Recommended
More Related Content
Recently uploaded
Recently uploaded (20)
Featured
Featured (20)
Summative presentation
- 1. My MEd Journey REFLECTING ON WHO I AM AND WHERE I AM GOING
- 2. "Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." - William James
- 3. Some teachers taught the curriculum today. Other teachers taught students today. And there’s a big difference. – Michael Fullan
- 4. "Do more of what makes you happy." - Unknown
- 5. "A child's laugh could simply be one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. " - Unknown
- 6. "Alone we are smart, together we are brilliant." - Steven Anderson
- 7. We say what we do, we sometimes say how we do it, but we rarely say why we do what we do. – Simon Sinek
- 8. One of the smartest things we might do in Phys Ed is aim for delight. If we are successful in that, we will surely get health too.” – R. Scott Kretchmar
- 9. Change isn’t really as hard as we thought if we capture people’s interest and give them enjoyable, worthwhile experiences – Michael Fullan
- 10. "Forget all the reasons why it wont work and believe the one reason why it will" - Unknown
Editor's Notes
- Throughout the last two years I have been exposed to many new ideas about education that have transformed how I think about physical education. The reading and research I have done has opened my eyes to the vast variety of approaches and models for teaching PE. The process of planning, preparing, teaching and reflecting on my practice has become a more thoughtful activity for me. How I interact with my students; knowing their needs, likes, dislikes and values with regard to PE, developing more depth, consideration, and understanding of them as people. What I value in terms of curriculum, leadership, and change in the realm of education, in my school and in my gymnasium has grown to be more inclusive, relevant, and appropriate. Ultimately what all of this learning and research has led to is a new understanding of what I need to move forward in my teaching, to be the best physical educator possible. Interestingly it has been the final courses that have really brought clarity to my reflections concerning my teaching. Leadership, mentoring, change, and meaningful experiences in PE represent much of the content I have reflected on, read and absorbed and focused on over the past few months. What I have finally realized is that creating change in any culture is a challenging and long-term process and within my teaching practice, the culture I need to lead in change is that of the classroom environment. In order to effectively address the problem, I needed to gather information and create a new vision for my classroom. With that in mind I proceeded to address the question of meaningfulness of the physical education program. Through a variety of data collection methods (non-participant observer, student voice, and reflection) I endeavoured to understand what the students were thinking about their experiences in the gym. Would I find a correlation between their interpretation of the program and the increase in misbehaviours? Would their feelings about the PE program reflect my feelings about it? At the same time, it is important for me to understand where I am coming from as an educator and leader of change. What leadership styles do I use? Which would be best suited for this change plan? What skills do I have or need to develop? Additionally, I believe that reflecting on what I value as a physical educator is also very important to understanding what I have to do to create a change in the culture in the gymnasium. “Moral purpose means acting with the intention of making a positive difference in the lives of individuals” This quote from the 7th slide of the Chapter 1/2 presentation by Professor Berg in EDUC 533 – Dynamics of Change, speaks volumes to me. My intention is now to create and embrace meaningful experiences for the students in PE that help to alleviate the off-task behaviours. As a leader moral purpose needs to guide my decision making and I believe that my goal to make PE more meaningful for the students through the planning process fits. I have the trust of the students and am working to build on that through giving them voice in their programs, I have a fine-tuned focus I am working toward and will develop it with the students and other teachers. I must persevere through this change until it becomes my go to practice in teaching and thereby is second nature. My plan for teaching explicitly for meaningful experiences in physical education is slowly developing the coherence needed to take hold. The critical difference with this change in my practice, is my moral purpose. By discovering Meaningful PE as a "thing", I found research that spoke to my feelings, values and beliefs about PE and gave language and direction to much of what I have been doing over the years. Coherence is all about mindsets, creating a shared mindset among all the stakeholders involved. It is critical that only a small number of goals are established, with the focus on student achievement in PE. My strategy to building coherence will focus on creating an excitement over student ownership of the PE program by making it meaningful to as many students as possible as often as possible. I have begun the process and have a focused direction in which I am moving my practice. I have also started to create the collaborative culture with the students through investigating their likes, dislikes and opinions about the PE program. The next steps are deepening the learning through creating goals and shifting my practice to meet the goals. Ultimately through building coherence my hope is to create a sustained focus on improved practice, more consistency in behaviours and improved student performance in PE. Another focus with respect to change is to address the marginalization of physical education as a program in school. This begins with simple steps like getting people to use proper terminology. "Gym class" and "Gym" need to become Physical Education, PE, or Phys. Ed. Secondly, more work with the other staff to view PE not as prep time but rather as an integral aspect of the curriculum is needed. Throughout this journey I have worked at reflecting in, on and about action (or as I described it using level 1,2 and 3 reflections). I continue to take risks with my teaching, searching for the most meaningful and instructive ways to bring the information and skills alive for my students. Working with others in the PE community and my school is a critical aspect of driving the changes in culture I am hoping to achieve. Finally, my professional development has impacted my teaching and student achievement continually over the past couple years in this MED program. The connection between the quality of my teaching and the quality of the student experiences has definitely strengthened. Beginning in the first summer we were asked to constantly reflect on our teaching practice. Over the course of 11 courses and two years that reflection was directed at researching how we could improve what we do. Beginning with our first course we were tasked with reflecting our our own place in the world. Who were we as educators, how we got to this point and what privileges, barriers and events guided us along the way. During this course I recall Professor Dan Robinson talking about a study he had recently conducted. That brought our an interest in me regarding Gender Bias of Educators and how it can affect decisions about students. Our first research course, with Professor Stephen Berg showed us the ins and outs of research methods and in that time I was focused on sharing student learning. Reflecting back on these first courses I find that my mind and focus was all over the place. Then fall brought on Social Justice in PE and took me back to my days in the MPE program at MUN where my research focus was on Adapted Physical Education and doing action research focused on the autistic students and their PE experiences. Winter 2017's course found me again thinking about and finally researching Gender Bias in PE. This has always been interesting to me and for a long time was in the back of my mind for the capping experience or for a thesis. But it was not to be, taking EDUC 507 Qualitative Research in the summer of 2017 I worked to develop a qualitative research proposal. Starting with gender bias I searched and searched but wasn't really able to find what I was looking for. No researchers or work was grabbing my attention. Then I came across the work of Catherine Ennis which looks at Value Orientation of teachers and how that affects their curricular decision. I dove into this research and found it fascinating. The ideas that Ennis and her colleagues, specifically Ang Chen, wrote about really hit home for me. The Value Orientations of a Physical Educator can really dictate what happens in a gymnasium. The freedom and even isolation of teaching alone, coupled with the vagueness of curriculum outcomes can really open the door for a wide variety of activities, class environments, assessment styles and many other curricular decisions that are made by the teacher. The potential for differences is far and away more varied than may be found from classroom to classroom. Funny enough, in the summer of 2017 when I was deep into this research, but had yet to experience the Ennis Value Orientation Instrument (VOI), I reflected on what my value orientation profile might look like. I believe that I would primarily fall into an orientation combination of the ecological integration(EI) and self/social responsibility (SR) orientations with a more EI focus. The EI orientation is a balanced perspective that addresses mastery, self-actualization and social interaction. Subject matter and social responsibility hold equal importance in developing an engaged and confident mover. While my secondary orientation would seem to fit the SR orientation that focuses on interpersonal interactions, cooperation, and teamwork in both the learning situation and beyond. The SR orientation uses group centered instruction, expects students to demonstrate respect and cooperation, value teamwork and emphasize collective effort. There are also aspects of disciplinary mastery (DM), specifically the development of physical competence, and learning process (LP) through the use of problem-solving and application of learning. What I find interesting though, is that this spring, when I took the VOI on two separate occasions (April 27th and June 6th) and scored both only after the second date, my profile was significantly different. Why was that? I have some ideas, but really I think the reflection in 2017 may have boiled down to my ideal, what I was aspiring to at the time. Versus the results in 2018 that represented my actions of the past year and my interpretations of the values based choices presented in the VOI. At this point in time I went to Belize with Dan Robinson and 10 other MEd students. There I had what amounted to a life altering experience. I had travelled extensively before, I had taken part in recreational programs like this before but to combine the two and offer this to a group of sweet, kind, naive and thankful children was special. Beyond the experiences with the kids, the experiences with the other people who went down was amazing. The bonds and friendships that so easily developed along with the trust, understanding and support offered without hesitation made the experience so much richer. It also affected my practice and thoughts about teaching. I was able to watch 10 other outstanding educators strut their stuff for two weeks. At no other time in my teaching career have I been able to simply observe high quality educators at work. This aspect of the program alone would push me to encourage anyone in the next cohort to be sure to take advantage of this class. This past year has challenged me to be even better. Seeing the quality of educators I have been studying with in action pushed me to excel as well. Within the realm of our MEd program that put my focus on the Mentoring course and working with Ericka as my mentee and Jason as my mentor. Truthfully, the mentoring aspect with Ericka was an excellent experience. We shared out learning and it focused on students with physical disabilities (as we both taught a primary student with CP who was confined to a wheelchair). But the relationship evolved over time and the friendship and collegial relationship we had developed in Belize blossomed some more. I wish I could say the same thing happened with Jason, but I did not put the effort into engaging in that relationship due to the artificial nature of the assignment (nothing against Jason who is awesome and tried to foster a mentoring relationship with me) and my not looking for the support, guidance or advice you might seek from a mentor. While all of this was going on I was weighing my options - write a thesis based on the summer proposal and working on it with Dan, or take 508 and do the capping experience. What it came down to was two things: (1) family has to be a priority and writing a thesis is time consuming and demanding, and (2) based on the wonderful relationships that I had developed I wanted to finish with the people I started this journey with. So I went the capping experience route, and of course my focus changed yet again. While doing our Canadian Researcher biography I came across Tim Fletcher, a Professor I had at MUN, and was interested to see what he was doing now as a Professor at Brock. This led me to his current research project called LAMPE - Learning About Meaningful Physical Education and I was sold. The work he and his colleagues are doing was exactly what I thought and valued in a well run PE program.
- The experiences and learning that I have been privileged to share with everyone in this group over the past two years is something I will remember always. A large part of my next journey in education is focusing on meaning and meaningful experiences. This cohort hold so much meaning to me from
- Moral Purpose