Welcome to the April 2017 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.
Tim Buszard and James Rudd are both academics in PE and Sport, with a focus on Skill Acquisition. They have jointly set up a website called Skill Acquisition Research which is dedicated to reporting the latest in skill acquisition research. A downside of being in a very close knit PE department is that we can sometimes fall into the trap of group think. Things are good because we all thinking it, we all think it there for it is all good. What Tim and James offer on this website is some bitesize information about skill acquisition research and a thread to go explore. I’ve shared Which way should I hold the bat? Challenging convention in cricket and Teach the textbook technique or encourage multiple solutions? before the start of this terms cricket season and it has generated interesting discussions about the way we approach our delivery in cricket. Be Careful What You Instruct: Working Memory Capacity & Decision Making and Contextual interference in hockey: Support for game-play offer a challenge and potential advice if wanting to make a move away from the traditional sport as sports technique that seem to dominate a PE curriculum. I hope to see this website updated regularly as It can help us to base more of our practice on evidence and to be used as a starting point of debate and critique within our departments.
- The Ecological Approach, Explained to an 8 Year Old by Andrew Wilson attempts to explain the ecological approach for and eight year old (and layman’s like myself!)
- Making Sense of Physical Literacy by Nathan Horne is a comprehensive reflection on his thinking about Physical Literacy and how it guides what he does as a PE Teacher.
- What the Health? is an open letter from Doug Gleddie providing five reasons to re-imagine the value and purpose of health and physical education in schools.
- Confusion – it’s such a terrible shame by Shane Pill asks whether we are so caught up in defining PL we aren’t having the more powerful conversations of content and delivery.
- Don’t let targets, adult pressures and expectations remove the most important element of PE and sport from the experiences of our students from Laura Davies questions our obsession with outcomes and grades and do we miss the real meaning of Physical Education and School Sport.
- Long time listener, first time caller from Liam McGowan, a primary school PE teacher, shares the evolution of the PE curriculum at his school. Looking forward to future instalments.
- When are we having a game? by Jack Walton offers advice on the use of games in coaching youth sports.
- Three Tools for Highly Productive Practice is a collection of ideas from Dan Coyle on how to better run your sessions as a youth sports coach.
- A passionate plea for evidence-based coaching and the appliance of science is Richard Bailey‘s call to critical thinking in PE and Sports.
- Sport Systems – fragments of thought #1, Sport Systems – fragments of thought #2, Sport Systems – fragments of thought #3 and Sport Systems – fragments of thought #4 is a series of blogs from Mark Upton which explores intent, action and behaviour in sports systems and asks whether the attractors/boundaries mean we don’t always act in the best interest of the child or the athlete.
- Health & Physical Education: The Five Propositions
- 5 Star Physed
- A multi axis approach to PE
- Dr Stephen Harvey’s Shape Convention resources
- We asked children why they don’t get enough exercise – here’s what they said
- Why Does Everything Have to Be SOOO Amazing For You?
- 2 of 9 Dimensions of Wellness
- 3 of 9 Dimensions of Wellness: Spiritual
- Physical Moments
- Student Friendly Yoga Booklet
- Move.Learn.Live Day 1
- Move. Learn. Live. Day 2
- Move.Learn.Live. Day 3 Storytelling
- Nowhere to Play – Hundreds of playgrounds set to close
- Does Student Autonomy Make a Difference?
- The Best Parts of My Week – 3/27/17–3/31/17
- Conditioned (Net) Games for PE P3
- 8 Group Games Using SCOOPS in PE
- Fitness Testing at the Elementary Level: Making the Case for Change
- The Best Parts of My Week – 4/3/17–4/7/17 (and a bit more!)
- Field Day
- KS3 Dance ideas for non-specialists.
- The Best Parts of My Week – 4/17/17–4/21/17
- Gamified Frisbee Station Activities
- Swimming Assessment Toolkit
- To stretch or not to stretch? That is the question.
- 4 principles for planning progression…
- It’s not what sport children play, but how they play it that matters
- The ebb and flow of teaching
- What is #PhysicalLiteracy: My Journey
- Purposeful Teaching – My Philosophy
- Unravelling ‘Locus of Focus’ – Where to Direct Athletes’ Attention When Training and Competing
- Moving primary physical education forward: start at the beginning
- Hand and Eye Dominance in Sport: Are Cricket Batters Taught to Bat Back-to-Front?
- Are secondary school environments conducive for active play opportunities? An objective assessment across Australian secondary school playgrounds
- Timing of the decline in physical activity in childhood and adolescence
- Justifying PE on Neuroscience evidence
- The 10 stuff-ups we all make when interpreting research
- Why Most Published Research Findings Are False
- The war on drills
- Episode #1 of the Way of Champions Podcast with 36x NCAA Champion Dr. Jerry Lynch
- Scrum Down Podcast with Russell Earnshaw
- Winning with parents
- David Epstein, The Sports Gene, and the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
- PE Shouldn’t Be Mandatory in Public Schools!
- The war on drills – ‘Peace Talks’
- Ellis Ball, Striking and Fielding Madness
- Begin With Why with Mel Hamada
- Talent Destruction
- Winning is a Limitation
- Is Your Child’s Youth Sports Experience Transactional or Transformational?
- The Why and How of Mentoring
- ‘Spiralling’ out of control? Getting a grip on your coaching curriculum
- A cognitive science reading list for coaches
- They Can Hit 400-Foot Homers, but Playing Catch? That’s Tricky
- How Freud and Heidegger helped the Oxford rugby team to victory
- The Danish way of creating champions
- When sticking to the Principle of making myself redundant as a coach did not work
- The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard a Swim Parent Give Their Kid
- Brian Ashton: A different kind of coach
- The Value of Debriefing a Good Performance
- Adults Back Off!
- It’s Time to End the Sideline Sportsanity
- The Talent That Whispers
- The Street
- Relearn Long Term Player Development – A conversation with Dave Clarke
- Helping players find best answers
- How to Run the Practices in Accordance with the Complex Systems Approach
- Practice Repetition Without Repetition
- Play is Serious, But Let’s Not Take Ourselves Too Seriously
- Our top 10 coaching sound bites
- Greatest Coach You Have Never Heard Of
- Should exercise be compulsory at work?
- From the NFL Combine to Irish rugby: Winkelman may be IRFU’s smartest hire
- Busting three myths around elite sports performance
- Make mental strength your strongest skill
- Science classes won’t future-proof our children. But dance might
- Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’
- How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
- The Real Spartacus: or What is Philosophy as a Way of Life?
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