The #PhysEd Show

🤖 The AI revolution is well-underway and, I don't know about you, I've been feeling a little overwhelmed by it all! In this first part of a two-episode series, we'll unpack some of the key terms around AI and explore the idea of how to use artificial intelligence as a co-pilot in your teaching.

🥳 Ok, I get that not everyone feels super excited about going back to school. That said, after three years of being away from teaching, I can't wait to start the latest chapter in my teaching career! In this episode, I'll share the four things that have me feeling fired up about getting back into teaching.

😨 In this episode, I'm sharing some exciting news and talking about some of the fears teachers experience as we head back to school.

💪 In this episode, I'm trying something new! Let me walk you through a lesson that I recently designed and delivered at a local middle school. The lesson kicked off the students' fitness unit and focused on helping them explore the health-related components of fitness in a way that did not involve fitness testing or hitting up the fitness centre.

🛹 Earlier this spring, I got to check one of my goals off of my teaching bucket list. For years, I've dreamed of teaching a skateboarding unit as part of my physical education program. Well, after several twists and turns, I finally managed to make that dream come true! In this episode, I'll walk you through the process I used to design and deliver a meaningful series of skateboarding lessons that empowered the middle school students at our local school to turn our town's skatepark into their own personal playground!

▶️ Games play an important role within physical education programs. That said, we need to ensure that we are designing games so that they are aligned to student learning targets and support our students' learning in PE. In this episode, I'll be sharing one game design tactic that I love to use to help my students experience success, deepen their learning, and develop skills, knowledge, and understandings that are essential to physical literacy.

🤝 School belonging is linked to improvements in academic achievement, higher self-reported levels of happiness, and fewer occurrences of violence and bullying in schools. In this episode of The #PhysEd Show, we'll take a deep dive into the world of belonging, make sense of the factors that influence it, and explore a set of evidence-based strategies and tactics that can help your students build a sense of school belonging in PE!

✨ Every now and then, you meet someone who reminds you how much fun it is to have fun while you teach. I've had the opportunity to connect with Barb Borden over the years and gain a window into her teaching through her Twitter presence. Without a doubt, Barb's teaching brings so much joy, laughter, and fun to her students lives. After connecting with Barb to learn more about how she has successfully accessed grant money to fund her PE program over the years, I quickly realized that her story was one that I wanted more teachers to hear. WARNING: your cheeks will most likely be sore after this episode from smiling so much!

♿️ Every child, regardless of ability, deserves to have access to effective, meaningful physical education experiences. However, many educators struggle with how to design physical education lessons that allow students with disabilities to engage in positive ways both in the learning and with their peers. Knowing this, I was fired up to get to sit down with Jen Heebink, SHAPE America's 2022 National PE Teacher of the Year. Jen has an incredible passion for Unified Physical Education and shares a ton of knowledge and expertise from her experience a both an adapted and unified PE teacher in Minnesota. Are you in for a treat? You betcha!

👀 Understanding how to align lessons to curriculum outcomes not only helps teachers maximize the impact of their instruction, it also helps them approach their teaching with as much confidence and clarity as possible! In this episode of The #PhysEd Show Podcast, I'm going to walk you through a purposeful physical education lesson that I recently had the opportunity to share with teachers here in Nova Scotia.

The lesson was designed to help students reach the following learning targets:

• I know a variety of offensive tactics that help create space.
• I can use a few (2-3) offensive tactics to create space in invasion games.

As you listen in, pay attention to the way the lesson's design constantly invites students to reflect on where they are going, where they are now, and how they close the gap. I had a lot of fun putting this one together, so let me know if you would like to hear more lesson walkthrough episodes in the future!

🏄‍♂️ Momentum is one of the absolute best feelings we can experience as teachers. It allows us to get more done, feel that we're on top of all of our tasks, and bring new and exciting ideas to our teaching. However, as teachers, we tend to be horrible at creating the conditions required to experience momentum in our work. This contributes to the feelings of overwhelm that are all too familiar to teachers and that can lead to stress, anxiety, burnout, and/or depression.

So, how do we create the conditions for momentum in our teaching? This is the questions that we'll explore in this week's episode of The #PhysEd Show Podcast!  

Elyse Loughlin is a physical education teacher currently teaching in upstate New York. 

In addition to teaching Elyse is an OPEN National Trainer. She has presented at local, state, and national conferences covering everything from SLOs and GLOs to the active role physical education and health education can play in social justice. Elyse also happens to be my co-host for the weekly #PEChat discussions that we host on Twitter Spaces every Monday night at 8PM ET.

Elyse is committed to using Physical Education as a venue for social justice work in regards to race, wellness, education, and poverty.

In this episode, Elyse helps us understand how Phase Four of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) can help us explore equity, social justice, and trauma-informed practices in physical education.

This episode is a recording of our latest #PEChat Radio Hour, one of the new chat formats that we are exploring on Twitter Spaces. The Radio Hour format consist of a live interview with a guest that anyone on Twitter can listen in to, share reactions, and engage in side-discussions by tweeting in the Space. At the end of the interview, we invite listeners to request the mic and share their questions and thoughts with our guest.

Be sure to follow Elyse online to continue learning from her in the future:

Andy Vasily is the host of The Run Your Life Podcast, a celebrated instructional coach, an incredible physical education, and one of my good friends.

Andy's teaching has had a huge impact on the way I think about keeping students at the centre of their learning experiences. In today's episode, we dive into Andy's transformation towards becoming an autonomy-supportive PE teacher at the start of his career, the impact that providing students with opportunities to exercise their voice and choice in physical education can have on their learning, and where teachers can start should they wish to shift their teaching towards pedagogies that support autonomy.

Be sure to follow Andy online to continue learning from him in the future:

🎯 Using success criteria in your teaching is a high-leverage practice that has a significant effect on student learning. By building success criteria in partnership with your students, you can help increase student ownership, motivation, and engagement.

That said, how can we bring this practice into a physical education setting? What are the steps to follow and how can we adapt them to meet the realities of teaching physical education?

These are the questions that I do my best to answer in this week's episode of The #PhysEd Show Podcast!

🎓 Become a #PhysEdU Community Member! #PhysEdU is the professional growth community that I've launched for physical educators earlier this year. It's purpose is to help you unlock and grow your potential to be an outstanding physical educator! Community members enjoy benefits such as exclusive posts, members-only workshops, my digital courses library, and instant access to all of ThePhysicalEducator.com's premium resources. To learn more and find out which #PhysEdU membership is right for you, visit https://thephysicaleducator.com/membership/ and use coupon code* "ONWARD" to save 20% on any of  annual membership (*while supplies last).

📝 Show Notes

“If you don’t do the work, then you don’t get the grade.”

The saddest part about that cringe-worthy sentence is that I’ve said it to students before. Early on in my career, I had no idea how to motivate students in my teaching. I’d do my best to plan fun lessons, but I’d resort to a “carrots and sticks” approach when dealing with unmotivated students.

The problem is that controlling students with rewards and consequences only leads to higher levels of anxiety, boredom, or alienation.

It robs students of their natural love for learning and the feelings of joy, enthusiasm, and interest that once came with it. Knowing this impact, how can we best support student motivation in our lessons?

Self-determination theory looks at human motivation and tries to understand the factors that push or prevent people from wanting to learn and grow. The theory argues that intrinsic motivation is sustained by satisfying three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

In this episode, we will take a look at how we can use self-determination theory to increase student motivation in P.E.

I did my best to tie theory to practice and I'm convinced that you will have a few new strategies in your tool belt after listening to this podcast.

Thanks for tuning in! Happy Teaching!

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Show Notes

The 2022 Olympic Winter Games in Beijing are underway and - as I write this - Norway is at the top of the medal standings.

Again.

Norway is a bit of an anomaly: it's a relatively small country at 5.3 million people (which ranks it #119 in the world based on population size), yet somehow it is an Olympic beast.

Prior to the games in Beijing beginning, Norway had 368 medals at the Winter Olympic Games (132 gold, 125 silver, 111 bronze). That count ranks them in the number one spot in all-time medal winners at the Winter Olympics, ahead of the United States (305) and Germany (240).

So what's going on here? What makes Norway so successful at the Olympics and what can we - as physical educators - take away from their approach?

In this episode, I'll be breaking down Norway's philosophy of "The Joy Of Sport For All" and sharing what PE can take away from the nation's approach to create safer, friendlier, more meaningful experiences for our students. 

Physical literacy is the foundation of physical education.

As physical educators, it is our job to nurture our students’ physical literacy through meaningful, effective learning experiences. However, there is a common mistake that many PE teachers make that can severely hamper the impact of their teaching:

They focus too much on the physical domain of physical literacy.

Physical literacy exists across four domains: physical, cognitive, affective, and behavioural. Therefore, we need to look beyond the physical aspects of learning in order to best serve our students.

It took me a while to realize this in my own teaching. However, that realization is what led me to eventually start focusing on three key areas of learning: skills, knowledge, and understanding.

In this episode, I'll be breaking down the difference between the three and walking you through how they can help you maximize the impact of your teaching!

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🥳 Connect with ThePhysicalEducator.com!

The school year is coming to an end. If you're an elementary school teacher, that means that Field Day season is about to begin!

Having taught elementary school physical education for the past ten years, I've had the responsibility of planning a whole-school Field Day event each school year. Planning an event of this size - with all of its moving parts - can be intimidating. That being said, I decided to sit down and create a walkthrough on how I went about planning my take on Field Day: The Interplanetary Games.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• The context and origin of my Field Day model.

• How we divided the entire school up into Field Day teams.

• How we used friendly competition to bring students together across grades.

• How we ensured that each station ran like a well-oiled machine. 

• The logistics involved in making sure the day was a success.

• The activities we included in our Field Day plans.

• Some tips that I have for teachers getting started with their first Field Day planning.

For the past 10 years, I've used the month of May to bring my school community together through a variety of health-based programs, challenges, and advocacy pieces. I call the whole initiative "Health Month" and it honestly helped transform the way my school focused on health and wellness.

Health Month is an opportunity for you to boost your program's visibility, strengthen partnerships and relationships with families, engage your faculty, and - most importantly - create fun, memorable, learning-based experiences for your students!

The initiative can be broken down into five parts:

Here's a different kind of episode! Think of this as "Story Time with Joey".

🎉 Here is my first-ever Q&A episode!

Not all moments in our teaching feel like big wins. Sometimes they feel like bellyflops. 🌊

In this episode, I'll be sharing a bellyflop moment from my teaching: the virtual rock-paper-scissors tournament that I organized for my students during the 2020 spring lockdown. My intention here is to help you see how - even when something feels like a total fail - our efforts can still result in lessons to be learned and wins to be celebrated.

It can be so easy to only want to talk about our success stories. That being said, the more we are willing to talk about our bellyflop moments, the more we can learn from them (and help others learn as well!)

Be sure to check out the show notes for this episode of The #PhysEd Show to see and access some of the resources I made for this tournament.

This is a pretty personal episode for me. I'll be opening up and letting you into some of the health issues that I have been living with. I'll also be sharing what I've done in order to prioritize my health and my family.

In this episode of The #PhysEd Show Podcast, I'll be sharing the strategy that we developed to help ensure that our students had access to engaging, fun, and safe recess experiences as they returned to school this fall in the middle of the COVID-19 global pandemic.

By the end of this episode, you will be able to:

1. Understand why recess needs to be a part of the school day at your school.
2. Know what the experts are saying in regards to COVID-19 recommendations for recess.
3. Be able to list a few key strategies/considerations for implementing safe, meaningful, and fun recess at your school in this COVID-19 reality.

Learn more about the standards-based striking and fielding games unit that I designed for my grade 6 students in this episode of The #PhysEd Show Podcast!

This episode will walk you through - step-by-step - the process I use to design standards-based units for my physical education program. In it, you will learn:

1. The SHAPE America grade-level outcomes that I built this unit around.
2. How I determined the evidence of learning I would seek out throughout the unit.
3. The assessment tools I created/used to capture that evidence.
4. The learning activities I built to help students develop the skills, knowledge, and understandings outlined in the grade-level outcomes.

This podcast was recorded to complement the MASSIVE Teacher Pack blog post that I wrote for this unit. Be sure to check that post out to learn more!

Show Links:

Learn more about how I organized a virtual running event for my school's community during the spring lockdown of 2020.

👀 Show Notes: https://thephysicaleducator.com/2020/11/17/planning-a-virtual-running-event/

The purpose of this episiode is to provide you with an overview of how to plan, organize, and run a virtual running event that can help strengthen your school's community should your school move to distance learning in the future. Here are the learning targets I built the episode around:

1. I understand the value of maintaining/strengthening connections within my school’s community in a distance learning setting.
2. I know what to take into consideration as I plan a virtual running event for my school’s community.
3. I can create an action plan that will help me successfully host a virtual running event at my school.