A new direction

I am now 5 weeks into the new school year; beginning my second year as MYP Coordinator, my 8th as a Head of PE and my 11th in teaching overall. (Wow, I feel old!). I have been goal-setting for the year ahead and reflecting on the year passed; and it occurred to me that perhaps…

The start of a new year

This is the excerpt for your very first post.

All teachers are teachers of health and well-being.

I was excited to be a part of the ConnectedPE online conference recently and presented a webinar about cross-curricular teaching and learning in PHE. I had decided to present this webinar as I feel that it is a vital part of education that should be developed and explored further, as the benefits for student learning…

Pinterest – Quick Inspiration

One website that I use often is Pinterest. For those of you that haven't used this site before, it is basically a digital cork board on which you can 'pin' your inspirations, ideas and thoughts about all manner of topics. I used to have a cork board as a child and loved to regularly pin…

Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Appreciation? A debatable question for Dance

Recently I have been increasingly curious about the expression ‘Cultural Appropriation’. This term was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017 and is defined as “... the taking over of creative or artistic forms, themes, or practices by one cultural group from another. It is in general used to describe Western appropriations of non‐Western…

iPads in Physical & Health Education

Two weeks ago I led a workshop for the PHE department focused on developing and improving our use of technology to enhance learning, specifically the use of iPads. This was actually supposed to take place in December but as I had ruptured my Achilles tendon playing Ultimate Frisbee (!) we decided to reschedule for when…

Summer holidays well-spent

There’s no doubt about it, one of the great things about being a teacher is the long summer holiday in July and August. No one can quite understand how welcome that break is after a full academic year of teaching, unless you’ve actually been a teacher yourself. But, no matter how well-earned it may be,…

Service learning in Fiji

Bula! It turns out keeping up with a blog is not that easy. Since starting back in September, this is only my third post. I have been meaning to write something for a while and have left myself countless post-it reminders and ideas about content but am only just getting around to it now. Work…

Don’t underestimate the value of praise

Today I received praise for the work I have done in my first half semester since joining this school and it has had such an uplifting, positive and attitude-changing effect on me. I think sometimes we feel that we are too mature to need praise. I work hard because that is just my work ethic,…