My Journey to Improve the Revision Lessons I Deliver


Sitting down after A level results day last year reflecting on the previous year I found myself disappointed with the results. It was my first year teaching AS level PE and I had the advantage of only having to teach a class of three students, so I had hoped that these students would have achieved higher grades than they did. They achieved one C grade and two D grades, when I had hoped they would all achieve C grades.

This lead to me reflecting on where I felt I had gone wrong, what I could change and what I could do better that was going to have a positive effect on student outcomes. Therefore this year I have really focused on my theory teaching and have had my performance management observations with my AS PE class to measure the progress I have made within my teaching and learning here. This has been made even more important by there being eleven students in the class this year and my teaching percentage of the AS level going from one section to two sections and the practical coursework.

One area I identified as needed a large improvement was the revision strategies I deployed. I did a lot of exam questions with this group and although important to look at exam technique I now wish I had looked at a range of strategies to take account of different styles and personal preferences the students had.

I decided to start by spending some time looking at the technique to answer the 10 mark questions, which are the largest questions on the AS PE exam at the end of each section. I had not looked too much at 10 mark questions through the year until after February half term. I felt the need to ensure students were confident in the content before looking at the larger question techniques. I decided to start by throwing the students in at the deep end and giving them a 10 mark question to complete with no work on technique, as a class the average mark was four. We then worked back from this point and focused on the technique students had used to answer the question. Firstly we looked at the question and picked apart everything it had asked and what that meant should be done with the question. We looked at command words in detail to ensure each student was sure exactly what the question was asking. 



A plan was then used to help students with how to structure their answer and ensure that they included everything that was asked of them in the question. It was only then we looked at the content. This proved to have a great impact, students were previously scoring on average four per 10 mark question and we now had an average of six per 10 mark question.



It became quickly evident that students were analysing well, but were missing some of the key basic descriptions of terms, which was limiting their answers in 10 marks questions and worried me for some of the shorter questions in the exam. Therefore I set about trying to ensure students knew basic descriptions for as many of the key terms as possible throughout the course. The first technique I decided to use were mini whiteboards. Each student collected a mini whiteboard at the start of the lesson and at various points throughout the lesson students were asked to describe one of the key terms. I began by using the key terms that we were looking at in the lesson but this quickly grew to random key terms as I found it challenged the students more.

Students were now able to give good basic descriptions of key terms, but when it came to explaining these terms there were some gaps in their knowledge. I called upon the classic game of taboo here to force students to go a little further in their explanations of the key terms. It was used in much the same way as the mini whiteboards, in that at various points throughout the lesson a student was given a key term to explain to the rest of the class. Although this brought about a positive impact on students work, the impact was far smaller than the previous two techniques I had used. Upon reflection it became evident that the impact could be seen with my more able students, but not with my less able students. As a result I realised the revision strategies I decided to use were not differentiated enough to ensure all students were making the required improvements.

Desk writing had been something I had wanted to try for a while; I believed this point was a good opportunity to use this. As a starter I put students into ability groupings and asked them to write on the desks everything they knew about a topic. Students then swapped tables so the more able students sat on the less able students tables and vice versa. The students were then given a choice of three activities; if they felt they had gaps in their knowledge and needed to relearn some of the content they sat with me and we looked over the section; other students were making flash cards and mind maps and testing each other using their flash cards; while the most able students were completing a range of exam questions on the section that were peer marked. Students were free to move between groups as they saw fit within the lesson. We completed a few lessons using similar techniques to this with students having ownership over their revision within the sessions. This made the lessons feel dynamic and students were enthusiastic about their revision.

Being the perfectionist that I am, I am never happy and although the revision strategies I had been using were far more effective than just looking at various exam questions, I felt there was still room for improvement. It was in this quest that I came across the Bulmershe School Toolkit (http://www.bulmershetoolkit.blogspot.co.uk/) Using some of the tips and techniques on this website I was able to create what I believe to be one of the best revision lessons that I have ever delivered.

I started by greeting the students with a list of the topics we had covered this year in the anatomy & physiology section of the AS PE course. They then had to use stickers to traffic light where they felt they were at with their revision in that topic. 
Red sticker = There are gaps in their knowledge and they need to look at this area in detail
Yellow sticker = They know this area but still need to do some revision on it to improve the depth of their knowledge
Green sticker = They are confident in this area and when they complete exam questions in this topic they are getting very good marks

Students then went around a variety of revision stations to test their self assessment of their knowledge on the topic areas.
Station 1 = Descriptions station, where students were given a list of key words that they had to describe or draw. Their partner then had to either state five facts about that key word or create an exam question that was worth a minimum of four marks.
Station 2 = Back to back station, where students sat back to back with their partner and talked for one minute about the topic area they had selected from either the easy, medium or hard lists. Their partner had to write down the key points they had mentioned and at the end provide feedback as to whether they deserved the reward.
Station 3 = Desk writing mind map station, this station was designed for students to get creative and produce a giant mind map across a number of desks about everything they knew about the anatomy & physiology section, each pair came along and added further to the mind map.
Station 4 = Paper chain station, this station involved students selecting a key word and creating one chain with this, then having to write the definition of that key word on another chain, they then had to select another key word that related and do the same for that. This station was all about making links between the key words. Students could select the key words from an easy, medium or hard list.
Station 5 = Exam questions station, the final station involved students selecting an exam question from a variety of topics, they had a minute a mark to answer the question and this was then peer marked by their partner using the 5 in 3 method.

The 5 in 3 method is where no matter how many marks the question is worth they can only get a maximum of five marks, but to get the five marks they must go above and beyond. The mark scheme is as follows:
1 mark  - Student has gaps in their knowledge and has not given enough information about the topic.
2 marks - Student has given information about the topic but has not given enough detail about the topic to meet the needs of the mark scheme.
3 marks - The student would have got full marks for the question
4 marks - The student has gone beyond the level of detail required by the mark scheme
5 marks - The student has included everything in the mark scheme and has answered the question in lots of detail.

To ensure that the whole range of students abilities were catered for the descriptions, back to back and paper chain stations all had three different levels of challenge. Students were also rewarded for challenging themselves, at each station they could earn poker chips according to what level of challenge they took on and how successful they were at the station. At the end of the lesson we revisited the topic sheet so that students could assess the progress they had made for each topic area in addition to if they had been incorrect with any of their self assessments of the topic areas. I was lucky enough to have this lesson observed for my performance management and it was judged as outstanding.

I continued to use variations of this revision lesson for the remainder of the revision lessons up until the exam for both of the sections I taught. I am confident that my students this year have had far superior preparation for their exam than my students last year and as a result am quietly confident that we should have some outstanding grades from this group based upon our assessments of them. In the process the most important thing I have learnt is that I need to ensure my revision sessions are differentiated for my students and also cater for their personal preferences. I was fortunate enough to have a very competitive group who thrived on any type of competition, so I was able to use this as a tool to drive the challenge aspect of my revision lessons.

Using Three Ring as a Homework Tool and Feedback for Parents




Enthusiastically watching the International PE Teach Meet in March, I found myself motivated by Jarrod Robinson's presentation on using Three Ring as an e-portfolio to provide feedback to parents. Being the perfectrionist that I am, I also started thinking about other ways I could use Three Ring. This is when I came up with the idea of using Three Ring as part of the students homework to self assess their performances.

Throuhgout the tennis unit of work I took lots of videos of students performances and recorded feedback students were giving to their peer's in peer assessment tasks. I started using our flip cams to record students work as this enabled me to give students the videos and upload the videos later, but found that the videos did not process on the site properly so it meant that they had to be downloaded before being viewed. I then tried filming with my phone but had the same problem. So I downloadeed the app and filmed from within the app and uploaded directly, which is a much quicker process. Although you have approximately a 10 second pause between uploading one video and being able to start another video, which can be a bit frustrating.

During this unit of work we had a quite well placed parents evening which gave me a brilliant opportunity to discuss with parents about what I would like to do and gain their approval before I uploaded anything onto the website, as I know some parents can be a little funny with things such as this. I then decided to cover my back even further and send a letter our gaining students and parents email addresses, again asking for their permission further to the conversations we had at parents evening, to ensure we had it in writing. Once I had all the email addresses I was able to set homework at the end of the tennis unit using a pre-made sheet getting students to self-assess their work to support our assessment process.

Maths in PE Extra Currcicular Club Session 5 & 6

Keeping with the spirit of summer sports I decided to keep with the cricket theme this week for my Maths in PE extra curricular club, but find an activity that would engage more students. I decided that we would complete a batting challenge, where students get bowled 6 good balls and we work out the average of the runs they gained, giving us a runs per ball figure for the batter. This was quite a simple task for the students meaning all they had to do was add together the amount of runs they gained from the 6 balls and divide by the amount of balls, which was 6.

The popularity of this task was high, which I found pleasing as the bowling challenge had lowered the numbers of students participating, due to it not being that interactive. It has increased so much that I am repeating the activity next week to get more students involved!

Maths in PE Extra Curricular Club Session 3 & 4

I decided to stick with the speed, distance, time triangle and develop it further. This time I made the decision to use the radar gun app for the iPad to measure the speed students were able to bowl a cricket ball over 20m and get the students to work out the time it took for the ball to get there. 

This seemed very simple in principle to me, but it included some difficulties. Firstly, the app measured the speed in km/H, but the distance was measured in meters, so the first obstacle we had to overcome was to convert the distance into km. Once we were had the distance measurements the same we then needed to convert the time measurement from hours down to seconds as it only took a short time for the ball to reach the wicket. It was then we could use the distance, speed and time triangle to get students to work out the time it took for the ball to reach the wicket.

This took the maths teacher and myself a while to work out, so it was not the best of weeks, and it took quite a while to go through this process with each student. If I am going to be honest it was not the most popular as the ratio of the amount of physical activity to maths was heavy on the maths side, this is my opinion prevented our normal pick up of lots of students who watch at first.

Next week unfortunately I have lost the maths teacher to GCSE revision until the maths exam, so I am alone. We are planning to look at batting averages, where students will get six balls bowled to them and we will work out the runs per ball average.

Math's in PE Extra Curricular Club Session 2

The Math's in PE extra curricular club that I have been running on Thursday is growing. This week we had a Rowing challenge. Students had to row 500m and were given a time, from that time they had to work out their speed using the formula.
                 Distance
Speed =  --------------
                   Time

We had nearly 30 students this week so grew our numbers by 10 students from last week which is really encouraging. This was a harder task for the students as they had to work out their time from minutes to seconds and then work out their speed in meters per second (m/s) so we used calculators this week. Next week we are going to get students to work out the Time element of this equation using the Radar Gun app with a Cricket bowling challenge, with the added incentive of house points for the winners!

Embedding BLP into my Practice in PE Lessons Part Two



Recently I had decided to strip back my planning to focus on really embedding Building Learning Power into my planning with a real focus on improving student attainment and engagement. After attending a Guy Claxton lecture on BLP, I raised a question on my own practice. By having BLP as an afterthought in my planning was I in actual fact hindering the development of BLP skills in my PE lessons?

I decided to start by taking a long hard look at my group and the sport we were working on, OAA, more specifically a Unit on Orienteering. I looked at the BLP skills I felt would be important for students to develop within the unit of work along that what content I felt was important. I decided that the two areas of BLP I would focus on during this unit of work were Reciprocity and Reflectiveness. The group needed to improve their ability to work together with all members of the group and their ability to look back over what they have done and be able to improve their performance for next time.

By planning what BLP skills I felt were important to improve as a starting point it meant that I was able to adapt the activities we did to help develop these skills. I started off in my first lesson looking at reflectiveness, we started out by looking at the big picture of what we would cover during this unit and what they could take from their previous units of work to be used in orienteering. We then set about planning how we were going to meet the assessment criteria within the unit. We referred back to where they were in relation to their plan at regular intervals throughout the unit. I also gave them explicit planning time at the start of each task.

With reciprocity we looked at the way in which they worked within groups.  They constantly worked with different people so that by the end of the six lessons they had worked with everyone in the class, this helped with the cohesion, there were complaints at the start but they soon got used to it, it helped that it was a boys group.  We also looked at roles within a team that they had to plan who was going to take on that role, and we swapped roles so that throughout the unit all pupils took on a whole range of roles.

Lots of this is just standard practice, but by having BLP as the focus at the start of the planning process it enabled the learning activities to be focused on not only improving students Orienteering skills but also on developing their BLP skills. I found that the group dynamics improved dramatically and students were able to tackle the Orienteering challenges head on in their small groups and were willing to accept challenges.

How a Maths Teacher and Myself are Trying to Improve Students Numeracy Through a Lunchtime Club



Another twitter inspiration came from @Matt6453 who had started his own Numeracy in PE Extra-Curricular club within his school. Inspired by this I approached a member of the maths department to discuss if they would be interested in doing something similar within our school. As you can imagine they jumped at the chance to make maths fun.

We decided we would start using the successful idea that Matt had used and do a free throw competition where students work out their success percentage with each student getting five free throws each time it was their go. Students did really well working out the percentages quickly within their heads and having the maths teacher there for when it got harder to help them with how to work out the more difficult numbers. We had nearly 20 students at our outside basketball hoops battling the wind to have a go. The best thing was that it managed to capture the interest of a group of our hardest to reach students who are on the positive change programme due to their behaviour within school not being as it should. These students loved it!

Where are we taking it next. This is where we are going to move away from what Matt is doing with his Numeracy in PE club. At our school we are fortunate enough to have a number of rowing machines, which our students love. So we are going to use a 500m rowing challenge to get students to calculate their average speed. I am hopeful that having so many rowers and with the activity being so popular with our students we should be able to get more students involved.

The plan is to then do some work with cricket in the coming weeks with each week a focus on a different maths technique, that's where the maths expert comes in. I would love to do something with skipping also, but am yet to work out what. I must admit I was a little sceptical at first if it would work, but thought I would take a risk and have a go and the initial signs are looking good. The key to its success will be ensuring the activities are fun and accessible and keeping the maths techniques going.