Episode 89 - Ben Mayes - Know, Show & GROW - Holistic and meaningful physical education

And let's talk about some of these then.

Yeah.

I read a lot of your work on LinkedIn.

You're kind of reflective and your posts are really interesting.

The first one I want to talk about is a recent post around normalizing struggle.

So you put a post up recently around the importance of normalizing and learners grappling with things in PE.

What does that mean to you? What does that look like in practice?

I think it's just a really important part of the learning process.

I'm massive on learning.

I think PE teachers as a whole aren't that big on learning, actually how learning happens.

And so I'm really, really big on that.

And I'm luckily enough, obviously, to be working at Bobbin College now, part of CELT, the Cornwall Educational Learning Trust.

And yeah.

And one of their chronicles, if you like, of learning is this idea of normalising struggle.

But it's also something that has been raised through conversations with people like Will Swaves about normalising struggle.

So normalising the struggle of learning PE, I think, is really important because we are on display as learners and learning can be difficult.

Some students won't have had that sort of foundational experience.

Skills learned in primary school or maybe to their upbringing, they just have a little bit of a disadvantage there.

So it's really important to normalize that struggle.

So it might be me as a teacher telling students this short objective is really difficult or it's really hard to understand this.

No objective they like if it's maybe a law and rugby, for instance.

Yeah.

And the reason why I posted about it is because I think it massively links to what we're trying to develop with our career objective.

We're trying to develop things like resilience, persistence, determination, embracing failure.

And all of those things sort of come with that normalising struggle idea.

And let's talk about some of these then.

Yeah.

I read a lot of your work on LinkedIn.

You're kind of reflective and your posts are really interesting.

The first one I want to talk about is a recent post around normalizing struggle.

So you put a post up recently around the importance of normalizing and learners grappling with things in PE.

What does that mean to you? What does that look like in practice?

I think it's just a really important part of the learning process.

I'm massive on learning.

I think PE teachers as a whole aren't that big on learning, actually how learning happens.

And so I'm really, really big on that.

And I'm luckily enough, obviously, to be working at Bobbin College now, part of CELT, the Cornwall Educational Learning Trust.

And yeah.

And one of their chronicles, if you like, of learning is this idea of normalising struggle.

But it's also something that has been raised through conversations with people like Will Swaves about normalising struggle.

So normalising the struggle of learning PE, I think, is really important because we are on display as learners and learning can be difficult.

Some students won't have had that sort of foundational experience.

Skills learned in primary school or maybe to their upbringing, they just have a little bit of a disadvantage there.

So it's really important to normalize that struggle.

So it might be me as a teacher telling students this short objective is really difficult or it's really hard to understand this.

No objective they like if it's maybe a law and rugby, for instance.

Yeah.

And the reason why I posted about it is because I think it massively links to what we're trying to develop with our career objective.

We're trying to develop things like resilience, persistence, determination, embracing failure.

And all of those things sort of come with that normalising struggle idea.