Written Documents And Lesson Organization In The Teaching Of Physical Education

Introduction

When the new education law was in effect at the beginning of the 90´s, there were many great changes in the Spanish educational system. To be precise, in the Physical Education field it was supposed to mean a new way of understanding the processes of teaching, learning and assessment. Traditionally, Physical Education’s quality and efficiency were determined by the amount of physical activity. It was deemed necessary to create and propose new practices that dealt with the teaching of conceptual, procedural, and attitude contents in a more balanced way. Our job was to find a way to organize Physical Education lessons to allow for a well rounded experience. That meant that the structure of our lessons was ruled by pedagogical, rather than by physiological rationale. We proposed the students´ journal to be an aid in the teaching, learning and evaluation processes.

Methods

A collaborative Research-Action group of high school Physical Education teachers worked on it for eight consecutive years. Even though there were different stages along the process, we can summarize their action as follows: the group planned emblematic practices; each teacher developed them in their context; an external observer did a verbal observation, as well as a slide show, of the practice; the group analyzed the practice based on those observations and the students’ journals. The meetings took place once a week. The transcription of each of the meetings includes the investigation data and the different documents (students´ journals, group plans and observations) generated by the process explained.

Results

The results revolve around two questions: on the one hand, the structure uses and functions of the student’s journal in the development of the teaching, learning and evaluation processes and, on the other hand, the internal organization of Physical Education lessons.

About the structure, uses and functions of the student’s journal, we can say that the journal has a specific mission in the initial didactic unit that presents the school year through the areas we have called Personal data, Thematic index and Instructions to do the journal. The journal has different functions depending on what moment of the unit we are on. The areas of Didactic unit project and Previous ideas are useful to anticipate and negotiate the construction of knowledge and participate in the analysis of what the students already know before starting each new project. The areas Plan, development, rethinking of the session and Personal interpretations are of inestimable help during the development of the lessons as well as the period between lessons. The area that we called Theoretical-practical test helps us get over the dichotomy evaluation-assessment.

As far as the internal organization of the Physical Education lessons, we can say that these have three main parts that we call: Meeting Moment, Construction of learning Moment and Farewell Moment. We would also like to highlight that each of the lesson is an increasing succession of activities that include: proposal, action, reflection and rethinking.

Discussion / Conclusions

We propose that the quality of the lessons follows pedagogic criteria, rather than physiological criteria (focused on the amount of physical activity). More specifically, we defend that Physical Education must teach a balance of different types of content (concepts, procedures and attitudes). That implies, among other things, a new Physical Education lesson concept (with quiet times for proposing, doing, thinking and debating) and new instruments that encourage the learning of the different types of contents so that they are more meaningful and lasting.