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.
