I came home and cried today. As an educator, I know I am not alone, but as a Physical and Health Educator (PHE), it cuts deeper because somehow I thought it wouldn’t happen in my class and to me. In education, resources are dwindling, red tape is multiplying, and complex student needs are reaching a …
Continue reading Fighting the Current: Reigniting Passion and Purpose
As a newly qualified teacher based in the Midlands of England, I have had the pleasure of teaching PE across every key stage of education. The mental gymnastics of going from planning a lesson on the musculoskeletal system, grounded in retrieval practice, cognitive load theory, and strands of Rosenshine’s Principles, to explicitly teaching the importance …
What if the thing holding back your strongest student work isn't rigor — it's the fact that you've assigned one product to thirty different people? We spend a lot of time designing what students will learn. We spend a lot less time thinking about who gets left out when we also dictate exactly how they …
Continue reading Choice Isn’t Lowering the Bar — It’s Raising the Ceiling
When you love what you teach, who you teach and where you teach in the good times, you feel like you are in your “flow state” but hold on…Let's be real for a minute. How many times have you had to teach through hard circumstances? Maybe students are difficult this year, you are on a …
At least 15 years ago, before social media or smartphones touched my high school English classroom, I used to teach an essay by the British novelist Laurie Lee, called "Appetite" as part of a unit on rhetoric. Lee writes about appetite in terms of food, describing the Depression-era pleasure of anticipating a toffee as much better than …
What I Hear: As an itinerant Adapted PE teacher, I travel to 20 schools interacting with 30+ PE teachers. In the conversations that follow I consistently hear frustration about a variety of items ranging from a lack of equipment to scheduling that is not aligned with student needs. While unacceptable these issues are all solvable. …
Continue reading 10 Steps for a Productive Conversation with Administration
The pursuit of excellence in Health and Physical Education is an ongoing act of finding balance (or “Tau” in the Aotearoa-New Zealand context I come from). As educators, our primary mission is to create a learning environment where every student, regardless of their capabilities or background, can find a meaningful connection to movement and Hauora …
In 30 years of teaching across six high schools on two continents, I’ve been fortunate to work in places that value physical education - schools that prioritize it, protect time for it, and employ certified teachers to lead it. I’ve even worked alongside former professional and Olympic athletes. In those moments, it’s clear: many schools …
Teaching is often treated as a problem to be solved. Pick the activity. Link it to a standard(s). Sequence the lesson. Measure performance. In physical education, this can show up as perfectly timed lessons, detailed progressions, and tightly structured plans … everything mapped out in advance: the day, the week, the month, the year … …
As I’m wrapping up my fourth year after I stepped away from my own classroom and having become a super sub (just a fancy way of saying I sub every day at one school…and I get paid a little more for it), I have gained a unique perspective that I’ll take along with me when …
Are you looking forward to the holidays? How about spring break or the summer or simply Fridays? Or how about just coffee? What about retirement? Do you know teachers that have their retirement date worked out to the year, month, week, day and depending on how things are going in a particular movement, they may …
Every few years, a new activity captures the interests of our students. Pickleball was hot for a minute, Spikeball was visible in every park and beach. Cup Stacking blew up for a while, and for a short period, each of these activities had their moment. If your community is anything like mine, it would appear …
Last May, as we were wrapping up the Lower School Field Day, a few Upper School students from Grades 6 and 7 approached me and asked, “Miss, why don’t we have a day like this in the Upper School?” A few weeks earlier, I had been told that I would be the Learning Leader for …
Continue reading When Students Ask, We Listen: Creating Our First Upper School Sports Day
Field Day is more than just a break from the classroom - it’s a carefully crafted experience designed to bring students together through movement, teamwork, and joy. While students arrive ready for fun, what they don’t always see is the incredible amount of time, energy, and resources that go into making the day unforgettable. Behind …
You can always spot a teacher at a conference. It's in the vibrant personalities and the unapologetically loud voices echoing through the lobby. It's the armloads of "really important stuff" including laptops, oversized water bottles, a stash of snacks that could last a week, and handfuls of "fabulous freebies." It's the heavy backpacks and the …
Continue reading A View from the Lobby: The Unseen Pulse of Pedagogy
Launched in 2020, over 240 educators and authors have joined in with the last six #microblog events here on slowchathealth.com. All six have been a huge success, lasting a whole month and featuring voices from across the globe. Sharing bite-sized blog posts of approximately 500 words, there have been submissions from experienced bloggers, first-time writers, …
As teachers, we’re constantly balancing our time between students, curriculum, assessment, and our own professional growth. One of the ways we nourish both our practice and our perspective is through intentional reading and I'm always on the lookout for books that make me think differently about learning, equity, connection, and the work we do every …
Whose responsibility is it? This is a common question that comes up when adults are considering how to disseminate information to kids. Whose responsibility is it to teach kids about their sexual health? Whose responsibility is it to teach kids about drugs and alcohol? People will have a variety of opinions. But let's focus on …
Continue reading Infectious Diseases: Why Skills-Based Health Education Matters
Ever since I watched Dale Sidebottom keynote at the PE Institute in North Carolina I've wanted to weave in some dice-based activities with my classes. I found this great deal online for 100 dice, but they sat in a drawer unaccompanied by an activity, until now. We return from break on a shortened schedule, and …
Continue reading Dicebreaker. The Connection-First Icebreaker
In a recent #Slowchathealth post, Andy Milne, shared a story about a “classroom moment” where his students took control of the learning environment and taught each other. The topic was menstruation and how to be supportive. A young man asked what more could boys do to be supportive, and this is what happened: “As I …
Continue reading Creating Environments for “Classroom Moments”
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