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When did you last see a world-class PE theory lesson? (Be honest)
Dear PE colleagues,
I'd like you to do something uncomfortable for me. Picture the last time you sat in a PE theory classroom, watching another adult teach, and walked out genuinely changed by what you'd seen. Not a lesson you observed for QA. Not a learning walk. Not a slide deck at a conference describing what brilliant teaching ought to look like. A real, live, full-length PE theory lesson, taught by a colleague at the absolute top of their game, where you sat as a learner and felt the difference in your bones. Put simply: When did you last witness a world-class PE theory lesson?
For most of us, the honest answer is: I cannot remember. Or worse: never.
That is the strange, quiet scandal at the heart of our profession. We might describe WAGOLL, "What A Good One Looks Like", in our planning, we might mention it in our department meetings, we might even write it in our schemes of work. We invoke it for our PE students all the time. And yet the vast majority of PE theory teachers (and, frankly, most secondary teachers across almost every subject) will go an entire career without ever actually seeing one. We plan for an excellence we've never actually witnessed.
A confession
I am not above this. For years, I described high-quality PE theory teaching to colleagues and trainees more often than I demonstrated it. I wrote about it. I talked about it. I built a business around it. The honest truth is that almost everything I now believe about PE theory teaching was reshaped by watching one extraordinary colleague work, and I've written about that experience separately. If you haven't read it, here it is: Dear Graham, you changed my PE teaching career. Without Graham, I'd still be describing the lesson, not living it.Then, in 2017, a time when the dream that was TheEverLearner.com still wasn’t realised, I went on tour and attempted to teach 10 demonstration lessons across five days across the UK. In my opinion, these types of experiences need to be available right now.
Why this scarcity of WAGOLL happens
Three structural reasons, with workload haunting all three.1. Our observation culture is observe-and-feed-back, not model-and-imitate. Judgement has thankfully softened in recent years, and most schools no longer grade lessons. But the format hasn't fundamentally changed: One teacher teaches, and another teacher watches and gives feedback. It is rarely one teacher modelling, deliberately, for another teacher to imitate. We have inverted the apprenticeship.
2. Demonstration lessons are vanishingly rare, and when they exist, they are performances. A "demo lesson" is usually a tightly choreographed showcase, polished for a visitor, not a working lesson taught with normal stakes. The audience watches the surface and learns very little about how the teacher actually thinks.
3. ITT and CPD are built on PowerPoint, not live teaching. This is the most ridiculous and consistent problem. We train PE teachers for classroom teaching by talking at them about teaching. We then send them out to teach, and we wonder why the gap between described practice and enacted practice is so wide. It would be unthinkable in medicine, carpentry or elite coaching. In education and in theory PE teaching, it is the norm.
Workload is the silent fourth reason. Even teachers who would love to model and to be modelled on simply cannot find the time, the cover or the stamina.
Seven things I now believe
- WAGOLL must be witnessed, not just described. A diagram of a perfect lesson is not a perfect lesson, in the same way that a recipe is not a meal.
- Modelling is the highest form of CPD. A great teacher teaching a real lesson, in front of other teachers acting as students, is worth ten conferences.
- PE theory teachers are uniquely deprived of this. Practical PE has a deep tradition of demonstration. PE theory does not, and that's a gap our subject has tolerated for too long.
- Watching is necessary but not sufficient. Teachers must sit as learners in the room, feel the cognitive load, experience the questioning and ride the retrieval, before they can faithfully reproduce the lesson back in their own classrooms.
- Performative demo lessons are part of the problem. A lesson taught for show is not a lesson; it is theatre. Real WAGOLL is a normal lesson, taught with care and craft, where the teacher is exposed and not protected.
- Modelling is an act of bravery. To stand up and teach in front of your peers, knowing they are watching every move, is genuinely frightening. That is precisely why so few of us do it, and precisely why it matters when someone does.
- The profession needs more visible practitioners willing to teach in public. Not pundits or theorists, but practitioners. Teachers who will put themselves on the line, with real content, real students or peers-as-students, and a real chance of getting it wrong.
I know this is hard
Workload is brutal. Timetables are unforgiving. The politics of observation, even in the kindest schools, can still feel exposing. Asking a colleague to model for you (or worse, asking yourself to model for them) runs against almost every cultural grain in modern teaching. I get it. I've felt it. I am about to feel it again, and very publicly.What's coming next week
This is a holding post. I'm publishing it today because next week, I am going to announce something I have been preparing for months. A free CPD event in late June, in a real PE classroom in a real UK school, where 30 PE teachers will sit as my students and watch me attempt to teach a magnificent PE theory lesson, live, on a topic that scares many of us. Meanwhile, a live stream of the PE lesson will be available online. Not a slide deck or a description, but a lesson. With everything that can go right or wrong in a lesson.I am putting myself on the line for this. I am genuinely nervous about it, and I'm doing it anyway. Because if I keep describing brilliant PE theory teaching without ever publicly attempting to enact it, I am part of the very problem this post is naming.
If you'd like to be first to know when registration opens, drop your details into the form below. You'll be the first cohort I email when next week's announcement goes live.
👉 PRE-REGISTER HERE
Tell me I'm wrong
If you have seen world-class PE theory teaching modelled live in the last five years, I genuinely want to know about it. Reply to this post or email me and tag the colleague. The point of this post is not to claim that nobody is doing it, but rather to say that almost nobody is doing it, and that has to change. If your experience contradicts mine, please push back. I'll listen, learn and publish responses where I can.Thank you for reading. Have a brilliant rest of the week back in your classrooms, and to anyone who saw a world-class PE theory lesson recently and can prove me wrong, please tell me about it. I would love to be wrong here.
James