20 Mistakes I've Made in 20 Years of Classroom-based PE Teaching

After reading the blog written by @ImSporticus titled '20 Mistakes I’ve made in 20 years of PE teaching', I was inspired to write this post. Like @I’mSporticus, I have a vast experience of teaching PE but, in my case, my career moved towards a specialism in classroom teaching and less so in the delivery of practical PE (although I’ve done lots of that too). 

I have taught almost every qualification that PE and Sport has offered from A-levels to GCSEs to BTECs to VCERTs to OCR Nationals and Technicals and I have been doing this since 1999 (which means this post actually has 23 years of experience to it). Like @I’mSporticus, I have had many inspiring moments in the classroom but also many, many failures (let’s call them “feedback sources” or “reflection points”) and this post is an opportunity for me to detail some of them for you. I have also been lucky enough to manage some of the biggest PE and Sport qualification offers ever in the UK. For example, as a HoPE at Farnborough Sixth Form College for almost ten years, I managed an A-level PE course with a cohort of up to 300 students per academic year. This experience has given me a unique insight into what does and does not work in a PE classroom and it is these ideas which I share below.

Mistake 1: Thinking that my job was to teach rather than to cause learning

In the early days, I was all about getting up the front of the classroom and “teaching”. Very early on, I taught from acetates and then via PowerPoints and so on, and the majority of my early classroom lessons involved me, the teacher, “teaching” rather than the learners “learning”. Now, I am not here to claim there is no role for from-the-front delivery. There is! But I put so much emphasis on this early in my career that I failed to grasp what, ultimately, the classroom was about. It is about learning by learners. Therefore, these days I value other behaviours in classrooms and almost all of these behaviours are performed by learners whether or not I am spending time at the front “teaching them”.

Mistake 2: Overvaluing presentation software

I imagine we have all been here… Powerpoint is omnipresent, even now. I recently walked through a sixth form college in Hampshire on my way to visit a PE department for a CPD session and I passed 9 classrooms with windows facing out to where I was walking. Nine out of nine of those classrooms had students facing forwards with the teacher, always at the front, with a powerpoint slide on the “interactive” whiteboard. I was introduced to PowerPoints on my second teaching placement in my PGCE in 1998/1999. It was presented to me as a method of quickly resourcing oneself and being able to provide consistency across a team of teachers on a particular course. I suppose there is something to this and for almost ten years I followed this model, and even led departments with the central resource being a series of powerpoint slides. 

I am not arguing against the use of presentational software. I still use Slides (Google) for CPD sessions. But slides are massively overvalued in education. Next time you are using a presentation, stop and reflect on the following questions:

• Who is working harder, the teacher or the students?
• Are the students engaged in meaningful learning?
• Are the students engaged in true concentration?
• What skills are my slides developing in my learners?
• Do my slides develop intuition in learners?

Whilst the points above may seem utopian, they are the fundamental aim of any classroom. 

Mistake 3: Starting a lesson when students were ready rather than when I was ready

I remember that I used to wait for students. They’d arrive to the door, saunter in and then, and only then, would the lesson start. This was an error. The lesson starts when I am ready for it to start and being late should feel like exactly that: being late! Therefore, lessons now start at exactly the start time of the lesson and not a second after. If a student mistimes their arrival, they’ll have the sense of embarrassment as they enter the room.

Mistake 4: Undervaluing intuition

I spent a long time “delivering content” in my career. Classic examples would be teaching definitions, lists of characteristics, strengths, weaknesses, etc. What I realised later in my development was that teaching these things was far easier when the learner had developed the intuitive core of the concept. In other words, students need to understand and then build the language of that understanding. For example, in my lessons on gaseous exchange and diffusion, I am actually teaching a probability lesson, contextualised with kinetic theory. This is what diffusion is. The definitions, examples and characteristics of this all stem from that fundamental point, so teaching for that understanding is the key. Recently in my teaching I have realised that students will quite frequently forget the subject-specific language but they will never ever forget the intuitive concept at the heart of things. 

Mistake 5: Mistaking “good behaviour” for concentration

When I started my classroom teaching, having students quiet and in a disciplined environment reassured me that things were going well. I thought that if students had their heads down and were not chatting, this was a sign of concentration. There is some truth to this and a controlled environment is generally better than an uncontrolled one but we must never confuse being quiet with concentration. Concentration, in my opinion, is the currency of learning and it is only sometimes characterised by silence. Concentration can also be characterised in the following ways:

• Concentration is temporary. 
• Concentration is tiring.
• Concentration is physical (you will see people scratching chins, rubbing heads, even shifting their seat or needing to get up).
• Concentration leads to either frustration or realisation.

Mistake 6: Teaching to the spec

I wanted to make this one number one. Early in my career, I “taught to the spec”. I ensured I covered the course as listed in the syllabus and nothing more. This is a huge error for two reasons:

1. As an absolute minimum, your job is to teach for full understanding of a potential mark scheme and every point on that mark scheme.
2. Learners have a right to learn things that are broad, representative and exciting.

Now, this might not be a popular opinion but the phrase “you don’t need to learn that” should be outlawed in classrooms. It is an unacceptable phrase, uttered frequently, and is deeply ideological. I strongly believe that no human being, teacher or otherwise, has the right to decide what another human being needs to and doesn’t need to learn. This concept is crucial and, whilst I absolutely do not teach in anarchy, I always embrace broader learning desires of students. I always share what the next progression of learning might be. I always try to ignite them towards broader understanding. I honestly believe that if we fail to do this, we are, in fact, not teachers at heart.

Mistake 7: Teaching content rather than teaching skills

If you are like me, you will tend to target content in your lessons and lesson objectives. For many years, I taught “the conduction system of the heart lesson” and “the PEDs lesson”. These days this is different and I might teach something like:

• The analysing skill using the conduction system of the heart
• The evaluative behaviour and writing skill through PEDs.

Whilst the shift is subtle, it is crucial. The objectives of my lessons have been to develop the assessed skills of each course. Students are typically assessed by their ability to write, sometimes to speak or draw, so my lessons need to explicitly develop these writing skills. Writing skills are underpinned by behaviours. One can behave evaluatively, one can behave analytically, etc. Therefore, these behaviours, writing skills and assessment experiences are built into every lesson I teach. As an example, here is a shot of my teaching plan for AQA GCSE PE. Notice that the column for skills comes before the column for content. 

Mistake 8: Undervaluing memorisation

Again, early in my career, I tended to spend most time “teaching” and too little time on learning. Here, I want to specifically consider how remembering works. Whilst you will notice above that I focus hard on skills in my lessons, it is also crucial for students be able to decode and use key information from the domain of study. Therefore, memorisation is critical. As an example, I have estimated that OCR A-level PE features over 2,500 subject-specific terms. These terms need to be recalled from the long-term memory and used in context. This means that memorisation is critical.

Thankfully, memorisation is well understood and, whilst an entire article (or book) could be devoted to the topic, the two most important features are these:

1. Make first learning “meaningful”.
2. Introduce practice and review to your course structures.

If you would be interested in me training your PE teams around these concepts, please contact me here. 

Mistake 9: Not analysing exams (and mark schemes) deeply enough

I could write many things here but, instead, I will simply show you how I analyse exams these days. I cannot imagine doing my job without this but I was a classroom PE teacher for over ten years without it:

Mistake 10: Starting a lesson with a definition

This mistake comes back to the points about intuition in mistake 4. Teachers, including me, very frequently start their lessons with a definition. On the face of it, this makes sense. We are clarifying key terms. However, my experience of students is that the definition does not embed until the student understands why the definition is the way it is. I will use my example of diffusion again. Here is the definition:

“The net movement of gasses down the concentration gradient across a partially permeable membrane.”

If I was to introduce this definition on slide 1 of my teaching, what are the chances that the concept would be understood? Doesn’t it make more sense to teach the understanding of diffusion and then, and only then, summarise the process by defining it? With the latter, the definition is then embedded in an intuitive understanding (in this case probability and kinetic theory) and is more likely to be retained and applied accurately.

Mistake 11: Too little practical exemplification

I remember promising my students “next lesson we’ll do practical.” Next lesson would come and it would be another hour of classroom work. I used to justify this by stating that I had to get through the content, say. However, (almost) every word of our PE courses is deliverable through practical experiences and some content can only truly be understood when experienced physically. Let’s take heart rate responses to exercise or energy systems. Feeling these experiences causes learning and practical is the environment where this should be achieved.

Another good example is a skill acquisition topic. If we are teaching students about operant conditioning or about visual guidance, doesn’t it make more sense to actually demonstrate this rather than simply learn about it and write it down?

In my experience, these are the factors that limit practical experiences in lessons:

• A dedicated practical lesson being used for sport development and assessment rather than theoretical exemplification
• Too much time “delivering”, often via presentation software (see above)
• A sensation that “getting through the content” is the aim rather than truly understand the content
• Lack of practical spaces during theory lessons due to core PE
• A lack of intent on the part of the teacherA lack of theory-learning environments in practical spaces. Items like whiteboards, benches, clipboards, etc. can all help with this.
• I challenge you to switch an assumed theory lesson to a practical space in the coming weeks. What are the benefits and drawbacks of this? Do the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? Are the drawbacks related to the teacher or the student experience?

Mistake 12: Underutilising the students’ skill sets

If we step back from a student’s experience of school, we can see that they have huge experience in working with language and numbers. Students study maths and linguistics every day of their schooling but, early in my career, I was squeamish about relying on these skills (and others) in my PE lessons. I would only do the most basic equation, I would not expect students to manipulate numbers, I would forewarn students that terminology was tricky, etc. These were errors and I should have had far more confidence in my students' learned capabilities in maths and language. These days, I do the opposite. If, for example, I am teaching about BMI, I am expected to teach that a BMI of over 25 means a person is overweight. Typically, in the past I would give them some numbers and expect them to complete this equation:In other words, I would ask them to complete the vanilla equation and simply calculate BMI for a range of individuals. But what about if I presented them with this information?:

“James is a 45 year-old website manager with a height of 1.78m and a weight of 86kg. Calculate James’s current BMI and calculate how much weight James would need to lose to be considered a healthy weight on the BMI scale.”

Now, most students will be able to figure out that James’s BMI is 27.5. However, the skill of calculating how much weight James would need to lose to get to a BMI of under 25 is exactly what students do in their maths lessons day after day. It also helps the student to understand the relationship between BMI, height and weight. In other words, using the student’s acquired skill set better embeds the targeted content and skill (calculate) we are working with in PE.

Mistake 13: Blocked teaching

For many years, I taught singular lessons on “the elbow” or “the golden triangle”. I went lesson by lesson, covering content until I got to the end of the course list. The problem is that PE content is not truly in chunks. It is deeply intertwined and connected and any teaching that does not recognise these interconnections is flawed. If we “teach in blocks”, students will “learn in blocks” and they will fail to connect their understanding at crucial points when answering exam questions or assimilating theory knowledge into a piece of coursework. These days, my teaching is deeply interleaved. There is rarely a statement that leaves my mouth that is not interconnected with broader understanding of the subject domain. Central to this is my own subject knowledge, my own sensitivity to the exact understanding of biological, mechanical, psychological and sociocultural. Every teacher will have their own, unique level of confidence in different aspects of their courses but I urge teachers to invest in their subject knowledge, to enjoy the experience of learning more deeply. For me this takes the form of reading and sometimes writing. I am continuously searching bookstores for interesting second-hand items on the biology or physics of movement, say. Yes, this might make me weird but it also makes me knowledgeable and broad and able to represent the subject domain of PE with deeply interwoven understanding. 

Mistake 14: Blocked practice

Following on from writing on blocked teaching is this mistake on blocked practice. For the majority part of my teaching career, if I taught a lesson on levers, say, the worksheets, past paper questions and exam practice were also on… Guess what! Levers!. This is, in large part, an error. The evidence around interleaved practice is very clear. Interleaving practice (worksheets, past paper questions, exam practice, etc.) leads to three outcomes:

1. Short-term: desirable difficulty experienced during the practice. 
2. Short-term: students need to use a skill known as discriminative contrast to compare and distinguish questions and challenges from different topics.
3. Medium-term: up to 74% better retention of the learned topic after 30 days compared to blocked practice.

Considering that interleaving practice has a cost of £0, this is a highly efficient method of improving the capacity of students to retain knowledge over time. The Chartered Institute suggests that interleaving is one of the most impacting ways to improve learning with the least cost. 

Mistake 15: Undervaluing quizzing

I barely used quizzing for the first ten years of my career. These days, quizzing is probably more typical in my classroom than me standing at the front with a presentation. High-quality quizzing, with automated corrective and directive feedback (see next mistake) is fundamental to increasing students’ retention of knowledge but also their capacity to decode and apply that knowledge. In other words, quizzing, done right, causes learning!

Here are my five tips for writing a great quiz:

1. Keep question commands brief and clear.
2. Use question imagery as much as possible to cause “double-barrel” learning/retention.
3. Be confident to keep a quiz question short. For example, rather than asking for a definition, ask for one or two key words to complete a definition.
4. Value different types of quiz questions including single choice, multi-choice, matching, grouping, sorting and gap fill.
5. Get someone else to do the hard work. Forgive the shameless plug but if you are a PE teacher, use TheEverLearner.com (my creation) for your quizzing. 

Mistake 16: Leaving too long between action and feedback

When I interviewed Professor Paul Kirschner for the Teacher in Classroom 21 podcast, one of my biggest takeaways was the importance of students receiving feedback rapidly after their action. Early in my career, I had not valued this enough. Here are five ways to cause feedback to occur sooner:

1. Use automated quizzing formats such as practice mode, test mode and checkpoint mode on TheEverLearner.com.
2. Develop your students into great exam markers by working closely with mark schemes during lessons and using self/peer marking and reviewing.
3. Share marking time with your teaching team. If, for example, you are completing an exam with your group this week, have your teaching colleague, mark the paper with you. This will half the turnaround time. The following week, you can mark for them. In this scenario, the student benefits with no extra work by the teachers.
4. Use my ExamSimulator software as much as possible to engage students in exam practice and to achieve marking and feedback faster. 
5. Spend lesson time marking and be confident in doing so. There is absolutely nothing wrong with a teacher marking student work in the classroom. PE teachers should do this as a matter of normality. 

Mistake 17: Not using enough model answers

I didn’t cotton onto this until I was an experienced teacher. Students gain massive benefits from model answers. Ideally, these will be answers written by a subject expert but they can be collections of high-quality answers written by students over time. Given that every teacher has access to a camera, this does not need to be an onerous task.

I do want to stress, though, that my own model is to write the model answers myself. I believe that this is the best way to set a standard and to improve writing standards for learners. 

Mistake 18: Becoming a “subject expert”

In the first three years of my career I was a “subject expert” in anatomy and physiology. I taught that part of the A-level course and I had little awareness of the other areas. It was only when I moved to Farnborough Sixth Form College, in my fifth year of teaching, that I was challenged to learn the entire subject domain. At Farnborough, it was (and still is—my daughter attends the college and studies A-level PE) customary to teach a group, not teach a theme. When I started there, I taught the entirety of AS and A2 PE including optional units on psychology, biomechanics, historical and comparative studies. Whilst this was very challenging, it forced me to truly understand the subject domain and be able to develop my students in the broadest sense. 

I understand that this is not always convenient, but I encourage PE colleagues to avoid believing that one section is harder than another or internalising that they “can’t do biomechanics”, say. I know from experience how facilitating it is to be open to learning how to teach the broadest range of content possible.

Mistake 19: Undervaluing my role in developing written/oral coursework

In my earlier classrooms, coursework—whether written or oral—rarely had any connection to my day-to-day teaching. Coursework would become a block of work bolted onto the course at a convenient time. This was an error. Almost universally, coursework skills are the same as the skills developed in classroom, theory studies and can be used as an application of that learning concurrently. I have noticed recently a trend online (PE Twitter) that coursework should be scrapped as it is “pointless” or a “waste of time”. I fundamentally disagree with this and I wholeheartedly believe that A-level, GCSE or any other type of coursework can be a highly applied experience of learning the theory content. 

Please note that I provide training to PE departments to this end. Please, contact me if this is of interest to you.

Mistake 20: Leaving the classroom

This was my biggest mistake of all. Five years ago, I left full-time teaching. In truth, I had been doing less and less teaching before that, as my career progressed to senior leadership roles. These days, with my three hours teaching a week, I miss the classroom deeply. I miss the day-to-day experience of working with young people and I miss seeing “a teacher” look back at me in the mirror.

As my work and business continues to grow, the likelihood of a full-time return seems very low. This makes me sad.

I am aware that many PE teachers imagine themselves out of the classroom and you may not feel particularly sorry for me. That is probably fair but I also want to take this opportunity to remind you that being a PE teacher can be a wonderful experience in one’s life and to never undervalue it. 

Thank you for reading.