The PE Playbook – June 2016 Edition

Welcome to the June 2016 Edition of the PE Playbook. The PE Playbook is a review of blog posts over the past month that are specific to Physical Education or Youth Sport. Its about bringing these blog posts into a format that is easy to find, use and share. Hopefully this will result in more PE Teachers (and others) reading them and engaging with them. If you have any feedback about the presentation or content of the PE Playbook then please let me know in the comments section of this post or via @ImSporticus. Previous Editions of the PE Playbook can be found here.

Stuart Armstrong is the Head of Coaching at Sport England and the Players Pathway Manager for the RFU and regularly blogs at The Talent Equation . This month Stuart has been blogging about one of his favourite topics, that of encouraging creativity and skill acquisition through practice design. In The joy (and the power) of experimenting in the ‘gamified garden’ he explores how playing around with the constraints of a game can help the participants (in this case his son) discover functional solutions to the problems posed by the game. He follows this up with another post More surprises from the gamified garden where this time his daughter is the focus of his backyard game experiments on skill acquisition. Once again the constraints of the game help her to solve and refine her technique to solve the questions asked by the game. I highly recommend going through some of his early blog posts, especially The pressure of the Twix! – a tale of developing a growth mindset (his poor children) and also his interview with Rob Gray on the Action Perception Podcast on a whole host of issues such as talent development, talent ID, the problems with competition and also sports analytics.

8 Myths We Need to Stop Believing For Kids to Enjoy Youth Sports by Anne Josephson challenges some shibboleths of youth sport, competition and talent ID and development.

Modern Lives are Weird! by Dr Richard Bailey looks at the world in which we inhabit actually encourages sedentary lifestyles and what we have to do to challenge that.

A sense of wonder and discovery: in support of methodological pluralism by Keith Lyons asks us to be open minded about approaches and that one way might truly be better than another. Lets not shut down the conversation but keep the dialogue and debate open and honest.

Superhero by Lynn Burrows is about the professional learning of a teacher and whether there is an end point, or a constant quest for improvement?

The Simplicity and Complexity Paradox in Training and Coaching by Informed in Sport explores the yin of simplicity and the yang of complexity when coaching.

Life Lessons from my “Old School” Sports Dad by Changing the Game Project offers ten lessons he was taught by his father when involved in sport.

Are you spreading misinformation without realising it? by John Stoszkowski asks us whether we should better control the supply of information, especially through social media, rather than having to deal with it post-facto?

Finding Strength in our Weaknesses by Lee Anderson is a personal account of overcoming struggle and the willingness to accept imperfections and work to develop them.

Do we need a coaching re-think? by Nick Levett asks whether we have to coach the way it is always been done, or perhaps there might be a different way?

Waving the wafer by Bob Wood is a brilliant post about when ability meets adaptability then that is where the movement magic can happen.