Recently, a few encounters got me revisiting a few problematic themes for me.

In a student-led and designed activity for a leadership programme, a group of student leaders introduced the touch-rugby pass as “you can only pass the ball backwards”.

• These are students who went through our Physical Education (PE) system and the cue/rule they used was a direct observable expectation of a pass which they conveyed without modification to their peers. Quite a few of the students were throwing the ball by first turning around and passing it backwards, still toward their opponent’s end-zone, meeting the given cue exactly.  I have been lamenting on this for our practise for some time, i.e. how we introduce movement evaluation cues directly as teaching cues to our learners. Much of the cues we derive from ideal movement solution may mean little to novices who are still exploring their own range of movement adaptations.

I ended the student leaders’ session by taking over and asking the students the following questions as a simple experiment on cues for learning for me;

• Do they know what and where their end-lines were?
  • Can they differentiate where their own end-lines were and that of their opponent’s?
  • Will they understand if I say “you can only pass the ball parallel to the end-lines and towards their own end-lines”?
  • How does the ball move towards opponent’s end-line if they need to heed the previous passing advice?

I stopped at that and will have liked to follow up on this at the next possible session. My take and hope is that such an approach actually makes more sense to novices even though it seems like a lot of effort just to explain the passing-back rule. It makes more sense because we are connecting clear guides that connects to the overall game by putting in true (not relative) directional words in the communication. (I also wont suggest using negative cue, e.g. Do not throw the ball forward.)

Our cognition probably adapts better if we relate a cue that connects to some layer of an action that relates to an external outcome, e.g. move towards the side-lines, go to space that is not defended, pass ball over opponents, target the side that your team-mate is waiting, etc. Reason for this being learners need to understand the consequence of a needed action to the task and environment. These are opposed to cues that are internal to the learner only, e.g. backwards, above your head, below your waist, bend your hands, lift your stick, etc. You will notice the latter cues are usually what you will use to evaluate a technically ideal movement solution for your own evaluation of learning success of the learners. This is an extremely popular way of teaching for many.

• This brings to the forefront for me the role of cognition and its influence on how we teach. Without making this paragraph a whole chapter on cognitive models, I still strongly support the idea of cognition as embedded in what we do. This may point to the possibility that our understanding of learning (a cognitive process) does not embrace enough the internal processes that happens. For example, direct teaching sometimes involves introducing a learning objective based on an external need of someone else that has little to do with what the learner needs to comprehend and therefore enact what is needed in relation to task, environment and learner’s value proposition, i.e. task makes sense only because its realised as an activity that adds value to the learner’s life at that point. This happens usually as a consequence of separating cognition and the physical to the detriment of their real existence.

When discussing a touch-rugby (this game seems to always awaken in me much thoughts!) session with a colleague, I asked about a drill that he used which I developed for myself as a result of much effort in figuring out what works best for the learners.

• It was a reverse interception game where the team with the ball attempts to tag the team without the ball. I used it to encourage effective passing of the ball primarily. So, instead of being under pressure of interception while passing, they are now in a position to have more time to plan a passing strategy to tag their opponents.

My colleague told me that it was an established drill that he picked up from his own rugby training and he found it very useful.  This is where I lamented the long route which I took in figuring it out for myself as oppose to being able to just picking it up from an expert course or book much earlier. On reflection, I realised that I probably just wasn’t in the right frame of professional development when I was younger and probably had little interest in looking at teaching further than breaking skills down exactly into bits for teaching. The value of learning from understanding is true even for us teachers except that we are expected to expedite this for the benefit of effective teaching the soonest.

Someone commented online that I mentioned once that “Fun is not learning but a by-product of it…”

• This added an impetus to my own recent reflection on what has changed or happened for me all these years. Ever since I first had the realisation while teaching of the common recurring themes of Passing, Scoring, Interception and Positioning (use to call this Movement) that keep cropping up for me, I have gone through much realisation. I started out using these labels as rule modification guides, adding in action behaviours a bit later and finally connecting these categories to the science and art of overall development and learning that may not be so linear.

Back then, movement was a simple straightforward action leading to an expected solution and now it is a whole philosophy and science of why, what and how we move in life. In the same vein, I think I need to reflect what has changed for me as a teacher on the ground. I realised my shifting from a technical aspect of Physical Education (PE) to a philosophical one. Being a philosophically guided teacher is not a popular choice in a busy school environment. Many of us are driven by the explicit love of selected sports with an unclear jump to needing to teach movement as a broad life skill, resulting in PE teachers finding joy in teaching only certain games. This is often enough for a PE teaching career but I see changes arising where more depth is needed from us.

My well-meaning colleagues yet again commented that they find it difficult to understand what I am trying to share.

• I am not sure if this is a result of a nuts and bolts culture where we want instantly workable solutions or not towards early principle understanding of why things work. I realised my deficiency in providing the former and lack of clarity when sharing the latter. It is not a case of wanting to be academic but rather just a very deep-set belief that it is important to understand the whys of behaviour. My ideal situation is to able to work with an expert practitioner who believes in the whys as much as I lack focus in the whats and hows. I believe our professional development climate also need to reach this balance of expertise awareness and practise. It is a struggle to find this in a busy school culture heavy with admin and short of time.

One drawback in my Professional Development is that I had a very technical one as a personal choice. It was all about technical qualifications from bodies that are run with very little or no reference to pedagogical consideration, usually by non-teachers or specific activity experts. It was qualification courses that are usually attended by very motivated and proficient people who absorb technical knowledge like sponges, very unlike what our learners experience in schools. They were more appropriate for after-school activities than PE lessons I realised, unless there is some conversion process that we use with our pedagogical understanding of learning processes.

Teaching has started out for me as a natural transition of someone who had an active physical experience and wanting to carry on that lifestyle, without any clear explicit thoughts on wanting to nurture others. In my work environment back then, I tried charting a path on wanting to be a good administrator rather than a good teacher, realising on hindsight. I have yet to reach either but clearer now on how important the latter is, years later but I guess never too late.

For a long time, I felt it is important to be scientific, driven by a sense of awe of scientific work rather than learner needs. Later on, I realised how much more the science makes sense when the philosophical backing is strong, e.g. a student learning how to run into position to receive a moving leather projectile technically and scientifically seems very simplistic and unnecessary until we present it together with the beautiful game. The game is such only when we realised its contribution to an individual’s life. We make a big assumption when we assume this is a given or that just going through the motion of a technical lesson, movement appreciation automatically takes place. A philosophical position for me represents a powerful force that influences internal personal and professional compasses in whatever we do.

Recently in a sharing, the issue of dealing with students who do not meet specific technical outcomes, i.e. not able to execute a skill, was brought up. If we are focused on content and assessment as a 2-part process, the struggle to find the best strategy to teach a specific skill will keep cropping up as we go through learners with very varied abilities and expectations that are beyond needing to show an action because the teacher says so. If we throw in pedagogy into the ring with content and assessment as a continuous cycle (not a linear one starting from one of the components) of equal partners, then we will have more aligned teaching practises to what we want to assess, perhaps lessening the issues of how to teach a specific skill. If we developed pedagogy closely with the sciences of learning and the role of the individual in a developing society/environment, then we might not have such specific technical outcomes as primary but rather as secondary indicators only, second to the more important demonstration of understanding why any selected technical expectations are deemed as milestones.

Then, there might be a push away from counting attempts, mimicking model movement answers, etc. and a bigger focus on the possibilities of the human body learning a necessary life-skill. This does not mean that we have a bunch of learners who can only recite verses of understanding but useless in play. The two are not dichotomies and we need realisation that it can easily mutually complementing. This issue parallels attempts we see in education when we try to separate the mind/cognition and the body. The mind is not an anatomical structure but a function that exist through whole body action.  

I have long subsume game under the bigger umbrella of recreational movement. I have to almost agree that this may not be necessary as a condition for an effective lesson designer. However, I do strongly believe that there needs to be a physical activity – game – movement philosophical/social/scientific approach (is this Physical Literacy that clarifies the value proposition mentioned in earlier paragraph?) that needs to appear in every teachers’ training or early experience in PE.

We need to move PE away from it being considered as just an opportunity to keep students busy and help them meet the necessary movement quota for healthy living. In the preceding sentences, it reflects a common issue of equating physical education to physical activities, daily exercise requirements, keeping student physically active as an attempt to recuperate the cognitive, etc. These all should be secondary indicators of desired outcome that are useful but do not define or prescribe the intervention. This happens when we want quick results in observable proxies of healthy living, which are not valid, it does not cause healthy living habits, or reliable, it changes at every measure depending on what behaviour you are orchestrating at the moment.