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Ladies and gentlemen,
I am delighted to welcome you all to The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy! This service, brand new to the PE teaching and learning sector, has one core mission:
To radically improve the PE achievements of all students and transform the PE-teaching sector into the best-trained and highest-performing classroom teaching network in the world.
The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy aims to achieve this mission by providing access to world-class learning experiences to PE teachers, specifically about PE teaching and learning.
If you are like me, you are probably a PE teacher. You probably went through your PE teacher training with little to no specific training on PE classroom teaching. You probably taught a GCSE, BTEC, CNAT or A-level course in the early years of your career with close to zero guidance on what learning looked like in PE classrooms and –again, if you are like me– you probably figured it out as you went through those experiences for the good of your students and yourself whilst, occasionally, receiving a piece of whole-school CPD that only slightly made sense in the discipline of PE teaching. If you are like me, there is no one available to truly guide you on PE pedagogy, PE curriculum, PE subject knowledge, PE cognitive science, PE course design and PE assessment.
Let me be very, very clear:
PE teachers have the right to expect that they will be trained and guided in the specific skill set of classroom PE teaching, assuming this is to be a significant part of their career and how their impact in their career is measured.
For these reasons, The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy is now at your service. The Academy is your new home of ongoing PE-specific CPD aimed, in its first iteration, at classroom PE teaching specifically. The Academy is separated into five sections, and these are:
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Section: |
PE Pedagogy | PE Curriculum | PE Subject Knowledge | PE Cognitive Science | PE Course Design and Assessment |
Each section of the Academy has its specific purpose:
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Section: |
PE Pedagogy | PE Curriculum | PE Subject Knowledge | PE Cognitive Science | PE Course Design and Assessment |
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User story: |
As a PE teacher, I want to learn how to set up a classroom, run learning activities and provoke my students to learn deeply and broadly in physical education. | As a PE teacher, I want to develop an intricate knowledge of the specific qualification that my students need to learn and I need to teach. | As a PE teacher, I want to learn the fundamental principles of my subject without the straitjacket of it being for a specific qualification. I want to be able to learn ideas that will allow me to teach from KS3 to KS5. | As a PE teacher, I want to understand what scientific research suggests are the ways in which human beings learn, remember and forget. I want to study these things in the specific context of PE teaching and learning. | As a PE teacher, I want to be proactive in setting up and maintaining reliable and sustainable structures for my PE qualifications. |
In this, the first post of five successive posts, I am going to focus on the learning of PE pedagogy.
The table below shows the proposed curriculum for PE pedagogy. The elements in green indicate the courses available to PE teachers immediately, whereas those in yellow are courses being considered for future development. As you will notice, the curriculum is broad, detailed and PE-specific. You may also notice that the PE Pedagogy curriculum is substantial enough for it to be relevant to trainees, ECTs, and more experienced PE teachers alike.
| Classroom | Questioning and group work | Instruction | Feedback | Homework and out-of-lesson learning | Behaviour management |
| PE classroom structures 1 | Questioning techniques 1 | Rosenshine's principles of instruction applied to PE | Feedback in the PE classroom 1 | Introduction to homework for PE learning | Introduction to behaviour management in PE |
| PE classroom structures 2 | Questioning techniques 2 | Instruction skills in PE 1 | Feedback in the PE classroom 2 | PE qualifications homework 1 | Behaviour management research applied to PE |
| James's PE classroom | Questioning techniques 3 | Instruction skills in PE 2 | Feedback in the PE classroom 3 | PE qualifications homework 2 | Behaviour management strategies in PE Part 1 |
| PE classroom environment | De Bono's research applied to PE | Instructing through practical examples | Feedback case study 1 | KS3 PE homework | Behaviour management strategies in PE Part 2 |
| Teaching PE theory through practical |
Group work activities 1 | Teaching higher order skills in PE | Feedback case study 2 | ||
| PE lesson timings 1 |
Group work activities 2 | Feedback case study 3 | |||
| PE lesson timings 2 |
Group work activities 3 |
Each of the PE Pedagogy courses has the following features:
- It takes approximately one hour to complete.
- There’s an average of 40 minutes of video content.
- Each course is broken into five or six lessons.
- Two short checkpoint quizzes are used as course assessments.
- Each course has hundreds of practice quiz questions so that PE teachers can build towards their checkpoints as they see fit.
Each course is completed and may be certified if the following two conditions are met:
- Over 90% of video content must be watched.
- Both checkpoints must be completed with a score over 80%.
Video viewing is measured by our educational video player, the only one in the world that measures viewing by the millisecond and in real time. 
Checkpoints are measured by the number of correct responses, and teachers may take each checkpoint as many times as they wish in order to reach the 80% threshold, with each subsequent iteration of the checkpoint being different to the previous one to ensure rigour.
PE teachers are welcome to study any three Academy courses simultaneously, and can self-enrol and unenroll to their heart’s content. A PE teacher’s three active courses may come from any areas of the Academy.
Why PE Pedagogy?
Understanding how PE classrooms do and don’t operate effectively is at the heart of the PE Pedagogy section of the Academy. It is my contention that every PE teacher has the right to be able to learn the techniques of effective PE classrooms as they see fit. Without this, PE teachers are left trying to figure things out or waiting for someone else to show or tell them how to do it. I strongly believe in all these statements:PE teachers have the right to be able to learn how to…
- … set up their PE classroom in a learner-centric way.
- …ask questions and derive answers that challenge every PE learner.
- …understand the importance and impact of feedback in the PE learning cycle and be able to apply these to PE courses and PE learners.
- …learn what effective PE instruction looks like.
- …be challenged to teach their PE courses in the appropriately applied and practical ways that cause the best PE learning outcomes.
- …structure homework and out-of-lesson learning to achieve maximum impact in PE learning and sustainability in PE teaching.
- …manage PE classrooms so that student behaviour causes the maximum possible learning and performance in PE.
These are the reasons why I invite all PE teachers to join us at the Academy. I ask two basic questions:
- Who doesn’t want to learn these things?
- Shouldn’t the PE sector have this provided to them?
Conclusions
So, there you have it. The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy is available to you NOW! Do please reach out to me and my team if you have any questions, and I look forward to seeing you in The Academy very soon!Thanks for reading.
James Simms