part of it really in that we’re trying to write plans for the subjects that we delivered the previous year… and then say, we are after introducing the whiteboards, interactive whiteboards…we’d some in-service for them ... so there’s a lot going on …and there’s huge demands on teachers time, both in terms of class, in terms of, in delivering the actual curriculum to the pupil. But then outside the class in terms of planning within the school…then we also have administrative policies to develop within the school. And last year we had to look at child protection… we’d to develop an anti-bullying policy. The support that teachers requested in physical education and their engagement
in it should be viewed in light of other professional development happening in the
school, which teachers were involved in. The Principal goes onto explain how he hoped
that the PDP would provide learning opportunities for the teaching staff and ultimately
that the children would experience quality physical education:
I suppose it was, I mean, you know, having these shortcomings in how we were delivering PE were obvious to a lot of us…so it was a real opportunity for us to address PE at school level…hopefully an opportunity for teachers to develop, and ultimately for children to get a broader and a richer experience of PE. I’d have felt that the PE in-service that we had [before PDP] was inadequate, in that it was rushed. It gives, threw out a few ideas, the teachers were doing that, the children got tired of just repeating the same ones. I don’t think there was sufficient follow-up to the actual in-service days we had, actual official in- service. So I thought it was a great opportunity for the teachers to learn. The Teachers Interviews and questionnaires. The teachers and the classes they taught
during the two academic years when this study took place can be seen in Appendix N.
In order to understand the teachers’ practices and perspectives of physical education,
and professional development in physical education, teachers completed a researcher-
developed survey and participated in focus group interviews. An overview of this phase
of the study is included here, in order to inform the reader about the case. The pertinent
findings from this phase were published
‘Its all about out of the classroom: The practices and perspectives of the teachers in teaching primary physical education’ (Coulter & Woods, 2007, Appendix B).
