Firstly I would like to clarify that this post will be quite brief as I am yet to start my placement.

However I am making an effort to speed up the process. Today I emailed my mentor who is also my former secondary school PE teacher. This is the first time I have made contact with her since she agreed to help me with my placement. In the email I briefly explained what the placement should consist of in terms of the required hours etc. Furthermore I also asked my mentor what she thinks would be beneficial for me to do during my time in the school.  I feel like I should have attempted to sort this out sooner in order to be better prepared for the presentation however I continued to delay this unnecessarily.

Therefore this has made feel slightly anxious that I may struggle to complete enough hours between now and my presentation to get a good mark as I work part time as well as attend university. On the other hand I am also confident I will be able to make a good arrangement with my teacher as she was always helpful during my time in school. I am intrigued to see what her plans are for me during my placement while I am also excited to gain more experience in the career area I aspire to work in. I believe this will be a very rewarding experience for me and I look forward to acquiring new skills as well as building on the ones I already possess.

Overall I look forward to my mentors reply and plan to take action to make my placement as convenient and valuable as possible.

Blog week 2

This week I spent 2 full days at Wallace High with my mentor (forgetting how long the school day was), trying to keep up was slightly difficult. However, going from being in classes from First to sixth year was fun and interesting as it was great to see the difference in sporting ability and tempo. Over the two days, I was able to follow around and shadow a variety of teachers, this really helped me to see different types of teaching styles, a very important aspect that I wanted to learn.

I was able to take warm ups for sports including; football, basketball and dance. It was great to be able to use what I know, games and warm up wise, and implement it on a class. However, with taking a warm up for a dance class, this was one I found rather difficult and worrying. Although I personally danced for 12 years (2-14), I have not thought of what I learned since I quit, this forced me to go speak to teachers who take either the school or dance or dance teams for inspiration. This however, has proved to be a good thing, it got me out of my comfort zone and has allowed me to learn new skills that i can take forward in life. (217)

As I was able to complete another 14 hours this week, I have managed to learn a lot and I’m excited to do the same next week. I have been tasked with writing a lesson plan for an S2 basketball class which I am very excited and nervous about. (266) With a good background of basketball I have already managed to plan the vast majority of the lesson, taking all the tips and tricks my mentor has mentioned to me and implementing them into my plan. I hope they love it as much as I have enjoyed creating it!

The ball is rolling in regards to getting my PVG finalised.  Hoping to have everything up and running by next weekend at the latest.

The excitement of finally getting going is building, with Craig emailing through opportunities continuously for us to get involved with.  The most recent being a chance to help out at a with Active Stirling and Scottish Disability Sport on November 8th.  Something that interests me greatly, with the role being to just assist around the event and make myself useful, this offers me a brilliant chance to gain an insight into how these things are run. How the people involved find such events, in terms of the sort of activities offered to the participants, and generally what it entails when organising such an event.  Something that I am looking forward to already.

With the delayed start to my actual placement, there isn’t much more going on for me at the moment in terms of news.  However, the patience showed by Craig has been reassuring.  With the endless events and opportunities for me to gain the experience I’m after, I am not too worried about the fact I am yet to clock any of the required hours to complete the module.  Again, extremely excited to start this unique experience with Active Stirling.

Hoping to have more to write about in the coming weeks,

Tom.

 

The first thing I have started to realise about placement is how tiring the days can be, to make it to Armadale for 9am I have to leave my house at 6:30am!! It is around1.5 hours on the train and 1.5 back. Although the days are long it’s a great visual as to what full-time work as a teacher can be like. Hayley picked me up at the station as usual, we discussed if I would be comfortable including two more young girls within my lunch time group, I was so excited that more girls wanted to be part of the lunch time club and voluntarily approached Hayley with their interest.

My day was to be very similar to my previous Monday, the same classes as I had already created good relationships with some of the pupils within those classes. I really enjoyed assisting with the swimming lesson 2nd period, swimming is something I am confident in so assisting with the lesson and leading games came naturally to me, I taught swimming lessons during my time working in America, so it was great to be able to use my skill set again.

During my lunch time group the active school co-ordinator was interested in sitting in and seeing how the group worked and what she could do to help. The two new girls arrived, unfortunately the two girls from last week didn’t show up but we proceeded with the group anyway, we played table tennis and football with the girls and spoke about P.E and there experiences within the subject, it’s a surreal feeling being on the other side now as I remember so distinctively being that young person. It is something which I will always utilise, so I can relate to young people and share my experiences of how sport and P.E can be used to change lives.

The last period of the day was a really interesting one, Hayley had mentioned that only one teacher in the school got an “excellent” rating on their OFSTED report, I was really keen on seeing this teacher teach, even though it wasn’t going to be within P.E. Olivea is a modern languages teacher who teaches French and Spanish, he agreed to allow me to sit in on his lesson with his higher French group. Seeing him teach was an amazing learning experience for me, he utilised technology as well as creating a humorous and safe environment for the pupils, from observing the lesson every single pupil was working and engaging within the class, even when technology was involved nobody was distracted and it was obvious the pupils had a massive amount of respect from him. Speaking with him afterwards was really interesting, it’s really important to be able to see different teaching techniques especially within different subjects.

Next week is half term so I will not be able to attend placement. however I am excited to get back to Armadale on the 28th of October.

This was my second week of going in to Wallace High to work with their school of sport programme and try to arrange some fixtures and competition for the S1-3’s. I felt much more confident going in this week because I am getting to know the faces around the P.E department and my mentor is really nice and welcoming.

This weeks work was to gather together contact details of local schools who might be interested in competing against Wallace High in either swimming or football. After gathering the details of multiple schools the next challenge was to get in contact with them and find out if there is any interest in competition. We are aiming these fixtures at S1-3 of all abilities so there is room for other schools to either compete against us or to just have friendlies. These tasks this week were relatively straight forward because my mentor already had a lot of great contacts that I could use. Getting in contact with other schools provided me with a great opportunity to work on sending professional emails and networking with other professionals.

Going forward, I have to wait for responses from other schools before we can plan any venues or dates for these fixtures which is frustrating but it gives me a chance to plan the structure of any future events. I am looking forward to getting things organised as I believe this is a great opportunity for the children to experience competition against other schools and will hopefully be a huge confidence builder for them.

 

Michael McAnespie

During my second day of my work experience placement with Active Schools, I learned about the collection, gathering and analyse of data using a spreadsheet database. I felt quite nervous about this as ICT literacy is an area that I feel I need to improve my knowledge and understanding of. However, this inspired me to take the opportunity to develop my admin skills and learn how to use this in the sports development industry.

My mentor Fraser showed me how to input information into the ASMO (Active Schools Monitoring) system which then is transferred over onto the main system at Sport Scotland. I learned that this system is used over the academic year. The Network of Active Schools coordinators and managers collect data on the sports which they have established in schools. This data is used to maintain the planning and delivery of the Active Schools programme. At the end of each academic year, this information is collated into a report, which summarises the activity across Scotland (Sport Scotland, Active Schools Report: 2018-2019). I feel this would play a pivotal part of the learning and reflection of an active schools’ coordinator and gives them quantitative data to summarise the year of sport within the learning community.

Fraser then allowed me to begin inserting the information and data for the first school term from five different schools. At first, I found this overwhelming but after observing a few examples and trying myself, I soon became very confident. I added the sports being offered in each school as well as the number of participants and whether they were male or female. I learned that interpreting data to find trends is an important part of collecting data in sport. For example, another tool used is SEAMUS. This gives information about every pupil and their position on the social deprivation chart. By looking at the information I found one pupil who attend no extra curricular activities in the first term. This pupil was also very high on the social deprivation chart. I concluded that a possibility may be that this pupil may not be participating in sport due to their personal and social, economic status. Fraser also agreed with me on this judgement. Although the collection of quantitative data is very useful, I feel that Active Schools and Sports Scotland could use qualitative methods to find out more in depth and descriptive reasons to statistical trends. This task made me use my interpretative and analytical skills to identify and explain why participation levels differ in social groups.

I thoroughly enjoyed my second week of placement. I found it really tested me and my areas of development. I learned a lot and feel I improved my ICT literacy skills massively, which was an area I mentioned in my skills audit. I look forward to my next day at placement, where I can challenge myself and learn something new.

-Stephanie.

Following on from my PVG being sent away to be updated last week I am still waiting on Craig getting back to me to say it has returned so as of yet I have not been able to start my placement.

In Fridays seminar last week Romie set us the task of career planning and taught us on how to be able to reflect. She gave us out booklets in which we used the session to work through. The first page contained a structure of our life from birth until now and we had to write what our most successful moment has been in our life so far. For me this was being accepted into University after failing to be accepted when I first applied when leaving school. When I got knocked back from University when I first applied it was a massive confidence knock for me and I constantly thought that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough. I also have a twin sister who had gotten accepted into the University courses that I went for as well so this made it even more difficult for me and put a lot of pressure on me. As I didn’t get accepted anywhere I worked full-time for a year instead, I gained a job as an assistant development officer which made me realise I really wanted to work within the sport development industry and gave me great experience in which I believe helped me to get into university when I applied the next year.

When reflecting on this during the seminar it made me feel really proud of myself and how far along I have came. Thinking back to how demotivated and upset I felt about not getting in to now looking at myself as a third year sport student at Stirling made me feel really good about myself and motivated me to try and do well.

-Rebecca

Towards the end of last week Craig contacted me via email to say that all necessary forms had been sent away and it would just be a case of waiting a couple of weeks for all of this to come back. Once this is all completed I will be ready to embark on my placement. I am looking forward to getting started and learning many new skills.

Due to not having started my placement yet I am going to talk about the seminar last Friday. I arrived at the seminar fairly early. This seminar was based on Career Awareness and Planning. I was given a booklet which had many different tasks in it. As Romy went through the slides she talked through each task which I had to complete.The first task at hand was to make a framework which Romy had already planned out for me. Then the second task was to structure my past. So I had to plot when I was born, my current age and an important event which has happened in my life. My important event was starting university when I was 18. Task 3 was to structure the most important things in my life just now and then rank them.

Following on there were a few more tasks to be completed. One task I enjoyed in particularly was structuring my future. So this task involved me planning what I want to be doing next year, in 3 year, in 5 years and then in 10 years. My wishes were based on my academics and my future job. I plan to be a primary teacher which requires me to apply for a postgraduate teacher training degree at the end of my current degree.

I feel that this seminar has been helpful and these tasks will be good to look back on and see if I have achieved my goals. I hope to have started my placement in the next couple of weeks.

Chloe Agnew

Today the 8th of September I met with my other mentor Shona Clark.  Shona like Lee is an Active Coordinator for Active Schools Edinburgh, she is in charge of the Forrester Cluster which is North West Edinburgh, this area is more idea for me to do placement as I live in that area of Edinburgh, although may still do some of my placement within the Leith Cluster with Lee.

The main reason for the meeting with Shona was to sort my PVG. This I need to do for my placement as I will be working with children.  I have previously completed it before as have done voluntary with children, but need to be done each time your working with different company and to comply with their policies. Shona was very helpful and ensured I completed form correctly, she told me it will be sent out tomorrow with the rest that is getting sent out and said may take up to 14 days for it to come through. Due to this wont able to start for over a week, this worried me a little as wondered how will I get hours in and mentioned this also to Shona.

Shona assured me that will able to get hours in once I told her my availability.  There is many extra curriculum sport  activities within active schools usually at lunch time, when school finishes and also there is one which are  full day where I can work alongside one of the coaches. Activities at lunch and after school are around and 1 hour some have 2 one after the other.  Due to my availability will able to do at least do 3/4 hours a week alone with these activities, and on the full day would be 8 hours. So once PVG throughs I could potentially complete my all my placement hours within 3-4 weeks. This has took the pressure away of not being able to get done.

Shona and myself also spoke about continuing voluntary work once the placement was complete and potential coaching courses I could be put on.

Today, was week 2 of my placement in Stirling at Raploch Primary School. As I arrived my mentor asked – do you have any suggestions of stations that I could use for this session? Yes, of course, I felt under pressure as I was put on the spot but I had a perfect idea! The aim of the session was to incorporate Shapes and Mathematics into Physical Education for a primary 1/2 class and I believe myself and Natalie did just that! The pupils where split into 4 stations however, at each station there was a shape such as; triangle, circle, rectangle, and square. Within each station, the participants had to perform a particular exercise. For example, triangle = star jumps, circle = running on the spot with your knees up, rectangle = skipping, followed by a square which required the children to reach up to the sky and touch their toes. Once the children where set and in their stations the coach threw a dice and depending on the number it landed on, the child would go on to complete the exercise the amount of times that was shown on the rolled dice.

For the duration of this session, I ensured that I got involved by joining in during the exercises, shouting out the numbers and shapes while encouraging the children. I was ecstatic as all of the children were participating with huge smiles on their faces! However, I noticed that some children where disobeying instructions by standing on the cones that were located at their stations. One strategy that I used to overcome this was I stated to the children that the cones where hot lava, therefore, if they stood on a cone, this meant they had to fix it and stand still for 5 seconds.

Overall, I believe that I have developed a strong relationship with both the participants and my mentor as they listened and valued any ideas or opinions that I shared. Furthermore, I have learned a new skill by incorporating other subjects into Physical Education classes providing a platform to support and develop the children! For next week’s session, I would like to support an external football coach and potentially referee competitive games.

Lauren