was that the HR monitors actually engaged students in a different way. They were keen to see how hard they were working, what running harder would do to their HR . Clearly, what I’ve learned is that using simple technology like this can have a huge impact on getting students interested in what’s happening to their body while they exercise. Unfortunately, these HR monitors don’t allow me to download the data or give average HR for the duration which I think would be really valuable for student learning and understanding. It would also be great to download data to combine with GPS feedback – but more of that later.

For now it’s off to find a few more HR monitors that offer more feedback for the students …