It has been many months of not visiting my personal blogging habit as a way to delve more comprehensively into a job that can very easily take on an event or activity management role. There has been more than enough lamenting here on our seemingly ‘babysitter’ job for ‘fresh air’ in between the more important business of academic, examinable subjects. In a recent sharing by our highest education trained in-charge person in the nation, much of the discussion revolved around taking care of the learners in the best possible way without a focus on wanting them all to be alike in objectives and achievements. In a perfect world, implementation should follow that line, but I left the discussion with much wonderment on how much of that we are able to follow.

In my bigger teaching environment, much effort is also put into the character and citizenship development of the leaners and this role is expected of all teachers, including the academic teachers with clear examinable performance indicators. We are driven by current and past central tendency data, meaning a lot of our planning and decision making is based on what the majority of learners are exhibiting vis-à-vis where we expect them to be, which is referenced from past cohorts being compared to overall nation expectations. You can imagine the dilemma when in such an environment, the same expectations overflow into subjects like Physical Education (PE). As much as we have settled handling this mismatch in evaluating subjects like PE and other life-skill related ones, it still creeps up every now and then on the ground in an awkward way.

Listed below are series of seemingly random encounters/questions/observations/etc. I encountered lately that spurred me to get out of this reflective hibernation for my own professional sanity. Learning comes from everywhere and my own personal slower methodology always comes from what’s happening around me. I at times regret not developing a more academic approach to finding out from literature (or proactively learning from external context) firsts and thus anticipating important areas of learning, direction, alignment, etc.

As I list out my laundry list of selected reflective prompts recently, I will attempt to connect it to why it also impacts for me at the bigger picture of making sense of my personal journey (which perhaps is heading very close to an end-point) in the teaching profession (I have reached a stage where I have called a break to trying to always want do things better, not always successfully, but rather focus more on the what and why of my day-time job. Probably a self-protecting mechanism of a teacher on a plateau of ‘what else is there in PE’).

• At what point do we intervene at classroom level if we want students to be involved in an explicit (something we can see) or implicit  learning process. Do we as teachers rely heavily on assumed implicit learning taking place and therefore not too concern on timely interventions? In fact, are we even also implicit in our own thoughts of learners’ implicit learning, basically not being concern or need to see learning taking place but go through the motion of completing a class/activity without the consideration of timely interventions. In such situations, we may tend to only create a learning narrative when the need to reflect on a lesson happens, giving a false illusion of explicit planning.

• What class lever is a pull-up/chin-up when looking at the workings of a specific muscle group. How to apply micro rules to macro actions or vice-versa. This reminds me of the whole non-linear/emergent ecological approach to approaching any skill acquisition (or functional working understanding) of a movement process, simple or complex. We tend to rely on heavily on traditional decomposition of a movement and working from a bottom-up approach of putting simple movements back together like a jigsaw into a whole complex movement. This has worked fairly well when trying to understand processes but may not reflect actual mechanisms at work. This and the podcast example (see below) reflects the same dilemma we have as teachers brought up very heavily on understanding motor schemas as our teaching framework, i.e. we create targeted needed component experiences and leave it to the learner to bring it up when needed it its whole expected perfect movement solution form. This lever example reminds me of how we are so comfortable with linear understanding of processes that assumes the whole is equal to its parts.

• Podcast episode discussing immediate history of a particular action being important to action, i.e. hysteresis, that works within the ecological dynamics school of thought also. How is this compared to traditional  ‘computational’ cognition? In the same podcast series, another interesting discussion was the role of a traditional football activity, the rondo, in high level training, coming from perspective of ecological skill acquisition. This was followed by another discussion on another podcast, the role of two-touch football in a drill and game. For the very analytical expert, the need to look at a specific part of a process and break it down is very tempting. While we all seem to understand the need for a holistic perspective, we may inevitable also take it for granted and very easily fall into picking apart components of a process.

• Teaching Games for Understanding is a multi-step process. Follow the steps and good to go? Where should we start at and do we follow it in a particular direction? Non-linear pedagogy is what? There seems to a frustration and jadedness to the response to teaching approaches being sprouted by different groups, with education systems/groups emphasising different perspectives with ‘nuts and bolts’ examples that gets in the way of understanding underpinning theories. Does this boil down to individual teachers and what their beliefs and philosophies are in teaching? A teacher who believes in the need to continuously understand underpinning physiological processes within the body-person-environment interaction will leverage on example scenarios of teaching approaches. The contrary will be those that rely on such examples to feed their repertoire of readymade strategies for different scenarios.

• Quote from my colleague (paraphrased), “I know PE is important, I saw them having so much fun just now…remind me of my own schooling days.” Does this undermine what we really do or should we rejoice that others see our students demonstrating joy? Do we need to be teachers, if mere instructions can carry out the same joyful expectation?

• Difficult looks from around when trying to discuss thoughts on pedagogy and PE – can we just get on without all these? Age-old observation. The need for immediate and clear implementation  structures and frameworks as more preferred and palatable. Structures can take on a life of its own, with the what and why of the structure forgotten?

• Can a PE teacher teach a much younger age-group if they have always been teaching older learners? Let’s assume we don’t consider personal preference and only consider professional competencies needed to teach extreme ends of an age-group spectrum. Are we equip to do handle all? If we are activity driven, does that get in the way of our worry of crossing age-groups for teaching. Will a conceptually driven teaching mindset help?

• Let’s not put Tchoukball (or insert any game that you think deserves an inclusion in this question context) in our curriculum as it is a very easy game and won’t require the usual length we spent on popular favourites from the Invasion family of games. Does this reflects an activity specific approach to teaching, as opposed to perhaps a curriculum that is concept driven (e.g. creating learners who are confident in movement) it its suggested teaching approach.

• Differentiated Instructions vs Differentiated Teaching – is it a versus argument? Should differentiated teaching be considered a teaching tool or a basic tenet of teaching? If it is the former, than it is just another tool. If it is the latter, why is it that propriety differentiated instructions methodologies (e.g. by Tomlision) seems so revolutionary?

The trigger points above demonstrate key discussions in this teacher’s recent professional journey that may or may not strike certain chords that resonates with others on a personal journey to make sense of the profession. Seemingly unrelated incidents and thoughts that may be written off by many as just the varied nature of what we do but maybe taken a bit too seriously by this teacher as something that needs to be made sense of.

The Graph below in Fig 1 was one way for me to make sense of the above points possible common manifestation in the profession (curious if they also resonate with others). I assumed that the curriculum flavour that we create also reflects the teaching perspectives that we have.