Teaching outdoor and adventure activities: an investigation of a primary school physical education professional development p

Outdoor and adventure activities.
The children had a better understanding than 
the teachers of Outdoor and Adventure Activities (O&AA), with many of the children 
describing outdoor pursuit type activities such as, rock climbing, hiking through the 
woods and canoeing. The younger children included going to adventure parks and 
treasure hunts in their descriptions. The children were very receptive to the potential of 
O&AA during physical education class but were anxious that they wouldn’t do it all the 
time in case it was boring. The senior classes mentioned that they would like to try it 
but would want to do games too. 
Conclusion.
The dilemma posed to the design and implementation of the 
professional development programme, from these findings is how to focus on learning 
objectives of a lesson while at the same time allowing for individual responses, and the 
need to encourage child input into the lessons. The goal of helping children become 
physically active for a lifetime is a difficult one – should we concentrate on giving 
children more of what they enjoy while moving or should we focus on teaching them 
the acquired skills to help them enjoy activity in the future (Locke & Lambdin, 2003)?
It can be seen from these findings, similar to those of Imwold and Conkell (1994) that 
some of the children in this school don’t know why they have physical education 
lessons and teachers need to regularly reflect on what they think children may have 
learned in their physical education classes even when the teachers are sure about what 
has been taught. Although it may be too early to include assessment into the PDP at 
this stage of the teachers’ learning, the children’s voices will be acknowledged during 
lessons by the researcher and the teachers through questioning and observation. Their 
voice has contributed to the design of the PDP through their responses to questionnaires 
and in their focus group interviews and will continue to do so through the PDP in 
lessons and during further focus group interviews.