My Ten Favourite Topics to Teach in PE Classrooms

Within this post I am going to explain the reasons why I love teaching ten PE topics. In truth, I love them all equally and all of them could be number one but I will count down from ten to one. I am also going to challenge you to guess what they are by my description. Much like a game of Taboo, I’ll describe the topic without naming it.

Here we go…

My tenth favourite topic to teach 

I love teaching this because it can be illustrated brilliantly with very simple practical examples that, for some reason, wow the students. When I teach it, I feel like a science teacher in one of those lessons where something goes ‘Bang!’ or ‘Poof!’ This concept also opens students' eyes to the beauty of rotational mechanics and helps them to understand why sporting performers structure their techniques the way they do in sports like diving, gymnastics or snow sports. These are sports that most students watch on TV but rarely experience. I like to teach this lesson on the trampoline emphasising how the manipulation of moment of inertia at the point of take off, in flight and upon landing can directly influence their rate of spin or twist.

My ninth favourite topic to teach 

I reckon almost every PE teacher that reads this post has taught this lesson. It’s often at the start of a skill acquisition unit at GCSE or A-level and, in my opinion, it is a gateway topic to so much more. The language contained within the lessons (such as ‘perception’, ‘decision making’, ‘muscular involvement’, ‘subroutines’, ‘pacing’ and so on) can be incorporated into the teaching of practical lessons from any age but also, crucially, incorporates with almost any other topic on a skill acquisition course making it perfect for building synopticity and broader understanding. I tend to teach the theory of this topic very quickly before moving to a practical space to exemplify it. I will always follow this up with quizzing and writing based on the acquired knowledge.

My eighth favourite topic to teach 

This topic is not covered on all PE courses and I am often left to wonder why. Learning this process is fundamental to understanding one’s own body and health and I think we should teach it more in PE. The topic is taught broadly in biology at GCSE level but it lacks application and in PE we can give it that application. When I teach this lesson, I ensure that students can link their knowledge of biology to PE but I also ensure that I teach the logic of why the small intestine follows the stomach, the crucial importance of the pancreas and the liver and I also link to the students’ knowledge of enzymes. 

My seventh favourite topic to teach 

Okay, this one was very nearly number one. I love this topic! When I teach this I am actually trying to teach two base concepts:

1. Kinetic theory
2. Probability

The topic that sits at number seven for me at its heart, is simply kinetic theory (learned in physics in KS3) and probability (learned in maths in KS2 onwards). This topic helps students to understand how a multicellular organism like a human being is able to take resources such as oxygen from the outside world and pass them into the body in order to process them. It also helps students to understand one of the ways that humans release waste products, in this case things like water and carbon dioxide. 

So, let me return to those two concepts. Kinetic theory states that molecules (of gas) are moving randomly and, if those molecules experience a diffusion gradient, the net movement of the gas will be from high to low pressure. But I love the fact that this is “net” movement and I challenge the students to realise that it is completely reasonable for a molecular oxygen to move from low to high concentration but that the overall (net) movement of all the molecules will be from high to low. Probability should now make sense too because what I just described is simply that: probability.

My sixth favourite topic to teach 

Okay, I don’t think this one is particularly popular but I love it! This lesson is capable of unlocking so much about the physical performance of sporting techniques and I have always introduced it the same way. I get a hockey stick from the cupboard, a dumbbell from the gym and a range of objects to be lifted. Some are light and some are heavy. I then rest the shaft of the hockey stick on the handle of the dumb-bell and roll the dumb-bell forwards and backwards to increase and decrease the effort and load arms in turn. I get students at the front of the class to operate the “machine” and I demonstrate all of this to them before we study any of the language of the topic or what mechanical advantage and disadvantage are. I then, of course, teach the classification of this concept, always taking time to hand draw the system on the whiteboard.

My fifth favourite topic to teach 

So, top five! I love this topic because it teaches sporty students about themselves. It makes them realise whether they are honest with themselves or not. Most students who sit in an A-level PE (where this topic is generally taught) classroom play sport of some kind. Therefore, they win sometimes but they lose plenty too. Teaching this lesson causes a student to reflect on the stories they tell themselves—often privately and in their own head—about the reasons they lost or won. Students learn that crediting external influences for either success or failure is not particularly healthy and they learn that, if they want to achieve a growth mindset (mastery orientation), they must take responsibility for both success and failure but do so in the right way.

My fourth favourite topic to teach 

When I started the list, this topic was number one but I chose to bump it down a few spots to fourth because I love the next three just as much. I always start this lesson the same way: students at the front, crowded round, two balloons hanging on string from a snooker cue and a fan pointing towards the gap between the two hanging balloons. I ask the students: “when I turn on the fan, what will the balloons do?” Most of the time, the students get this wrong and suggest the balloons will separate further when, in fact, the balloons move towards one another and collide. This daft little experiment causes the students to grasp, instantly, the principle that fast moving air is at lower pressure. 

My third favourite topic to teach 

In this lesson, I always try to challenge and utilise the students’ maths skills. Year 11, 12 and 13 students have been studying how to restructure basic mathematical equations for a decade and this topic linked to the broader topic of body composition allows me to extract those skills for a little bit of intrigue. Typically, I will give the students a series of word challenges with some supporting resources to go with them. Here are three examples:

• A 45-year-old website owner and former PE teacher is 1.80m tall and has an **** **** index of 28 (overweight). How many kilograms would he need to lose to be considered healthy weight? 
• An 18-year-old PE student weighs 68kg and has a  **** **** index of 20. How tall are they?
• An 18-year-old PE student weighs 68kg and has a  **** **** index of 20. On average, how many kilograms per year would the student need to gain for them to be obese by age 30.

Now, I typically point out to the students that the latter case is not hinting at an aspiration. 

When I watch teachers teach the **** **** index topic, the calculations are always limited to calculating the **** **** index. Why? I would argue that the beauty of the **** **** index is that students could actually use—it not just measure it—and hence the challenges above. As a final point, I also find that working in this way causes the students to grasp the intuition of the topic, not just remember it.

My second favourite topic to teach 

This lesson, traditionally part of a historical studies A-level course but more recently studied within the Sport in Society units, draws on the students’ knowledge of the impact of industrialisation. Specifically, I enjoy teaching them about the emergence of the middle class and these wealthy, suburban living, skilled professionals establishing a new sporting identity in the UK and, ultimately, the world. I also love comparing this process to what came before (popular recreation)  and what followed (modern, commercialised sport) and watching in joy as students realise that 19th-Century middle-class sports people had the concept of fair play so central to their experience that they would refuse to acknowledge that a foul had been committed by the other team.

My favourite topic to teach 

When I teach this lesson, I literally bounce to the classroom. I adore it! I adore it because it is logical, systematic and reliant on a broader skill set than is normally expressed in a classroom PE lesson. I always prepare the same way the day before the lesson: I sharpen a box of pencils, I check that my stash of coloured pens are working and I buy a bunch or Maoam chews ready for the lesson.

The lesson itself involves the drawing of magnitude and directional arrows on sporting performances within the study of biomechanics. Students learn about balanced and unbalanced forces, about friction, about air resistance, about ground reaction force… but they also learn the rules of this drawing skill as well as the ‘secret code’ or the conventions that good biomechanists have learned such as the typical length of a weight arrow for a human being, shot in flight or shuttlecock.

Towards the middle part of this lesson, once the students have grasped the main concept, I turn to the sweets. The sweets are not frivolous. I am aiming to force the students to remember the length, points of origin and direction of each arrow and do this by making them not draw the arrows but chew their sweet, extract it from their mouth and then form it into an arrow. And, yes, it’s disgusting and, yes, it might even be inappropriate in a pandemic world but, you know what, it works! It is your call whether you do it like this. If the contamination is too much for you, use sticks or pipe cleaners or other objects to form the arrows but by the students manipulating the arrows with their mouth and then hands, they will always remember it. 

So, what do you think? What would you have included and why? When I read back over my ten descriptions, I realised that I get a buzz from seeing a shift in students. Going from a lack of awareness or understanding to that awareness and I really value it when this is skill-based.

Thank you for reading and please consider leaving a comment or sharing this post with others.