Observation

So far I have attended a number of physical education classes and as such, have
seen no assessment of the students. Many of the phys ed teachers seem
more concerned over the lack of student ability than actually devising a
way to help them and assess them. In one of the classes (grade 11) the
teacher just let them play volleyball 6 on 6. Need I say that the
students could barely string 2 passes together and seemed bored and
frustrated. The teacher insisted that they didn't want to be taught the
skills and that they simply wanted to play. I also observed a class where
one student was physically active for only 5 minutes out of the 35 I
watched for. It seems as though each teacher really wants the best for
the students but large class sizes and poor teaching styles didn't gel.
The students were not given a chance to progress and all to often only the
practice and command style were used. The teachers need more information
on other techniques of teaching to include every student in the class. In
fact, Bo and I were quizzed in a meeting with other phys ed teachers as to
how this can be done.
Games that Sandy Gibbons showed us to start the classes are amazingly effective
and really get the students interacting. It would be great to be armed
with more of these for our real practicums.
We had to sub for one of the teachers as the sub cancelled on him and luckily for us we were under the Principal's supervision. What I noticed was that students were very quick to dismiss
us and believed they could just walk out of class when they wanted to.
One student was following a warm up orchestrated by another student. He
said that if he was made to run anymore then he would walk out. How do we
deal with that as a teacher?? Its all well and good saying that he will
not walk out or there will be repercussions but how do we engaged them so
this doesn't happen? Also how do we deal with the student cockiness and
arrogance that has set in at grade 11? How do we help them understand
that we actually care about their future and that is why we are going to
do the job? Some of the teachers had no problem dealing with this while others just dismissed the problem altogether. It seems as though many of the teachers want to create great lessons but do not have the time to do so.