Evolution of Movement

Starting with the Why?

As I begun this learning journey my hope was to have a better understanding on how I could meet the needs of my students beyond current assessment practices.  By no means am I an assessment guru, but applying ‘academic’ assessment practices to the world of movement has always been of interest to me.  Evolving from the ‘number of times’ to the process of ‘getting better’ has been a struggle capturing this for myself, as a mark and making the learning real for the students.  Questions were numerous but with some guidance @jsetzkorn and conversation @edaigle I landed on “How might I get a better understanding what students are learning beyond observational/anecdotal and summative data, so that this understanding helps us to meet the students learning needs in the moment”.  Conceptually I really wanted students to see that learning movement skills and strategies is a process of repetition and error reduction.  What I wanted to figure out was “how I could help them figure out their next move in their journey in that moment?” time to reflect

Evolution takes time

I really love to learn…but it really takes time to apply that learning in a meaningful way, especially with so many moving parts.  From students, to schedules, to colleagues the minutes of the day get away. The best laid out plans are often pushed aside for the rigour and mechanics of the school day.   Unfortunately my ‘big’ action, plicker magnets still lies unwrapped on a table at home, the magnetic whiteboard in budget purgatory and my colleagues left wondering ‘what is he doing anyways for Cohort21?’ It’s not to say that I have not been doing any work. I just finished the second new movement unit that was predominately student driven with much success.  Smiles on the faces and the collaboration around a singular purpose was at times magic.  But leaves me wondering about the students, ‘did they get that doing stuff you might not be good at takes risk and in the end builds some courage’ and ‘did they understand that you’re not always going to like who and what you are doing but you persevere and do it anyways”.  And for me, what’s my role in that learning; experience provider, reflective coach or summative observer? My hunch is all three, and making it real for the students takes time.

Physical Literacy continues…

There is always a ton of work to do.  For me it’s critical work as I continue to build meaningful quality movement experiences into the lives of the students I serve.  The reality is as movement educators we are facing some of the biggest challenges of our careers as we strive to equalize the movement experience with the academic rigour.  Concerns of the health and wellness of our students continues to grow in the school space and with that increasing opportunities to make the connection between movement and wellness.