Winner stays on: which classroom strategies actually secure marks in PE exam courses?

Do you ever find yourself watching ‘Winner stays on’ on YouTube shorts or Tiktok videos when you really should be doing something else, such as falling asleep or talking to your family? A video of Rio Ferdinand deciding who is superior in an imaginary best footballer contest between the two different Ronaldos? I do, all the time, and they are quite compelling for a wasted moment or two. 

The 16 contenders

If I’m going to waste time watching Rio decide between Ronaldo and Ronaldo, I might as well waste it productively. It got me thinking: if I ran a Winner‑stays‑on tournament for the things we actually do in qualification PE classrooms, what would make the final?

I set myself three rules:
1) First, everything had to be something you can see, hear or feel in a GCSE, A‑level or BTEC Sport lesson. No vague “school culture”, no abstract “vision statements”.

2) Second, nothing about behaviour or classroom management. Important, yes. But those are muddy waters and I wanted to stay firmly in the territory of learning.

3)Third, each contender had to be a lever you and I can realistically pull in the next couple of years, not a fantasy reform that requires a new education secretary

With those constraints in place, here are the 16 candidates I’ve chosen, in no particular order.

Metacognitive strategies: How we help students plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning.

Quizzing: Low‑stakes retrieval, in and out of lessons, that forces students to drag knowledge back from memory.

Spacing: Deliberately revisiting content across months, not cramming it once and hoping for the best.

Interleaving: Mixing topics and question types so students can’t predict what’s coming next.

Exam question practice: Everything from one‑mark recall items to full six-, nine‑, 10-, 15- and even 20-markers under timed conditions.

Model answers and exemplars: Showing students what “good” actually looks like, rather than leaving them to figure it out.

Feedback and re‑drafting: The green‑pen, DIRT‑style cycles where students edit, extend and improve their work.

Homework as practice: Planned, purposeful tasks that extend learning rather than simply keeping students busy.

Explicit instruction: Clear explanation, worked examples, guided practice; the moments when we just teach.

Teacher subject knowledge: Our depth of understanding, our examples, our ability to answer the hard questions.

Curriculum sequencing: The order in which we build concepts over two or three years, and what we choose to revisit when.

Dual coding and visuals: Diagrams, timelines, annotated images, all the ways we combine words and pictures to make ideas stick.

Note‑making and organisation: How students record, organise and revisit the content we’ve taught them.

Student revision strategies: What they actually do, alone at home or in the library, in the weeks before an exam.

Use of diagnostic data: Question‑level analysis, mock exam autopsies, identifying and closing specific gaps.

Pre-study: Learning material before the peak experience within a lesson, sometimes known as flipped learning.

You might already be mentally rearranging that list. You might be thinking, “Where’s X?” or “How on earth did Y make the cut?” That’s part of the fun. This isn’t a definitive list of ‘The 16 Most Important Things’. It’s a conversation starter, based on what I’ve actually seen move the dial for PE students over the last 20 years.

The draw: Who plays who?

Of course, any self‑respecting Winner‑stays‑on tournament needs a proper draw. I didn’t want to just throw the contenders into a random generator, so I’ve tried to engineer fixtures that create interesting contrasts and real dilemmas. The kind of ties where you and I might genuinely disagree about who should go through.

Here’s how the round of 16 looks:

1. Metacognitive strategies vs Curriculum sequencing

2. Quizzing vs Homework as practice

3. Spacing vs Student revision strategies

4. Interleaving vs Note‑making and organisation

5. Exam question practice vs Model answers and exemplars

6. Feedback and re‑drafting vs Use of diagnostic data

7. Explicit instruction vs Dual coding and visuals

8. Teacher subject knowledge vs Pre-study

Some of these pairings are, frankly, brutal. Spacing vs student revision strategies? That’s essentially asking whether it matters more what we build into the course, or what they actually do with their time outside lessons. Explicit instruction vs dual coding? That one pits our explanations against our diagrams, which feels uncomfortably personal for those of us who pride ourselves on our whiteboard work.

Over the coming weeks, I’ll take a couple of these fixtures in turn. For every tie, I’ll:

• Define both contenders clearly in PE‑classroom terms.

• Describe how I’ve used each one, including the times I got it badly wrong.

• Weigh up their impact on student learning and exam performance, as honestly as I can.

• Declare a winner, knowing full well that some of you will disagree with me.

Winner stays on. The eight winners from this round will move into quarter‑finals, then semi‑finals, and eventually we’ll crown one overall champion: the single factor I currently believe has the biggest impact on PE students’ learning and performance. And, yes, I reserve the right to change my mind halfway through the tournament if the evidence (or your emails) push me in a different direction.

Thank you, as always, for reading and have a wonderful day in anticipation of the Round of 16! I encourage you to subscribe to the blog (completely free!) so you don’t miss a contest in the coming weeks.

James