This week I attended my work experience placement at Dunblane High School on Thursday afternoon. I worked with two class groups during the school day and assisted in running two afterschool clubs.
The first class group I worked with were a sports leaders group learning how to deliver tennis to different age groups. I assisted in this class by helping the teacher demonstrate skills and practices and by offering feedback and advice to individual pupils throughout the lesson. Having not coached tennis before, this session gave me an understanding of how the sport can be adapted for different ability levels. Also, it was interesting to see how this lesson differed from other PE lessons as its aim was to develop sports leaders rather than to specifically develop sporting skills and techniques in the performers.
The second class I was involved with was a second year group doing outdoor hockey, as a hockey player this was an environment I was much more familiar with. This made it easy for me to offer feedback and coaching points to the pupils in order to help improve their performances. During this session I helped set up practices and referee games, I also had to continually encourage pupils to remain focused and involved as, due to the adverse weather conditions, some were quite reluctant to part in the activity.
Directly after school I was left to run the badminton club which was attended predominately by first and second year pupils. This was a far more relaxed environment than the curriculum classes during the school day and gave me an opportunity to engage with the participants and develop more of a rapport. I supervised the activity and again offered feedback on their performances to aid their development both while observing and competing against them.
Following the badminton club there is a floorball club which is run by Tony, an independent sports coach. I worked with Tony to deliver this session. Floorball is similar to indoor hockey, so again was an activity I felt very familiar with, allowing me to give appropriate feedback and encouragement to the pupils and to effectively referee games.
I really enjoyed my placement this week as it gave me an opportunity to experience different types of PE lessons and different activities. I am hoping my placement can continue over the next few weeks as I still have quite a lot of hours to complete for the module. However, concerns were expressed by the staff that schools may be required to close in the near future in response to the increased spreading of the coronavirus. This is a situation I will need to monitor carefully going forward.
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