4Ms of transformative PE curricula

For Catherine Ennis, if PE is to educate students for a lifetime of physical activity, then it needs to provide not just an effective experience but an engaging one as well. It is this engaging experience that will better support the enhancement of children and young people’s value for physical activity, as well as their capabilities and willingness to participate and perform in forms of physical activity beyond the classroom. She defines an engaging experience as something that needs both a cognitive and reflective element which encourages thoughtful judgement and purposeful decision making by the pupils within lessons. Ennis offers three ways PE could design transformative curricula to create enhanced psychological and physical experiences for students through a focus on mindfulness, meaning, and motivation. To her original three we could add a fourth focus, metacognition, which also meets her definition of an engaging experience.

The 1^st M of Transformative PE Curricula – Mindfulness

This isn’t the mindfulness associated with meditation, but about paying attention to our choices with regards to physical activity engagement (or not). For Ennis sustained engagement in physical activity isn’t a behavioural habit which is obtained solely through repetition of activity, it is also cognitive one. An individual who freely engages and participates in forms of physical activity engages in mindful decision making. Michelle Segar in her recent book “The Joy Choice” highlights the growing evidence that trying to build physical activity habits through simple cue and respond mechanisms might be counterproductive as they don’t fit our messy and complex lives, especially for people who have yet to find a place for PA in their lives. Therefore we need to develop a range of flexible thinking strategies – such as goal setting, how we frame physical activity and what choices we make before, during and after. PE Teachers can support children to be mindful as cognitive decisions are required to take advantage of opportunities or overcome barriers to physical activity participation and PE is a key place that can support that development.

The 2^nd M of Transformative PE Curricula – Meaningfulness

The priority of meaningfulness has a long history in education and in physical education. Both Eleanor Metheny and Scott Kretchmar have advocated for PE professionals to prioritise meaning and personal significance found in PE, sport and physical activity, especially if we want young people to adopt an active lifestyle. Ennis herself, working with Ann Jewett and Linda Bain position meaningfulness as a key value to build a PE programme around. More recently, Tim Fletcher and Deírdre Ní Chróinín have put forward a conceptual framework and pedagogical principles that facilitate the prioritisation of meaningful experiences in PE. Here democratic practices – with children involved in the decision making of the lesson and reflective practices – with children reflecting on the experience of physical activity, are a cornerstone of prioritising meaningfulness within PE.

The 3^rd M of Transformative PE Curricula – Motivation

Motivation is considered a critical element to success at school and can enhance children’s learning either by energising, directing or regulating behaviour. Therefore, PE teachers who look to develop motivational strategies do so to facilitate engagement and interest as learning is optimal when students are intrinsically motivated. Ryan and Deci’s Self-determination theory is a theory of motivation that is widely used in PE and physical activity and suggests that intrinsic motivation is more likely nurtured if three basic psychological needs of competence, autonomy and relatedness are satisfied. Recently novelty has been proposed as a fourth basic need in self-determination theory by González-Cutre and colleagues. Not only did they offer evidence that novelty needs satisfaction predicted life satisfaction, but it also predicted intrinsic motivation within PE independent of the other three psychological needs. Here Gamification might provide a guide for both curriculum design and pedagogy that meets all four of these basic needs. The current work done by Javier Fernandez-Rio demonstrates it’s positive impact on motivation at both primary school and secondary school levels.

The 4^th M of Transformative curricula – Metacognition

To the transformative curricula of mindfulness, meaning and motivation we can add metacognition. Meta-cognition is about the ways people monitor and intentionally direct their learning and along with two other components of cognition and motivation they make up self-regulated learning. John Flavell, states that we improve the management of our thinking by monitoring what we know and understand about ourselves as a task, the tasks we are participating in, the others we are participating with and a range of appropriate strategies than be used in that context. He suggests that this capability develops through experience, by the setting of goals, by the selection of strategies to achieve those goals and finally reflection on that process. All of these components interact with one another, and through such interactions we develop metacognitive skills and further our knowledge. Whilst meta-cognition is growing in education, it has been less applied to physical education. Amy Price has attempted to do this with The Digital Video Games Approach. It draws upon Gee’s features of good game design to purposefully develop pupils planning, testing and problem solving skills.

Engaging experiences

If we want PE to educate children and young people for a lifetime of physical activity then we need to design a PE curriculum that is transformative. To do this Catherine Ennis appeals for us to go beyond effective to engaging, with engaging requiring both a cognitive and reflective element. To be educative PE needs more than high levels of physical activity, but to develop judgement and decision making on, in and through physical activity. Ennis writes “Providing opportunities for students to think critically and reflectively and apply knowledge to solve physical activity problems provides an interesting and challenging cognitive as well as physical experience to develop the mindful mover.” To achieve this we may consider the 4Ms of mindfulness, meaningfulness, motivation and metacognition and look to deliberately plan and make time for them within PE.