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Dear PE colleagues,
The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy is now officially live and I encourage you to visit and have a gander before reading this blog. The Academy is the home of PE-specific CPD for PE teachers, PE courses managers, Heads of PE, Directors of Sport, as well as trainee and ECT PE teachers. We have built it because there is a serious lack of PE-appropriate training that PE teachers can benefit from, specifically about classroom-based PE teaching.
In the last two weeks, I have written about our work in PE pedagogy CPD and PE cognitive science CPD. This week, I wish to take this further by guiding you on PE curriculum CPD. Put simply, PE teachers, whether delivering a GCSE, A-level, BTEC or WJEC Technical Award (list of PE and Sport courses not exhaustive) have the right to be trained in what that course entails and to be trained by experienced PE colleagues who do not represent the exam boards. Therefore, as of now, PE teachers can experience training and guidance specific to their qualifications via The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy.
Classroom- and qualification-based PE teaching, right now, is very heavily specification- and exam-board-focused. Rightly so, we might say. I agree. PE teachers definitely need to understand the intricacies of the courses they teach and exactly what is required of them and their learners. Where do PE teachers currently go to receive objective guidance on this? If a PE teacher wants to develop insights into the real challenges of, say, AQA GCSE PE Paper 1, where do they go? Until this moment, the only answers to that were the exam board itself or, if one was fortunate, a knowledgeable colleague. But this model is unreliable. The exam boards, understandably, are partial. They have a sales role to play, whether they acknowledge it or not. Having a knowledgeable friend is unreliable. This is where The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy Curriculum courses sit. They are unbiased and offer objective guidance specific to a PE qualification’s structures and requirements.
Crucially, another section of our Academy provision is PE subject knowledge. Our subject knowledge courses should be seen as overlapping with our PE curriculum courses, but they are exam-board-agnostic and focus on a PE teacher’s deep intuition and understanding of PE knowledge. They are not designed for the specific teaching of one qualification or another. PE curriculum courses are!
PE Teacher Academy courses are offered across five specialisms:
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Section: |
PE Pedagogy | PE Curriculum | PE Subject Knowledge | PE Cognitive Science | PE Course Design and Assessment |
And each has its 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. |
PE Curriculum as part of The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy
Please take a look at the table below. The green cells represent courses that are already available via TheEverLearner.com and the yellow are courses that are currently in development. For example, Introduction to AQA GCSE PE Paper 1 is live and available to study by PE teachers.
| GCSE | A-Level | CNAT | BTEC | |||||
| AQA | Edexcel | OCR | AQA | OCR | Sport Studies | Sport Science | Tech | |
| Introductions | Introduction to Paper 1 | Introduction to Paper 1 | Introduction to Paper 1 | Introduction to Paper 1 | Introduction to Paper 1 | Introduction to R184 | Introduction to R18o | Introduction to Comp 3 |
| Introduction to Paper 2 | Introduction to Paper 2 | Introduction to Paper 2 | Introduction to Paper 2 | Introduction to Paper 2 | ||||
| Introduction to NEA | Introduction to NEA | Introduction to NEA | Introduction to NEA | Introduction to Paper 3 | ||||
| Introduction to NEA | ||||||||
What follows below are a series of screenshots of the Introduction to AQA GCSE PE Paper 1 course that is live on TheEverLearner.com:
Image above shows: I have enrolled to the course.
Image above shows: The course is available for me to study.
Image above shows: Topic 1 contains three lessons.
Image above shows: Lesson 2 of topic 1.
Image above shows: I’m ready to take the first checkpoint assessment.
Image above shows: An assessment question I believed I have answered correctly.
Image above shows: Another question I seem to have got right.
Image above shows: I didn’t pass the checkpoint but I can review my answers.
Image above shows: My checkpoint assessment is recorded.
Usage cases
I am fascinated to observe how different teachers and departments will utilise the curriculum courses within The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy. It is predictable that the courses will be valuable to new teachers of a qualification, but I also wonder if more experienced teachers will see clear benefits too. How many of us in the PE teaching sector might be prone to making assumptions about our qualifications? I feel this is common, and the curriculum courses will help us all to challenge those assumptions.I also reserve special mention for trainee teachers who may well be teaching in a PE classroom for the very first time when they are on placement. The courses that we have live already definitely provide support for these cases, but I also want to mention where we believe the curriculum provision might go. Take a look at this below. We believe this is the probable destination of our curriculum provision in one particular course. This one is AQA GCSE PE:
| AQA GCSE PE | ||
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Introductions |
Paper 1 teaching | Paper 2 teaching |
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Introduction to Paper 1 |
Teaching the musculoskeletal system | Teaching sport psychology |
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Introduction to Paper 2 |
Teaching the cardio-respiratory system | Teaching engagement patterns and commercialisation |
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Introduction to NEA |
Teaching anaerobic and aerobic exercise | Teaching ethics |
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Teaching short and long term effects | Teaching health, fitness and wellbeing |
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Teaching movement analysis |
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Teaching physical training |
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Teaching the principles of training |
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Teaching use of data |
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We believe that this lesson-by-lesson guidance for PE teachers could be really valuable for colleagues, and we hope that the use of the Academy is sufficient to cause us to us to build these courses for you as well as their equivalents on other courses.
Conclusions
So, there you have it. The EverLearner PE Teacher Academy Curriculum edition is ready for you.Before I finish, I want to remind you of some key features of all of our Academy courses:
✅ Between one and one and a half hours of study per course
✅ Two checkpoint assessments per course
✅ Online note-taking for video content
✅ Ability to study up to three courses concurrently
✅ Ability to activate and deactivate courses as you wish
✅ Available to entire PE departments
Thanks for reading and don't forget to register your interest, if you haven't done so already 👇:
James