Inquiry in PE

Student Teachers Josh Stanley and Matthew Maccagno with Tammy Berry and Dean Schmeichel ~Physical Education grade 4-9

What could an inquiry unit in PE look like? At CSS, we challenged all 600 students from grade 4 to grade 9 to explore the question, “To what extent does training affect performance?” Each student was given the opportunity to choose a sport or activity that they were interested in, and then create a plan to improve a specific skill in that sport or activity. How the students chose to use their time over the course of the unit was entirely up to them. They had access to all the resources that CSS has for physical activity.

The rubric was created collaboratively between teachers and all the students in the school over the first two days of the unit.

Here’s what it looked like daily while students were working on their individual project:

For the most part, students were excited to have the freedom to work on something that they were interested in. However, not everything was perfect. If we were to do an inquiry unit in PE again, we would structure it differently. Some students saw this unit as an opportunity to play a sport against their friends, and as a result were measuring their results at the same time, against each other. This left these students with multiple manipulated variables, and affected the accuracy of their recorded data.

Pros	Cons	Student Feedback
Students were equally or more engaged than they would be in a traditional PE class Students were given ownership over their own learning Students started to understand the role of statistics in sport The focus was on the process rather than the result – anyone could be successful	Safety concerns – available space Initial setup was lengthy – lots of talking We were uncomfortable giving students so much freedom in PE Some students took the unit as a time for freeplay	A mix of students enjoyed the unit A surprisingly significant number of students said they could apply what they had learned to their sport outside of PE There was a mix of students in terms of their preference for being told what to do in PE versus having the freedom to choose

If we were to do this unit again, we would be sure to clearly explain the importance of eliminating human error from their data. In the future we would try to incorporate more structure into this project, while increasing the student’s activity time. A potential way that we could do this would be to start a unit by teaching the student’s pertinent skills, and then implementing our inquiry question. Students could then pick a specific skill they had learned in that unit and find ways to improve themselves. At the conclusion of the unit, students could be brought back into a game scenario and then try to transfer their improved skill to the game itself. This would keep all students working on the same activity, and would limit safety concerns. We would also work with a smaller group: 50 students proved to be quite challenging to manage in the space available.