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Welcome to Off The Back Fence. This Padlet was born from a desire to connect, grow and be inspired. I'm a passionate, early career PDHPE teacher, working as a single-person faculty in rural NSW. I've created this space as a bit of a professional journal for myself, but also an opportunity to share what I learn and create with others. I'd love to connect - get in touch with me via LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-barden-622000259

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Find full units of work under the subject headings below. Feel free to download, adapt and use. I have created these units to specifically cater to my context - not everything will work for you, but you are welcome to take what you like. I hope it reduces your workload one way or another :)

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Introduction to the new school year.

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Dimensions of health / Health and wellbeing.

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Physical activity for health.

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I work on a two year cycle with staged classes. I have tried to design units with a common focus throughout the year, in the hope to maximise opportunities for retrieval practice (see the diagram of the 'forgetting curve' above). For example, in Year A, I focus on the dimensions of health and holistic wellbeing. In each folder, you can find a unit program, student workbook, PowerPoint presentation and numbered activities (corresponding to the lesson number in the unit). Consult the program and/or PowerPoint for instructions about how to facilitate each task. The program 'Resources' column will help you identify what to prepare to run each lesson.

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Introduction to the new school year.

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Physical activity and health.

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Nutrition and sleep hygiene.

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Skill acquisition / esports.

*If you want to learn more about using esports to boost learning, engagement, attendance and student wellbeing, check out MJ Raatz's Padlet here: Esports @ Forest Lake State High School, QLD, Australia (padlet.com)

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Sustainability in sports.

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Movement skill development.

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Health and wellbeing / Healthy lifestyle / Protective and risk behaviours.

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Relationship between sport and politics / Introducing generative AI to the classroom.

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I use this process and sentence stems to explicitly teach collaboration skills in my classes - students pick it up after a few viewings, but I keep it embedded in PowerPoints/workbooks to review. I have also asked students to co-construct a poster with collaboration phrases/questions in my classroom by pasting sticky notes - this keeps a visual example that they can refer back to all the time and my students love the ownership aspect.

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I used to throw research tasks into my lessons thinking that more opportunities for research would equate to my students becoming better researchers...but when I started to observe more closely and have conversations with my students about the processes they were using and the reasons behind the decisions they make during a research task (eg. how to source information), I realised that I was letting them down. I created this scaffold to use when I implement a research task - it takes time for them to complete, but it is worthwhile. Modelling and guiding this process before allowing them to complete independently is also crucial!

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I use TEEL for paragraph writing structure in PDHPE, but if you use a different structure, you can adapt this too. I edit the highlighted parts to reflect the question and provide this template during learning tasks or as a resource for draft responses during assessments.

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I find being in single-person faculties makes the 'silo effect' more pronounced and I have to actively seek out opportunities for collaboration with other professionals (hence this Padlet!). I've created a bit of a process/norms for collaboration, which I've used to lead collaboration between staff across different subject areas.

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"All teachers are teachers of literacy" - I recall hearing this during pre-service training. I love literacy - it is a particular passion of mine. I love using Frayer models to boost vocabulary in my classes and I have collated/created a few different versions - examples/non-examples, examples/visual representations or examples/use in a sentence. Additionally, AERO has some great resources to support HPE teachers to include literacy skills within their units. You can find it all in here!

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The ratio of students paying attention vs not, actively engaged in learning vs not - probably the single most important factor in a classroom, yet something I've personally overlooked a lot. When I think about lessons I have run in the past and routines I have had in my classroom, I've definitely fallen into the trap of 'teaching one, not all'. I stick these prompt cards on my desk/in my daybook to remind me to build good habits and increase ratio in my classroom. If you are interested in the subject, Doug Lemov's 'Teach Like a Champion' and Adam Boxer's blog, 'A Chemical Orthodoxy', are great reads.

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In my context, I work as a single-person faculty. It has many great benefits; one of which is certainly the professional autonomy that comes with being in charge of all the decisions associated with your subject area. It also comes with challenges, not least of which is the workload. You get to decide everything, but everything, more or less, falls on you. You can't delegate, rely on others, or collaborate within your subject; at least, not with the same ease you can in a faculty.

When I started out, I started with nothing and began building resources from scratch for all my classes. It was hard work, but designing units is a part of my job that I really like - it gives me an opportunity to be creative and I see it as an intellectually stimulating challenge to try and engage the students in front of me in their work. For the first two years in my role, I got swept up in this challenge. I was determined to make polished units and adhere to strict deadlines. Add in all the other challenges and tasks that come with day-to-day teaching and working in a school and I was pretty flat out. I would take my laptop on car journeys and program in the passenger seat; I would work through breaks and my mind would always be elsewhere during playground duty, morning runs or staff meetings.

I have really mixed feelings looking back at this. I know that I wasn't practising being present and taking advantage of the potential of all the moments that happen each day and I was conscious of my workload; but I just don't know how I could've done anything different. I needed to put my best foot forward in terms of creating learning experiences for my students. Time in class is short and I am passionate about the transformational potential of health and physical education for disadvantaged communities, so I didn't want to waste a minute. Yet by fixating on this goal, I feel like I couldn't benefit from many of the other opportunities that arise; opportunities to build relationships with students, families and community or to help out a colleague who was struggling, to really appreciate the good work that other people were doing or to meaningfully contribute to my school through actions outside of the four walls of my own classroom.

I'm not suggesting that, if I had my time over again, I wouldn't prioritise my own class and making sure I had quality learning opportunities for my students ready to go, and I'm certainly not suggesting that this feeling is unique to being an early career teacher or a single-person faculty. I think no matter what role you have or how experienced you are, it is easy to feel busy and overwhelmed and miss those opportunities. I guess this is more writing for the purpose of catharsis. It is difficult and sometimes it feels like there is always "something else" you could be doing. I'm sure plenty of educators can empathise with this feeling.

This year I've made a commitment to myself that I will make sure I'm being present and taking advantage of all the moments - big or small. I'm promising myself that I'll make more of an effort to make conversation with students in the playground, interact with parents and carers when the opportunity arises, be present in my community and contribute to the big picture things happening at my school - say my piece at staff meetings or volunteer for that extra-curricular activity.

Whilst those smaller moments are important, sometimes we miss the boat with the big moments too. From my perspective, it all comes down to preparation. In my context, we don't often have the opportunity to get a lot of our families on-site and financial constraints, being in an isolated, low socioeconomic area, are a big barrier to many things that might be the norm in larger, regional or metropolitan schools. There is a lot of things that maybe get put in the "too hard basket" or become an opportunity that was missed because the time wasn't taken to plan, prepare and consider how our actions will be perceived and experienced by the target audience, whether it is staff, students or family and community members.

I feel this kind of user experience design approach to anything - whether it is professional learning during a staff meeting, an event within school or an opportunity to speak with or write to families - is critical. In my view, this sort of comes down to the old adage that says "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing right.". If you're going to give a speech to your community, send a letter home to parents, run a staff meeting or deliver a program for your students, it is vital to think about how it will be perceived and experienced by the audience. Are you making your point clearly? Does the audience have everything they need to understand and act on it? Have you made it easy for take-up to occur? Is your audience going to benefit in the way you want them to? If not, what can you do differently? I think sometimes in the rush of the day-to-day, these questions aren't asked, or they aren't asked in a way supports different perspectives to be heard and considered as to provide stronger preparation. Consequently, we miss an opportunity to make the most of the big moments. I don't think that it is because anyone intends it to be this way, but viewing our schools and interactions with a user experience lens is a skill that I'm endeavouring to practice more intentionally.