
Blogger of the Month
Jorge Rodriguez teaches primary school PE in Saudi Arabia and is the host of The Global PhysEd Voxcast, a podcast where he talks to educators from around the world and tries to learn from their unique experiences and perspective. Jorge consistently gets some great people on to interview about great topics such as Meaningful Experiences in PE with Tim Fletcher and Doug Gleddie, how to go about building relationship within the classroom with Aaron Bieghle and functional movement with Frank Forencich. Jorge is a great interview, asking insightful questions and allowing his guests the time to explain their answers with both depth and clarity. If you are a PE Teacher, you need to be listening to Jorge and The Global PhysEd Vocast.
Top 10 Articles of the Month
Discipline are some words of wisdom from Vern Gambetta about how developing self discipline can create freedom and a sense of agency whether you are an athlete, coach or PE Teacher.
Creating Meaningful Learning Experiences in Racket Sports is a detailed explanation about how Andy Vasily attended to the creation of meaningful experiences within a unit of work within primary school PE.
Game sense — more than just “common sense”? is by Andrew Bevan, reflecting on a recent podcast about the Game Sense approach and how it might apply to his domain of cricket coaching.
“We need a much deeper understanding of the nature of learning” is an insightful interview with Alex Beard and his thoughts about learning, which is carried on in a second article “Education is not solely about acquiring job skills”
Valuing the physical activity life is a blog post by Dr Ash Casey on Siedentop’s paper titled ‘Valuing the physically active life: contemporary and future directions and his‘take home’ messages that would shape our practice as PE Teachers
How America Killed Play and what we can bring it back is a Stack article on the decline of unstructured physical play in the US and what adults can do to try and promote it in the modern world.
Making Progress with PE and Young People is a reflective piece on assessment and charting progress within PE from Liam McGowan.
Maslow’s Island is a wonderful review of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how we always try to simplify something complex to the detriment of our understanding and implementation.
To speak or not to speak, Teaching in Physical Education (PE) is by Balbinder Singh which focuses the role of verbal instruction when designing learning activities.
Finally, but by no means least, the below video is by Stephanie Beni and is an advocation piece for meaningful experiences in PE by making her research accessible by presenting it as a children’s storybook!
General PE
- Origins of Physical Literacy
- 5 key findings from Sport England’s Active Lives Children research
- Exercise officially makes you happier than money, according to Yale and Oxford research
- Schools urged to use PE to tackle mental health ‘crisis’
- Online physical education classes spark outrage among Quebec gym teachers
- ‘Schools have forgotten about fun for fun’s sake’
- Kids surrounded by greenery may grow up to be happier adults
- On extreme instructivism and the social construction of evidence
- Philosophical Foundations of Physical Literacy
- Bildung – a student-focused approach to PE
Primary PE
- Using Learning Targets for Effective PE and Student Success
- REGARDING BOREDOM: Yesterday versus Today. We all need a “GO-TO.
- The Movement Composition, Dance Part 2
- Story-Telling as a Provocation
- How to Play: Think Ball
Secondary PE
- On Community, Cooperation, and Competition
- The Constraints-Led Approach…what is it, really?
- ‘A Rising Tide Lifts All Boats’
- Keep The Fire Burning
- Are PE Teachers the Most Important in your School?
- Play with Purpose: Deliberately
- Can you raise participation by offering students a choice of activity?
- Mental Health ≠ Mental Illness
Tech in PE
Research in PE
- Key differences between a happy life and a meaningful life
- How Can Physical Activity Be Promoted Among Children and Adolescents? A Systematic Review of Reviews Across Settings
- Pathways to Expert Performance in Soccer
- A constraint-led approach to sport and physical education pedagogy
- A Narrative Review of Children’s Movement Competence Research 1997-2017
- A Revised Definition of Games: An Analysis of Grasshopper Errors, Omissions, and Ambiguities
- Creating adaptive athletes: ASM for enhancing physical literacy as a foundation for expertise.
- The Power of Play
- Multidisciplinary Expert Views on Applying Explicit & Implicit Motor Learning in Practice
- Prospects for Improving the Educational Value of Physical Education
- Physical Education and Value Diversity
- Examining the Pathway to Motor Skill Competence in a Mastery Motivational Climate: An Appreciative Inquiry
- Looking beyond what’s broken: towards an appreciative research agenda for physical education and sport pedagogy
PE Podcasts and Videos
- Living & Breathing a PE Culture with Headteacher Chris Willan
- Game Sense with Shane Pill
- Demonstration & Imitation as Rate Enhancers in Skill Acquisition
- Meaningful PE with Tim Fletcher
- Learning to teach/coach with game-based pedagogies with Dr Adrian Turner
- The Happiness Hypothesis
- Developing Skill with Stuart Armstrong
- What are the benefits of mixed playing experiences?
- Top Tips for Delivering EYFS Physical Education
School and Youth Sport
- Developing Skill Part 2. Information, autonomy and playing in the ‘ugly zone’.
- That. Yes, that!
- Traits of Elite Coaches and High Performing Practitioners
- The Leader Who Listened
- The Phenomenon of Path Dependence in child-youth Sport
- What is engagement?
- Why Do We Think Physical Punishment is a Good Teaching Tool in Sports?
- What is the LTAD model and should you be using it?
- Why the ‘Big Kid’ often gets bad coaching in youth sport
- Why Youth Sports Coaches Should Not Focus On The Fixture
- Lessons from my worst coach Part 1
- How To Behave In Ways That Will Motivate Young Athletes
- Trying to get it right
Other Articles of Interest
- Hitting the Brakes
- SUMO: Shut Up and Move On
- Angela Duckworth recommends the best books on Character Development
- Against metrics: how measuring performance by numbers backfires
- A philosophical approach to routines can illuminate who we really are
- Research scholars to air problems with using grit at school
- Human contact is not a luxury good
- High school doesn’t have to be boring
- Five Lies Our Culture Tells
- The music of all time is a duet between order and disorder