My driving question has been through a long journey these past eight weeks. It began as “How can we do PE online?” and for a while, I stubbornly thought it could remain that. When I finally admitted to myself that I sounded more like a caveman and less like a graduate student conducting research, my DQ then began a wild ride with the following considerations:
-Can PE teachers and coaches improve their instruction and facilitate active learning with new tech tools? -How can we effectively incorporate technology into PE and coaching to enhance student learning? -How can we effectively incorporate technology into PE and coaching at the secondary level to make our students more motivated and active learners? -How can the incorporation of technology in PE lesson design increase student efficacy? (something about lifelong learners!) -What are the systems for students tracking what they're doing health-wise which will transfer from classroom to distance learning? Doing routine enough to become classroom procedure Then I began to think about three research questions in relation to my capstone project. I want my capstone project to be a resource for secondary PE teachers for “How to Tech in PE,” including digital tools for youth, high school collegiate athletics. The goal is to make digital learning and effective implementation of technology in physical education and coaching more tangible for physical educators and coaches everywhere. Right now I'm hoping my DQ and research questions lend themselves to this goal. They are currently as follows (though evidently it can always change at any moment!)... DQ: What tools + procedures can a PE program put into place that will easily transition to distance education and support students to develop lifelong habits? RQ1: How can the incorporation of technology in PE lesson design increase student efficacy and create lifelong learners? RQ2: Which tools support a student who prefers individual exercise routines vs a student who needs the social aspect? RQ3: Which tech tools and strategies will allow youth, high school and collegiate athletic programs to effectively teach year-round?
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I decided to take a break from the DQ stuff and write about transliteracy today instead. “Transliteracy is the ability to read, listen to, synthesize and apply what we gather across different platforms” (1). When I think about students demonstrating transliteracy, I think of a specific example that applied to me when I was in school. I think about all of the film and video production classes that I took in high school and college. Video production requires effectively writing a script, working a camera, choosing what shots/visuals to include, and considering when to incorporate titles, dialogue or possible captions. There is a ton of creative freedom in video production, but one must be sufficiently transliterate to pull it off. It makes me wonder about what is offered in NVUSD – Do we have video production classes for or students in high school? (I genuinely don’t know, but I can tell you we did not at my old school.)
I was a video production/media studies major in college (back when I was still trying to find my path in this world), but I think the skills I cultivated then contribute to my teaching and my general technical abilities today. That’s because making videos helped me become more transliterate! I hope for NVUSD students who are passionate about video production, we can provide them with this ever-so-important opportunity in education.
My DQ in its current state: “How can we effectively incorporate technology into PE and coaching at the secondary level to make our students more motivated and active learners?
My end user: PE Teachers and coaches like me! I have an idea of what I’d like my capstone to look like --a Website with resources for “How to tech in PE and coaching.” These resources would be applicable both to the classroom and for distance learning. My capstone would include the most effective applications and tech tools PE teachers are using in the classroom to enhance learning. It includes examples of innovative lesson plans which implement the use of technology in middle and high school PE. It teaches how to use the most popular and effective tech tools for athletic coaching. It shares tech tools which guide and motivate students to continue to learn about lifestyle and health from home. So I have a DQ and I have an idea of what I want my final product to be, but I’m not exactly sure how to go about doing my action research to get there… While reading the Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg, some of the methods of data collection seemed like they might be able to apply to my research.
Each week (I think) my DQ is becoming more solid. Looking forward to continuing to gain clarity on my plan of action (research)! John M. Keller’s ARCS instructional design model "identifies four essential components for creating motivating instruction…”
Attention: Strategies for arousing and sustaining curiosity and interest Relevance: Strategies that link to learners’ needs, interests, and motives Confidence: Strategies that help students develop positive expectation for successful achievement Satisfaction: Strategies that provide extrinsic and intrinsic reinforcement for effort (1) When I think about using this ID model in PE, I think of the challenge of creating student buy-in when it comes to exercise and fitness. Keeping ARCS instructional design model in mind, the first step would be to get their attention. A video hook could be effective in arousing interest, or even something as simple as a question posed out loud to the class “Do you think your decisions regarding health and fitness made today can affect how long you live for?” followed by a Think, Pair, Share. The next step would be to make the content relevant. Continue a class discussion which gets students thinking about their family, friends, loved ones, and so on… who all have varying degrees of “healthy lifestyles.” Who do you know who is older and still physically active? What do you think makes one person more healthy than the other? One of my major goals in teaching and coaching is always instilling confidence in my students and athletes. In order to get students to feel successful in an area that many naturaly will not, is to set REALISTIC expectations. Improvement, improvement, improvement. Everybody is created differently… Some people are much better than math at others, some people are more naturally athletic. There is no “right answer” or “passing score” when it comes to fitness. When it comes to exercising, satisfaction is the easy part. I am always preaching to students the physical and emotional benefits of exercise. Your brain will create endorphins which make you happier and your body feel better! You will have an easier time doing day-to-day physical tasks. Food will taste better. You will sleep better. As you age, you will greatly reduce the risk of injury and illness. These are all the natural consequences of physical activity, or the intrinsic reinforcement. grading students on their effort will be an extrinsic reinforcement. I can also award additional positive consequences for those students who gave excellent effort, such as a “no dress pass” or water bottle. My driving question… How can we do PE online? I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now… This is something I care about and am quite interested in doing research on. I think there is a need for it, especially if we return to distance learning in the fall. Even if we go back to campus, I think incorporating technology into PE classrooms can be a good thing and is something I am hoping to do more of. I was also initially thinking my capstone project could be not only a resource for secondary PE teachers for “How to tech in PE,” but have tools for high school and college coaches and athletic programs. So where does my dilemma unfold? I’m not sure how to begin designing my action research. I think my driving question is centered more around teachers and coaches than students… How do I go about doing the research? I think I need to find some sort of PE teacher forum... (1) *The ARCS Model of Motivational Design originally developed by John M. Keller (1979, 1983). Adapted by Steven J. McGriff (1999). drive.google.com/file/d/0B1w1JOh5kTmMaVNud0Zua25DcE0/view
Considering how students make sense of new information is so important for effective teaching. After reading Dervin, Baggio and Clark this morning, I can’t help but think about my own teaching and reflect on how I can improve, as well as what I might already be doing right. Dervin talks about individual levels of understanding and qualitative research… these concepts understand the individual as essential to forming understandings. Similarly, Baggio writes about constructivist learning theory, which emphasizes the willingness, readiness, and autonomy of the learner… When teaching something new in PE, I always strive to have my students learn as through activity or gameplay. Sometimes that can look like classmates helping less experienced classmates to understand the more intricate details once gameplay has started. I generally try to spend as little time as possible frontloading students with the most important/basic concepts for a given game/activity, before letting them get out there to experience it in real time. Sometimes putting a big pause on the game is necessary to bring the class back together for a teachable moment, but now students are able to apply that new lesson to something they’ve actually just experienced. Both Baggio and Clark reveal the importance of effective visual imagery for learning. I believe in this deeply for PE. Verbally explaining new concepts can only be so effective (or not), but when we include whiteboard diagrams, poster board visuals, video learning, or student modeling/demonstrating, students can now very directly see the achievable outcome and try to replicate them. Connecting Dervin, Baggio and Clark: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-KWmVv9LvlaqiNTZmBbydIGcDi2GJdJH3TVX7I_rjdk/edit Wow! Brenna Dervin’s chapter “From the Mind’s Eye of the User: The Sense-Making Qualitative-Quantitative Methodology” is pretty difficult to make sense of. One might even call it educational jargon... but I will do my best to share MY understanding of the article.
Dervin is not preaching facts, but instead is revealing academic theory posed by various studies on sense-making, and condensing those studies into a very dense chapter. She takes the information presented in various studies and continues to pose questions related to cognition and sense-making. Throughout the chapter, a major focus seems to be the role of human interaction and understanding information: “humans by continuing dialogue and sharing of personal observations do arrive at always limited but more stable observations” (Dervin 63). Similarly, she reveals the individual’s role in understanding new information: “sense-making does not assume that the individual is situated at cultural/historical moments in time-space and that culture […] Nevertheless, sense-making also assumes that the individual’s relationship to these moments and the structures that define them is always a matter of self-construction, no matter how non-individualistic the person or the time-space may seem” (67). Another way she frames the individual vsstructural levels of understanding is with the terms qualitiative vs quantitative approaches to research. Qualitative entails the individual’s role and all their biases in defining new information, while quantitative looks at new information from a structural standpoint. Ultimately, Dervin defines sense-making as “explicitly both qualitative and quantitative […] systematic qualitative research, an approach with qualitative sensitivity which is amendable to the systematic power of quantitative analysis (81). If I were to attempt to share this reading with a high school class, I might ask each student to pull 3-5 quotes from the reading and add them to a class-wide google doc (or padlet page!). Students should pick statements from the reading they can actually understand; quotes that they would be able to summarize in their own words. Then I’d have students get into groups of four and try to make sense out of the giant collage of (hopefully understandable) quotes from the reading, and collaborate on writing a short paragraph in which they utilize at least three quotes from the collage. Well…. I have always done well in school and enjoy reading new material applicable to my classes and career, but I have also always struggled with intensely theoretical academia. I’ve avoided philosophy classes my whole life for this reason… I cannot wait to read my fellow cohort member’s interpretations of this reading. I hope they shed some light and can “make some sense” out of this for me. Thank you! We are in unprecedented times. Schools districts are needing to make important decisions on the fly. A lot of good questions are being asked, like "what exactly do we want distance learning to look like?" Anybody who has taken an online course can form some kind of idea in their brain as to what a middle or high school distance learning math or history class might be like.
But what about physical education? As a PE teacher, it feels like I've been asked this question a thousand times during quarantine. I've relied mostly on video learning for students to partake in bodyweight workouts and fitness focused lessons. But what other methods of instruction can we implement in an online physical education course? That's what I hope to tackle. |
About Dustin Green:High School PE Teacher Archives
March 2021
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