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This blog is prompted by World Health Day 2022 which comes a day after Annual World Day of Physical Activity. Awareness days allow us an opportunity to reflect on key themes, in this case, Health; in this short piece I would like to explore its relationship with PE. We have also prepared a FREE resource, Top Tips for Supporting your Students’ Health, to help apply some of the points discussed into practice. Click here to receive it.
In 1969 Muska Mosston published his continuum of teaching styles. These equipped PE teachers with 11 distinct styles that supported different learning processes and outcomes. In March 2022, Ofsted published the Research Review into PE in which they clearly prioritise 1 of the 11 teaching styles; Style B, Practice Style. In this blog, I will share some initial reflections. At the bottom you can click through to some questions, which aim to support teachers explore the applications and implications of the Research Review.
The purpose of physical education has long been contested. This is expertly documented and the claims assessed in Bailey et al’s seminal summary paper (2009). However, it could be argued that the purpose is not debated or debatable. If we examine policy documents from around the world and over time, there is actually a very consistent theme – equipping young people with the tools they need to be active and remain active. For a range of complex reasons, physical educators have always justified the existence of the subject by jumping onto other agendas. These agendas are always a reflection of the broader societal and educational priorities. These priorities often take on the guise of commonsense, after all, who wouldn’t want young people to be more resilient? However, if we ask deeper questions such as who produces and prioritises the agenda and why, which young people is it aimed at and who benefits or suffers as a result, the veneer of commonsense soon fades.
Scenario: It’s the first day of the new academic year and you are Head of PE at St Andrew’s High. Two parcels arrive on your desk both containing sports shirts. One is from Harry. Harry left your school last year. You knew him very well. He has sent you the shirt he wore for his Liverpool debut with a note saying ‘THANKS FOR EVERYTHING from ST ANDREW’S FINEST’
To get young people into sport and PA we usually start with ‘why’. However, Jay Coakley, the father of sport sociology suggests that if we want to understand how to set young people up for a lifetime of PA, we should look to, and learn from the experiences of active adults when they were young. However, there’s a paradox here that continues to trip us up and it plays out like this...a young person has positive experiences in sport/PA. This grows into a passion. The passion might lead to pursuing a sport related degree and the most common of these is sport science. Sport science is a common first degree for people who go on to teach PE. Equipped with deep knowledge about the scientific benefits of physical activity the now qualified teacher believes that it is via rational persuasion that an individual will get into the very thing that the teacher is into. This logic is flawed and ignores the emotional attachment that got the teacher into sport/PA in the first place. As such, we lose the soul of our subject. Rationality, objectivity, science does not shape behaviour. Feeling connected to people, places, activities does. So in this blog I’ll explore what we can learn from the behaviour science of habit formation that can help us support students more effectively.
Peter Drucker, the ‘founder of modern management’ coined the phrase 'if you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it’. So simple and so applicable to so many areas of life from fitness programmes to screen time to outputs in pretty much every organisation. I’m sure Starbucks knows how many cups of coffee they sell. Supermarkets often have a smiley or sad face for customers to tap on their way out to share the quality (or otherwise) of their experience. Call a bank or visit a hospital and within minutes the text messages start pinging through for you to register your feedback. Every Google Meet call is followed by a message to rate the quality of the sound.