1. Inspirational Physical Education
Physical Education Primary Ltd.
October 2017
Inspirational Physical Education
Physical Education Primary Ltd.
Copyright © 2004, Physical Education Primary Ltd.

2. Inspirational Physical Education
‘The test of successful education is not the amount of knowledge that pupils take away from school, but their appetite to know and their capacity to learn.’ Sir Richard Livingstone, 1941

3. Inspirational Physical Education
Inspirational Physical Education is a new CPD PowerPoint resource for primary schools. Inspirational Physical Education views learners as active creators of their knowledge and frameworks of interpretation….. learning is about children searching out meaning and imposing structure. Inspirational Physical Education supports teachers in identifying and exploring core concepts for developing children’s thinking skills.

4. The resource explores…..
The importance of invigorating the mind as well as the body.
Developing children as creative thinkers.
Teaching children how to think.
Using visual tools in developing children’s thinking skills.
Using questions to make children think.
Listening to learners - children bring their own conceptions (and misconceptions) into the classroom.
Exploring motivation

5. Inspirational Physical Education
Is about….Invigorating the mind as well as invigorating the body.

6. ‘Cognitive Thinking’ and ‘Doing’
Is there a potential conflict?
Learning by doing only works if we reflect what we have done.

7. Creative Thinking Skills
Are essential for success in learning and success in life.
Promoting creative thinking is a powerful way of engaging children with their learning.
Children who are encouraged to think creatively show increased levels of motivation and self-esteem.
Employees want people who are adaptable, innovative, can solve problems and communicate well with others.

8. Generate and extend ideas.
Creative Thinkers
Generate and extend ideas.
Suggest hypotheses, apply imagination and look for alternative, innovative outcomes in any activity.

9. Creative Thinkers Creative children need creative teachers!
Creative children have positive attitudes.
Children need the right conditions for creativity to flourish.
Creativity thrives where there is time to explore, experiment and play with ideas.

10. Thinking Skills Information is acquired by being told.
Knowledge is acquired by thinking.
It could be argued that this represents a return to the true agenda of education.

11. Thinking Skills How do we make learners think?
The phrase 'think about it' is often heard in the classroom.
But if learners are not taught how to think, how do they know what is expected of them?
Thinking skills include different types of cognition, such as information processing, enquiry, creative thinking and reasoning.

12. Thinking Skills
Schools take different approaches to teaching thinking skills, either introducing them within the curriculum as a discrete unit, or instituting them through the use of a specific methodology.
The best approach is one that stimulates learners to use and apply thinking skills across the curriculum and upon their own learning.

13. Thinking Skills
Offering learners opportunities to apply their higher order thinking skills stretches and challenges them and can reduce the boredom experienced in conventional lessons.

14. The Teaching of Thinking Skills
The teaching of thinking skills can be grouped into three broad categories.
Brain based
Philosophical
Cognitive intervention

15. Guy Claxton
‘Intelligence is like a muscle that grows with exercise. Like the tools in a gym used to increase muscular strength, so visual tools increase thinking strength.’ Guy Claxton 1999

16. Visual Tools Visual tools are prompts for thinking.
Visual tools make thinking invisible.
Visual tools are prompts for thinking.
They are cues for our eyes.
With such cues, our thinking is stimulated, challenged and supported.

17. Visual Tools Make Thinking Visible!
We treat our thoughts much as we treat real objects…..
We manipulate them, organise them, move them about and even forget where we put them!
The only difference with our thoughts as objects is that we cannot see them!
Much of the trouble that children have with thinking is due to its invisible nature.

18. The Visual World Children are familiar and comfortable with it.
We live in an increasingly visual environment.
Children are familiar and comfortable with it.
The discrepancy between the visual orientation of the outside world and the verbal emphasis in the classroom will expand unless action is taken.

19. Spatial Dimensions
We cannot divorce the ‘visual’ from the ‘spatial’ where patterns emerge.
The ‘physical arrangements’ of the words within a visual tool represent the abstract arrangement of ‘thought objects’ in our minds.
Visual tools serve as ‘mental maps’ to depict complex relationships in any subject and at any level.

20. Examples of Visual Tools
Temporal visual tools – to represent a sequence of events.
Structural visual tools – to start thinking about a topic, organise the content, see the relationship between the whole and the parts.
Representational visual tool – to illustrate key features, and highlight details
Causal visual tools – identify the causes of events and create a baseline for action planning.
Numerical visual tools - items – ranking order, trends – change over time, frequency, correlation.
Organisational visual tools – direction of thoughts and content.

21. Questions to Make Pupils Think
Questions determine our thinking and stretch our vocabulary.
The use of ‘visual tools’ makes ‘questioners’ of all pupils (peer tutoring and assessment).
When we ask questions, WE THINK!!!

22. Listening to Learners

23. Exploring Motivation
Reflect on what you think motivates your pupils to learn in your lessons?
Make a list of factors you come up with.
Then ask pupils what motivates them?
Ask them what they look forward to most in your lesson… and what they dread! (if anything).
Why do they think its important to work hard in your lesson.
Whether any thing they would change which would make them work harder.
Have a dialogue with them… this can be rewarding and helps suggest things that you might do differently.
Consider if there are any factors which you do not feel you can control which affect the motivation of your pupils, and the implications of this for your lesson.