EPHE 452 - Strategies for teaching games in physical education

UVic Teacher Education Competencies

In relation to the program competencies for this course I have the following goals:

Managing People and Projects - I plan to develop my understanding on how learning happens and plan lessons that reflect my emerge insights.  In particular, I will explore how the use of constraints can help shape students learning through more guided discovery and peer teaching approaches. I feel I particularly want to realize through instructional practices the Lil'Wat nation's idea of Kamúcwkalha (acknowledging the felt energy indicating group attunement and the emergence of a common group purpose) through group and team based activities using a scoring system and getting students to take up roles for their team.

Community engagement and inter-professional collaboration -  My goal is to actively engage with peers, teachers and mentor teachers to share resources and ideas to improve lesson design and implementation. I will do this by using Google drive to plan with peers, get their feedbakc and edits and then finalize resources in order to teach our lessons. Through discussion, reflection and field work, I can further develop my teaching strategies and create inclusive learning environments for students using a combination of guide discovery questions, reciprocal peer teaching and problem solving prompts. As part of professional learning community I want to show that I can promote my peers' learning whilst being responsible for my own learning - Celhcelh (each person being responsible for their own learning and the learning of others, always seeking learning opportunities).

Scientific and discipline knowledge - I want to read about and experiment with how to teach games by learning how to apply TGfU ideas for invasion games, as my previous experience was in net games. In this competency I want to embrace the idea of challenging my thinking and disrupting some of my past practices such playing 5 on 5 games without creating exaggeration strucutres or treating students as if they are all the same ability. I will plan to make games adjust to challenge the winning team/player to make it harder for them to score again. In this way I will take on Cwelelep (recognizing the need to sometimes be in a place of dissonance and uncertainty, to be open to new learning) to expand my capacity to teach to enhance student learning.

Instructional techniques and assessment - I want to improve how I use assessment during activities to guide what I teach next. I would like  to get better at noticing how students are performing skills and using that information to adjust demonstrations, cues, or task difficulty so everyone can keep learning and participating by using evidence based approaches used in class.  I will experiment in this field experience with students completing self-assessment tools to gather insights on their thinking, but to also show that I value theor social, cognitive and personal learning, as well as their improved physical competence.

This assignemnt was an authentic experience at trying to apply what was learned in the EPHE 452 class in school context.  This assignment generates artifacts for all four of the competencies but with a particular focus on Instructional techniques and assessment.  The other competency of Managing People and Projects is also a key aspect as we had to figure out how to be the teacher managing the learning environment to facilitate students learning.  Build a unit plan became a group project that had its own unique challenges as we did always connect around the same ideas and know how to delegate duties. Finally, this assignment also offers evidence of Community engagement and inter-professional collaboration as we had to figure out how to work with the schoolteacher, adjust to the school environemnt and collabirate to generate a professional unit plan.