Standard 4 Solutions: Knowing which of your students choose to be active

Don't miss the latest episode of HPE Radio! Join Jordan Manley and Greg Dryer as they break down the new SHAPE America Standard 4. This is a must-listen for any HPE educator. Listen now and level up your teaching! #HPERadio #SHAPEAmerica #HPE

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We're looking at specifically at solutions for teachers and the phrase that jumped out

(00:17):
of the new standard for is as per the title.
Note that teachers are expected or required or obliged. I'm not sure how forceful that will be.
But it's recommended that teachers know which students choose to engage in physical activity.
So this really speaks to probably my favourite quote, which is from a Swedish guy called

(00:48):
Mikael Krinnyssted. And I like this because it's just so straightforward.
So we've been talking for many, many years around what the purpose of PE is.
And before we dive into the standards, I think it's probably worth coming up a level and thinking,
what are we trying to do every day where we go to work and you're working across the country

(01:12):
with thousands and thousands of young people and they take part in their PE, they pick up PE
credits depending on what grade they're in. What are we trying to do? What is the outcome?
Because the outcome is probably not getting the grade, getting the credit rather. I've never
spoken to a pre-service or an in-service teacher and they tell me that, you know,

(01:35):
what really motivates them is young people getting their credits. We are in the business of
introducing kids to this magical world that is physical activity and the real, real benefits
that that can bring to a person's life. And so Mikael Krinnyssted said, the only real sustainable
aim of PE is that kids want to do more PE. Now, I would probably broaden that as per the title and

(02:02):
the language in the standard, they engage in physical activity. So I would probably say
the only real sustainable aim for PE is that young people want to be more physically active.
So that brings us to a really difficult question because saying that is pretty straightforward.
The difficult question is, what do we need to equip our young people with in order to set them up

(02:28):
for a life that is better in and through physical activity or is better because they've got physical
activity in their life. So just a brief recap, the standards basically say that to answer the
question I just posed, to unlock the world of physical activity, young people need to develop

(02:51):
movement competency. And it's really interesting which movements do they need to develop competency.
And we're not talking about standard one, two and three today, but I'll just throw those out
as questions. And I've always framed, I've always thought of any physical activity as simply being
a movement challenge, a movement problem. I want to walk up a hill, I need to solve the problems

(03:16):
that the hill poses, I need to judge my pace, my stride length, I want to get a ball past a group
of defenders to a given zone, then I need to be able to throw, catch, move, dodge, accelerate,
decelerate, etc. to unlock that puzzle. I hope that makes sense. It's not the key

(03:38):
hot point of today, but I'm just framing it that the kids need to move well enough
to unlock the problems that are in front of them. Similarly, standard two is that they need to apply
knowledge. And you probably can't divorce the thinking with the movement. So if you go back to,

(03:58):
I need to be able to throw and catch, it's probably not just enough, not enough, you need to know who
to throw to, and how to throw to someone so that they can catch, and where to throw to them, etc.
So the knowledge, the applied knowledge, in the example I just give is coupled with the movement
competency and this idea of unlocking the problem. And then standard three talks about

(04:23):
a really good quality physical education program, enables young people to develop the social skills
to connect to people in and through activity. And then we've got the reframed much more prominent,
as Jordan said in his introduction, much more prominent standard four. And I've paraphrased

(04:46):
this and you might challenge this. I've said it's really about the young person building a connection
to activity. And if they build that connection, they are likely to choose to engage in physical
activity, they feel connected, they feel that sense of belonging, as opposed to this belonging.

(05:07):
So I hope that's really clear. And this is the actual wording that they do young people,
the student develops personal skills, identifies personal benefits of movement,
and chooses to engage in physical activity. And just before we move on, a really brief word
on what are the personal benefits of movement. Now, we're all pretty familiar with the

(05:33):
supposed benefits of movement. But I think the insertion of the word personal really gives
it a new dimension. Because this is not saying what you or I think the benefits of movement to
that young person's lives are, is giving them the tools so that they can articulate the benefits
that they get from moving their way. And I've actually taken it from the circle and said,

(06:02):
in this slide, I'm saying that the notion of choosing to engage in physical activity is a
precursor and a prerequisite of developing through the other domains, if we're if we're
comfortable and happy, calling standards one, two, and three domains, the physical domain,
the cognitive domain, and the social domain. And I if we want to extend that language, and we again,

(06:27):
we're happy with it, this is around what young people are feeling. This is the psychosocial,
sometimes I would refer to the affective domain around affection, feelings, and emotions. So
those emotions drive behaviors. We do what we love, we do what we feel positive about. And if

(06:50):
there's a choice, we're always going to go with the things that we feel a strong sense of connection
to. So we're not going to develop as movers, especially you got one hour of phys ed a week,
you're not going to develop necessarily the movement competency within that time. But if they
choose to do more, they will. And similarly, they're not going to develop as thinkers, they're

(07:14):
not going to develop and be able to apply knowledge if they don't have plenty of opportunity to apply
that knowledge. And similarly, building those relationships in and through activity. And then
what the outcomes are, how they choose to be active. That's the personal decision, as well as
why they choose to be active. So how do we are going to keep coming back to this problem? How

(07:39):
do we know which students choose to be active? And there's a lot of insight data that's required
there. There's a lot of understanding. And it is, you know, really challenging to really,
really have that knowledge at our fingertips. Just a very brief word on standard four is really
encapsulating genuinely global conversations that happen in our space and in our subject area.

(08:05):
Lots of talk about physical literacy, lots of talk around meaningfulness through movement,
meaningful PE. And the language that shape of deliberately use draws upon that the language
which is prominent in both of those conversations overlapping conversations I should add. So in

(08:25):
physical literacy, certainly here in the United Kingdom, we've refrained it as a person's relationship
with physical activity, which is shaped by, well, first of all, it is a personal relationship,
exactly the language around shape that shape you're using, that is around the values that we

(08:46):
give to physical activity, how much we enjoy it, and the meaning that we take from it. And not all
of them need to be present. You know, there's a really complex relationship between enjoyment and
meaning. I could find something really meaningful, but not necessarily enjoy it in the sense that I've
got a big smile on my face. I'm thinking like, I don't know, some endurance running, I ran a 10K,

(09:13):
now granted, I'm not a 12 year old kid in grade seven or eight. But you know, I ran a 10K and
there were times when it really didn't feel very enjoyable. But boy, there was a lot of meaning
around that. And I really value the experience moving on because I don't want to dwell on this for
too long around movement. When people choose to be physically active, and again, we've got the same

(09:35):
themes here, they need to be able to move, they need to be able to connect to the people in the
space and the place, they need to think to understand what's going on. And they need to feel great in
that space. And if we go to the five, sometimes there's additional features that have been added,
but the work from Didgeridoo, Neen Cronin and Tim Fletcher, and lots of other people who are

(10:01):
writing around this, you know, they're talking about what's personally relevant, what is fun.
Personally, I would challenge the word fun, but that's recently been expanded to be delight and
to joy. So we're looking for young people to have delightful and joyful experiences,
where they can socially interact, where they can develop competency, and they can develop

(10:23):
and they can meet challenges. I mentioned walking up a hill or scoring against the defense,
whatever it is, I can overcome challenges. Now, in the many of the conversations I've had with
Jordan, he does a lot of fantastic work where his students begin, and I know Jordan's reframed the
language a little bit, but they begin to articulate what is their relationship with an activity.

(10:49):
And this leads us to a really interesting point that activity preference is not just
what which activities I like doing, but how I might engage with those activities. So if we take a
simple, let's just take basketball. Okay, there is a clear difference between the ecology, the

(11:10):
environment, and the demands of 5v5 high school varsity basketball, compared to 3v3 on court
basketball outdoor court inner in a park or a public space, compared to shooting hoops on my own.
Now, each of those have different levels of motivation and different relationships. So you

(11:34):
might well have kids who just like shooting hoops on their own, because they just love the challenge.
They love the challenge, can I get high percentage of free throws? 3v3 might be all about the
final, it might be about a social interaction, it might be about connecting with the environment.
And, you know, kids in varsity, they've probably got lots of challenges, they probably really enjoy

(11:58):
or thrive on developing motor competency and extending their skillset, etc. So this is a
really personal journey. Again, that magic word that appears in standard 4. This is personal,
therefore, we need to know our students as well as we can. So if we take these ideas,
and in standard 4, those are people who have had a chance to look at it, the website is really clear,

(12:24):
you can click through, you can see the breakdown, the progressive stages of what type of skills
that young people need to learn in order to work towards standard 4. And these are the skills that
are mentioned. They need to set targets, they need to reflect them, they need to review whether
they've met their targets, they need to reflect on activity, meaning in experiences, they need to

(12:49):
begin to analyse those experiences, to review the choices that they make in there, and to begin to
articulate their relationship with physical activity. And having the language to do that
really depends on what is taught, what's the content. So I've put the bullet point here,

(13:11):
where are they exposed to going further and deeper than just saying, how was that? Yeah,
that was fun. Okay, what was fun about it? Can we use those five areas? Was it challenging? Was
that what was fun? Did it give you a sense of self worth? Again, and a whole new different concept?
Did it boost your confidence? Did it make you feel safe? So lots of work to be done here. I'm not,

(13:38):
you know, I'm really, really interested in working collaboratively with teachers to look at how we
extend vocabulary, because the vocabulary represents thinking. And then analysis, we use this really
simple framework. What so what, what if, I think sometimes we might do in a different order, but

(13:59):
what describe what happened? So what, why was that significant? And what if, what if something changed,
if what if something changed, or sometimes sometimes we had a fourth question, what next?
So they're all simple frameworks for that can come into lessons in age appropriate ways to,

(14:19):
to drive and shape teacher student conversations. But then how do we evidence that? And our subject
area is notoriously difficult for recording and evidencing young people's progress. And that's
why we built this tool, MyMove. And indeed in this, in this screenshot here, it's around this

(14:45):
asking the question, how active will you be next week? Well, straight away, that talks to target
setting. And it talks to the overriding objective of physical education, as I framed at the beginning
to be more active. And standard for do we choose to be active? So if I could just briefly by way of
introduction is, and I'm just really quickly going to show you this that MyMove is a really great

(15:14):
solution for working towards standard for it's made up of a student app and a teacher app. And if I
very briefly come out of screen share. So this is what a student will have. And we talk about what
is physical activity? Well, it's about intentionality. So we asked the young people on MyMove, or we

(15:35):
give them the opportunity to record which activity they did. And I'm just going to move me out of
the way. How long did they do it for? So they begin to journal reflect, review, who did they do it
with? I did it with friends, where today it was at school, but we capture in, you know, remember

(15:55):
the language, choose to be physically active. It doesn't say choose to be physically active at school,
where there's offered limited choice. But maybe we're choosing to be physically active in our free
time. Hey, that's got to be a win for PE. If we know which students are active in our free time,
we've got great data to celebrate our successes and to advocate for our work. How does the activity

(16:18):
feel? So now we're beginning to get into reflection, exactly the language is standard for. And it might
be I met a challenge, I lifted a new point B, okay, a particular performance oriented post.
I finished recording the activity. I have my reviews are here. Oh, forgive me. Reviews are here.

(16:43):
Lots of other functionality in here, including dashboards and gamification points. And then as
far as the teacher is concerned, teacher can log in, they can see which students are choosing to
be physically active, physically active, really straightforward. This is our dashboard. And then
in here, we've got all of our students. If I go last activity, you can see the fitness training

(17:06):
I just posted in real time. So you can literally see which students are choosing to be active today,
or over a weekend. And I'm just going to click in here. This is the activity that I just posted.
I probably need to refresh. And then this is all the students comments, you can see how they're
reflecting, whether reviewing, are they applying new language, etc. There's a little bit more to it

(17:31):
than that. I'm wary of the time I started off saying we want 20 minutes, I've presented for 20
minutes. So I'm going to just jump back to here. If you want to find out more, you can email me
personally on here, Greg at my move app. Or if you want to talk to any of the team, just email team
at my move app. And I'm going to be quite there and hand it back to Jordan. I'm going to stop sharing.

(17:58):
Yeah, thank you, Greg. And these webinars are set up for our membership to be able to log in
live. And so I do want to model our hopes for some of our future webinars to have a little bit of
back and forth Q&A at the end. So while you were talking, I did write down a couple of questions
that we can just jump through pretty quickly. One thing I know that is on the minds of a lot of

(18:24):
teachers is that it does feel quite contrary to the way that we were taught to be teachers,
to monitor a standard that can be so qualitative. Rather than the quantitative, like I can assign
a number to this, how do you get a teacher to make that mind shift?

(18:45):
Yeah. But we had a conversation which I think is recorded on HPE collective around what is
success in PE. And if I understand your question correctly, it is a mind shift to start, as I said
on that initial slide that Michael Quinich said, that we are winning, our students are winning if

(19:08):
they want to do more. And if we put that into the bigger context of the challenges that young
people are facing in 2024 and the concerns around mental well-being, the concerns around physical
well-being that adults have, I'm not sure necessarily all young people have that. But

(19:31):
this shift from, and if I understand you correctly, the quantitative measurements
that might be around fitness testing or how many push-ups can you do in a minute,
I think we can really use the opportunity to ask how relevant is that to young people's lives?
Is that really opening them to a world of joyful physical activity? Let's face it,

(19:58):
most people who are in our subject area, our lives have been better with physical activity
in it. So setting the goal, and it is an ambitious goal, I would argue it's more ambitious and it's
much more challenging to get every one of your kids to get that positive relationship with physical
activity than it is to show improved fitness testing over the course of X months. That's

(20:23):
relatively straightforward. But at what cost might that come? How do we know if we're turning
young people off of physical activity by having a real emphasis on aspirational fitness or
progression through fitness? But if kids are switched on to activity, they are much, much
more likely to seek out fitness promoting activities as they go through adolescence and

(20:47):
into young adulthood. So the relationship between what their school experiences are,
I was reading a paper on the other day that was saying that there's some really,
really strong research that adolescents, especially who are regularly active,
are much, much more likely to stay active. It's not impossible that someone can come to
activity in their 30s. But if you're active at 14, 15, and you're gaining pleasure and benefits,

(21:14):
clear benefits that you can articulate, then that becomes a really important part of your life. So
I think there's a robust case for it. I'm not sure I've necessarily answered the part of how do
you bring about that mindset shift? That might be above my pay grade. Yeah. You know, and you just
mentioned the ability to articulate. And one thing that I jotted down while you were talking is,

(21:41):
is how do we develop that model to have students be able to capture what they need in order to
articulate it? And I get to work with high schoolers. So I do feel like I have a little bit
of an advantage there just because they have a little bit better speaking skills, writing skills,
maybe even thinking skills. And so one thing that MyMove does as a tool that can support teachers,

(22:07):
allows students to kind of curate a little bit of a profile of the activities that they've done. And
then that then turns into the job of the PE teacher to put resources in front of them to be able to
synthesize what's in MyMove and then take that into some type of presentation format, whether it's
a live presentation, or they're recording a short video about themselves. But those conversations,

(22:31):
even though they're very one way presentations toward me, sometimes I get an opportunity to talk
back to my students during them, but just hearing them talk about activities that they have had the
opportunity to do, whether it's in a PE class or outside of school, really informs me so much about
the depth of their relationship that at this point in their life, what experiences have held so

(22:56):
much meaning that they might continue it later. And so I really think that that's a really
important thing for teachers to start to consider what standard for is how do we collect and monitor
student data with this and how does that data speak back to the student? Yeah, and I would only add to

(23:18):
that, but it can also be integrally related to instructional content and teaching and learning.
And so you were talking about the age that you work with, but maybe for younger children and
young people, maybe for high schoolers, challenges around, we're really diving into

(23:41):
what you feel when you are moving in this type of activity area. Now, I'm always reminded of our
friend Aaron Beatley's go to phrase that young people don't care what you know until they know
that you care. And so by expressing or by showing that you care about what they feel about is

(24:01):
automatically a really inclusive reach out, which is a very, very powerful message. Then learning to
learn into new vocabulary. There's so many different teaching strategies that we could do that,
like off the top of my head, when you click your, it was great emoji, then I want one sentence that
doesn't use the word fun, but be more analytical. What was it that made that activity great? Or we

(24:27):
can use word banks or we can use word selection, if by other means, or use a keyword around
joy or delight or flow or any of the other emotional words or anxiety or tensions and let them put
that into context. And then straight away, you're beginning very easily. You can see that data,

(24:50):
what your class responded, and that we can look at in a relationship between behaviors and vocabulary
and being able to articulate. And it's super accountable for the kids is validating for the
kids. If you have to report to parents or highlight to any other stakeholder in your school,