I have been really busy recently- hence the blog silence- but I am now reaching a corner where I am finally able to cross 'write blog post' off my list.... hopefully- as long as nothing dramatic happens in the next 45 minutes or so....
However what I have been doing recently is lots of learning- it's the time of year when conferences are held, as well as research seminars and training courses which I can actually go to as I am not teaching or marking so I have had a good couple of months of learning lots about many different things. Because I have not been immersed in teaching I have also been given the gift of time to think (when you work in education you realise just how much you really need thinking time!).
Lots of the conversations I have been part of have been about how we measure quality of learning or education- a lot of the work I am involved in stems from the belief that we can't use only grades and academic achievements as measures of success. Indeed, an article I read recently about what parents hope for their children identified that happiness far outweighed the desire for children to be 'successful' in the academic sense. It strikes me that with the growing focus on mental health and well-being why we don't consider happiness and enjoyment more within our measures of success in education, PE in particular.
When I was teaching in schools I considered my main aim to be to help young people find an activity that they enjoyed, so that they could go on to play it, or take part in it for the rest of their lives. This is an underpinning idea in the concept of Physical Literacy- having the motivation, confidence, competence, knowledge and understanding to make physical activity part of your life, throughout your life. There is a reason motivation is first in this definition- namely it's really hard to start something and continue to do it, unless you really want to do it.
Admittedly, there are some things we do which we don't LOVE but we know that it is important- take medication, brush our teeth- all those necessary little things (admittedly, some people still don't do those things, but they have the inconvenience of dealing with the consequences so I guess if you're prepared to do that then feel free to stop doing anything you don't want to- just maybe don't be surprised if I hold my nose when you're talking to me.... ). HOWEVER, if we really want to integrate something into our lives we have to love it- or find a way to love it.
I have been lucky enough to go to a few talks at the Cheltenham festivals over the past few years and a few have been on motivation and willpower- the overriding message in all of these talks is that willpower is only temporary and that we need to find the joy in things in order for them to become part of our day to day lives. This leads me to thinking about education- this morning on twitter I had multiple people in my feed retweeting an article in the guardian regarding the gap between achievement from students from different backgrounds (read it here). Much research and hard work has gone in to identifying why this gap exists (as well as how much of a gap there is, as different measures may yield slightly different figures- and most rely on examination results- I will avoid getting into that particularly rabbit hole on this post!) but I wonder if instead of looking at the inputs and outputs of 'the system' we instead look at what is going on inside to try and change things a little.
If we know that motivation is important in changing behaviour and in maintaining a change in behaviour why not factor enjoyment, fun, even love of an activity or task into it's effectiveness? If as a teacher we encourage our students to love our subject that will lead to improvement and eventually mastery- what more do we want?
A system we used to use was to focus on attitude to learning- I have mentioned it in an earlier post so feel free to pause and have a read to see how it worked. This used ideas from self determination theory that if students felt more competence (that they were good at the activity) autonomy (the feeling that they had control over their learning- created through the use of peer teaching methods) and relatedness (making them feel part of the lesson through learning names quickly, personalising targets and more time speaking to pupils during lessons) that they would become more motivated. This method led to many of the girls in my group dragging their parents over to me at parents evenings when previously they wouldn't have thought twice about speaking to their PE teacher.
So if we know motivation and enjoyment are important, why don't we use this as a measure of teaching quality? Sure, teachers could put on a video every lesson which may mean pupils 'enjoy' their lessons despite not learning much however I think students are more savvy than to be pacified by something like this- also it is nigh on impossible to find something that everyone in a class is happy to watch- teaching is FAR easier!
In PE in particular, students enjoyment is critical to them becoming physically literate (in my view a key aim of any practicing teacher) as well as important in developing skills such as resilience- if a task is enjoyable students will continue to persevere despite failure in order to find their way to success. So why don't we spend more time thinking about how to make our sessions engaging and enjoyable- if we can help our students to develop a love for physical activity everything else will come after.
P.s.- Procrastination meant this definitely took me longer than 45 minutes- oops!
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