Are the Steven\u2019s or Ramesh\u2019s or Eva\u2019s and Marie\u2019s in your classes ever even?<\/p>\n
No.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re all individuals and need to be treated as such. We can\u2019t simple scratch a start line in the sand and start our teaching from there. Steven is not starting from the same line as Eva and even if he is there\u2019s no guarantee that they start together every week. We know that children learn at different speeds. They also learn different things. So how do you challenge them all?<\/p>\n
Firstly, think about drawing different start lines. We are very good at extending children at\u00a0 the end of the lesson. We set extension task but not extension starts and we need to think about beginnings and not just endings.<\/p>\n
Think Hollywood. How many films start with a \u201cOnce upon a time?\u201d How may end with a \u201cHappily ever after?\u201d None (or very few that I can think of). Why? Because it takes too long to tell the whole story every week. And a lot of the details are irrelevant.<\/p>\n
Lessons are the same. We don\u2019t need the details every week. We need to st<\/em>art the story from the most relevant place. Imagine rewinding the film to a point that everyone in the audience remembers? Most of the audience would get frustrated and bored.<\/p>\n Why is a PE lesson any different?<\/p>\n It isn\u2019t. So let\u2019s stop using the rewind button and stop looking for our once upon a times. Instead let\u2019s acknowledge that there are no even Stevens.<\/p>\n That said, it\u2019s not realistic to draw 30 different start lines in every lesson. Instead, we can take some averages. What we can\u2019t (or at least shouldn\u2019t) do is take a class average.<\/p>\n So how can we begin?<\/p>\n I\u2019ll use a basketball lesson as an example.<\/p>\n How frequently do we start with the shot rather than the part of the game where the shot takes place?<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take the set shot as our example. We often start on a cone and ask our students to take two steps and then layup. How often does that happen in a game? How frequently are we a perfect distance from the basket with no opposition? Has Steven done the layup before? Or Ramesh or Eva and Marie? Do they all need a cone as their start line?<\/p>\n In the past, I\u2019ve started with the game and three start lines. Steven\u2019s wearing a red bib. He\u2019s on the first start line. He can\u2019t be marked closer than a mere and when he thinks he can score he can shout \u201cshooting\u201d and have a free shot. This teaches him to get in the right position to score and then he gets his two steps and a layup.<\/p>\n Eva and Ramesh are wearing yellow bids. They can be closely marked and defenders can try and block their shots from a metre away once they have called \u201cshooting.\u201d They are on start line two. They still get a chance to layup but the pressure is higher than that on Steven.<\/p>\n Marie is wearing a green bid. She get no help from the game but can still perform a layup if she can get in the right place. She\u2019s on start line three.<\/p>\n So in one game we have three start points, and I\u2019m sure you can think of others. The key is not looking to even everything up for the Steven\u2019s, Ramesh\u2019s, Eva\u2019s and Marie\u2019s in your classes. Look, instead, for different start lines.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Are the Steven\u2019s or Ramesh\u2019s or Eva\u2019s and Marie\u2019s in your classes ever even? No. They\u2019re all individuals and need to be treated as such. We can\u2019t simple scratch a start line in the sand and start our teaching from there. Steven is not starting from the same line as Eva and even if heRead more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":565,"featured_media":25,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-challenge"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/565"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87\/revisions\/88"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/physed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}