Learning Domains – Referenced

My blog series on Learning Domains (4 Learning Domains in PE, Refined and Hierarchy)  are easily my most read posts. They also generate the most emails, especially from trainee teachers. Most of the time they are asking whether they can reference it in their essays but there are much better references. In 2010 I was …

Hierarchy of Learning Domains

In my last post I looked at the four domains of learning within PE and asked if they were both necessary and sufficient to achieve one of PE's ultimate aims, that of empowering lifelong physical activity. Mel Hamada asked via a comment on the post "Great points raised - would you say these four are …

4 domains of learning in Physical Education – Refined

  18 months on from my initial post about the different domains of learning in PE and my thinking on them has been refined. I am aware that once you accept a 'theory' and then use it to make decisions it becomes difficult to find fault and challenge it. It can lead to 'theory blindness', …

Assessment without levels – update

In August last year I wrote about the proposed assessment without levels model that we were going to try within the department. This post is an update. The scoring system in the original post was dropped pretty much immediately as it was felt it was a replication of levels which we wanted to try and …

The physical and beyond.

What are the educational outcomes of PE? Is it solely about the physical, or should we have a wider set of learning outcomes for our subject? When I asked other PE teachers to describe their best student there was a range of answers, however the physical outcomes were distinctly missing and this made me worry that …

4 domains of learning in Physical Education

During one of my recent departmental PE meetings, we may have moved away from the set agenda. Instead we engaged in an enjoyable but heated discussion about the 'best' students we had in Physical Education. So a few weeks ago I asked the #physed community the same question: To be fair it was a vague and subjective …

Increasing the Physical in PE

Physical Education is in its nature a practical subject. Whilst I have a deep rooted belief that we need to impart knowledge about our subject to students, we need to do it in the most practical way possible. We need to give our students as much time to run, jump, throw, catch, kick, and hit …

The practical value of time in PE

There were two moment in the last week that have upset me. Firstly I received back the results of a YST PE and School Sport survey I had filled in. 1946 primary and secondary schools had completed it, and the document compared my school results to the County and National averages. The results in the …

The Health and Wellbeing of a (PE) Teacher

At the end of the last academic year I was standing on a precipice. I was overweight, was suffering from insomnia and was developing anxiety when going to work. I was one step away from ending my teaching career and handing in my resignation. Work had become an unhealthy obsession where every waking moment and even …

Progress in PE is never linear

As usual, my school being quite traditional, is waiting on what other schools are doing with KS 3 assessment. Therefore we are continuing our misguided practice of levels with sub levels. A number of HODs, including myself, have been saying this is the chance to design something that is specific to the children we have …