This year was my first year as the head of department and although I've been in a leadership position before, this was a big learning curve for me, due to the size of the school. I changed the PE curriculum, so now students are able to develop their physical literacy through a variety of activities, rather than teaching activities that are best suited for the teacher. This required teachers to teach activities they were not used to, but as a department we supported each other through this process. At the end of the year, the teachers were happy with the variety taught and were happy to continue with the program for the upcoming year.
We also had two inspections last year with CIS and BOS, which required a thorough inspection of our documents and with us delivering a relatively new programme, we had to create new schemes of work from scratch. This tied in nicely with introducing our new assessment rubrics, which I believe was more simple and specific to what we were teaching. This required some training for my team, as we are all from different teaching backgrounds. This year was an implementation year, so the assessments are something we want to improve for next year.
Moving forward
Each year, I try to implement 2-3 strategies/ideas to my teaching, but last year I never got the chance with all my time being spent on the sport teams. I don't think my teaching got affected but I definitely did not develop as a teacher. For this upcoming year, I would like to go back to basics and be more creative in:
Helping students understand their assessments.
Understanding students learning through effective plenaries.
Implementing technology into my teaching (I have now bought an iPad).
If you have any advice or strategies/ideas that you may think may be useful for my targets this year, please get in touch. It would be greatly appreciated.