In 2014, I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the purpose of physical education from the perspective of the PE teacher. The conclusion was, that there was little consistency in teacher perceptions, thinking seemed muddled and unclear. In the subsequent years, as my good friend Mr Moorhouse can attest to, I have bleated on about that same question ‘What is the purpose of PE?’. Recently, this has come back to the fore, with questions around Joe Wicks professing himself as the ‘Nations PE Teacher’, in response I have asked the same question to a number of people and again there is significant disparity in responses. This makes me consider a second question; can we be effective teachers of physical education, if we don’t truly understand (or aren’t absolutely clear on) the purpose? As Patrick Lencioni tells us, clarity is everything.
In this blog, I am going to attempt to articulate my thoughts on the purpose of PE.
“Ensure that all pupils, have and can apply the knowledge needed to lead a healthy and active lifestyle”
If I was to narrow down my PE philosophy in to a sentence, it would be the above, however I feel the need to break this down somewhat. Firstly, by knowledge I mean both procedural and declarative knowledge, I mean specific skills, I mean understanding. Secondly, by apply, I mean to contextualise that knowledge e.g perform a pass in a football game or create a balanced diet plan. The next think to consider, is what knowledge do they need to achieve that aim? Well I believe this falls in to three broad categories:
- Sports knowledge (social and cultural influences and specific sports)
- Fitness knowledge (Types of fitness, types of training, etc, I think Joe Wicks fits in here)
- Health knowledge (Anatomy & physiology, diet, physical, mental and social health)
I feel like the inclusion of health and fitness knowledge explains itself, but why sport? Many will argue that PE isn’t about sport, many will argue that sport is the vehicle for learning, that learning should happen through sport. And I agree, you can learn non-sport skills through PE and sport, like resilience and communication, but these should be a focus across all subjects in the curriculum, they aren’t limited to being developed through PE. I often feel that we, as PE professionals, try to justify our existence in the curriculum by citing the development of these skills, when in fact knowledge on sport, health and fitness is critical knowledge in itself. That knowledge is so critical, that it justifies inclusion in the curriculum on its own.
We want students to continue playing sport throughout their lives, to do that, we need to give them experiences in a range of sports, so they can make informed choices about sports they do and don’t like. We need to consider our students and our context, we need to think carefully about which sports we leave out and which sports we teach at what time of the year. We want students to understand the knowledge required and we want them to be able to apply that knowledge to the sport. I’m conscious that I don’t want to talk too much about curriculum design, but I’m also not convinced by the notion that skills such as catching are transferable and as such I will always teach specific sports. I will caveat my thinking on sport, by saying I am predominantly talking about a secondary curriculum. I am very lucky to work at an all-through school and during the primary phase we focus on fundamental and specialised movements and physical literacy. These foundations are critical and can and should be revisited regularly, however my purpose remains the same. In my opinion, students who have the procedural and declarative knowledge in a specific sport are more likely to continue that sport outside of school. Why? Self-determination theory (Dan Pink’s thinking on this is brilliant) says so, it tells us that being competent at something, motivates us to do it! In fact, I question why we shy away from saying we teach children about sport.
It’s also important that students enjoy PE and build a positive relationship with physical activity and sport. That doesn’t mean that we should just play games, remember enjoyment can come from overcoming a challenge, learning something new or releasing some endorphins from a high octane lesson!
PE lessons themselves are, in my opinion, on a knife-edge. Whereas we were once at the forefront of teaching pedagogy with modelling, assessment and questioning, I now see moving cones to ‘demonstrate progress’, booklets with pages of assessment criteria but little or no impact and incessant box ticking. We need to stick to the basics, in our lessons students should be active, for as long as possible, appropriately challenged and learning. We demonstrate progress by the students getting better and we use assessment to support students getting even better, this doesn’t need to be written because not all knowledge that students are learning in PE can be written. I work with an excellent head of music, his students don’t always do a great deal of writing but do you know how I know students are making progress in his lessons? Because of what they produce, because of how they perform, because of what they can tell me about different composers and because they can pick types of stringed instruments from a piece of music that I didn’t even know existed.
Trust that our subjects knowledge is critical, trust that a student enjoying our subject doesn’t devalue it and trust that you can demonstrate progress without a pen or 12 section assessment system.
I’ll repeat again what I believe to be the purpose of PE; “Ensure that all pupils, have and can apply the knowledge needed to lead a healthy and active lifestyle”. I was criticised for two parts of that statement recently. The first was ‘ensure’, unfortunately I’m never going to aim for any less than 100%, so ensure has to be there. The second, was that I shouldn’t impress or force ‘that lifestyle’ on anyone, however if that you haven’t got your health, what have you got?
