week 2 reflection

^09/22/23

Me again.

I would like this week’s reflection to be on my two favorite PHE Open Educational Resources that I can’t stop talking about.

If you have had to sit by me this week, you have probably already heard this and I’m sorry

https://www.iphys-ed.com/blog/teaching-net-wall-games/

https://www.thephysicaleducator.com/game-categories/net-wall

I love both of these websites because they include resources that utilize Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) in PHE. I also really like them because they provide worksheets and images that can be used with the games and I love when teachers share

what is TGfU?

• I think that everyone can agree that PE has always been known for strictly measuring psychomotor domains, which automatically places students who have other interests or physical/cognitive limitations at a disadvantage.
• implementing this ‘games based’ approach can level the playing field between all students:
  • before, there was sports and drills (booooo)
  • TGfU strays away from drill like activities and towards breaking down sports into categories and concepts, creating games that teach concepts that can later build up to a greater understanding of how all sports can connect
    • realizing that tennis/badminton/volleyball/pickleball are all in the same category of net/wall sports and have the same concepts but are completely different sports
• TGfU includes all domains of learning:
  • Cognitive: we can assess students on if they actually understand the concepts or put in the effort to try and understand concepts
  • Psychomotor: actual mechanics of their movements and measures physical literacy of the student
  • Social/Affective: takes into account a student’s effort, motivation, attitude, preparedness to class and overall treatment and respect of their peers

why I think TGfU is beneficial

• TGfU allows us to teach sports in game concepts, for example: Instead of teaching a volleyball unit, I would teach a “net/wall” unit that would focus on different concepts with multiple types of equipment
• within the net/wall unit, you can teach concepts like “defending space” or “setting up an attack” through any type of net/wall sport you would like (volleyball, tennis, badminton…) as they all have similar concepts but you can choose a sport that maybe no one in your class has tried before to make sure that everyone is going to be at the same starting point (I think of using spikeball, it’s a fairly new sport so you won’t find as many “advanced” players)
  • allows an even playing field between all students; students who may not be as athletically gifted will now be assessed on their level of cognitive engagement as well as social attitudes and effort
• moves away from the “old school” PE styles of drills and sports and moves towards a more games approach to PHE

I hope that was as exciting for you as it was for me!

_{^{(also, Bitmoji has a website???? https://www.bitmoji.com/stickers/ )}}

until next time,

xoxo

fyi https://spikeball.com/