The PE Playbook – August 2016 Edition

Welcome to the August 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.

Darren Wensor is an athletics coach and coach educator from Sydney in Australia and blogs at Coaching Young Athletes. He tends to be my go to guy for ideas about teaching athletics as his posts on 10 of the Biggest Mistakes Young Athletes Make When Throwing a Javelin, 10 of the Biggest Mistakes Young Athletes Make in the Hurdles and 3 Common Athletics Myths You Should Know demonstrate his wealth of knowledge on the subject. Just a shame that the athletics season has ended now. However he also shares his thoughts on youth sport in general. How to Get Buy-in From Young Athletes By Giving Them a Voice is an excellent practical post about how as a youth coach you can seek out our athletes thoughts and ideas and how to incorporate them into our coaching. How many of us are actually willing to seek this information out and listen? He then proceeds to give good advice to adults involved in supporting their child in sport with How to Be an Awesome Sports Parent. Darren is continually looking to develop further as a coach and he shares thoughts on his read. This month his Recommended Reading For Coaches: was “Legacy” By James Kerr An excellent book and one that I encourage all teachers and coaches to read and Darren’s blog to follow.

What does it mean for pedagogy to think like a game developer? by Shane Pill distills the research on how game development could shape pedagogy when teaching sports
Do Learning Objectives Restrict Learning? is a provocative post by Kevin Peake that explores the importance of learning objectives within PE
Dear Potential Recruit, Your Talent Only Gets You So Far from Changing the Game Project looks at the character traits in sport needed to go support the development of talent
Can we teach talent? by Christian Fallick looks at the work by Dan Coyle in the Talent Code and tries to apply it in a PE Context
Essential Agreements in PE – Starting the Year with the Right Mindset is the first post by James Dowling where he shares how he sets the right culture with his PE classes at the beginning of the year.
Why I Don’t Like Fitness Testing in School PE is where Justen O’Connor shares some recent research with regards to fitness testing within PE and asks us to carefully justify it’s place within our curriculum
Virtual Reality in PE is an excellent thinking piece by Mike Prior on the possible future VR might have in PE in the future, especially in academic PE
The Future of Academy Coaching by the guys from the Player Development Project offer some blue sky thinking on youth development from Elite Football clubs that may be pertinent for school sport.
We need to coach players to play according to how a game emerges is another excellent piece from Mark O’Sullivan which advocates that practice tasks should be deliberately designed to be flexible and representative of the performance environment.
Clubs in the bag: Attaining an optimal grip on the opportunities in the game is a deep and thoughtful piece by Benny Franks on how coaches might be able to better enhance their players understanding of contexts they play in.