Prior Skills:  Most of the students are actively involved in sport outside of school and have a good grasp of the Fundamental Movement Skills, there are some students that struggle with some of the basic skills. I think athletics will be a great opportunity to work on some of the Fundamental Movement Skills. 

The students will also have completed a Gymnastics scheme of work which used a lot of elements of cooperative learning. The students developed skills that will help them in the PSI Model

Prior Attitudes:  Students always have great attitudes towards PE. They participate well and enjoy PE Class. There are some students that benefited greatly from the Cooperative Learning Gymnastics Model that the students have completed

I think that giving the students an opportunity to experience sports that they would not have had experiences in before is important. It allows the students that don’t have an interest in the popular sports such as Gaelic Football, Hurling, Soccer and Rugby to find a sport that they enjoy. It also provides a new challenge to the students that play the ‘popular’ sports. 

The students will also develop skills in athletics that will help them in the sports that they play. Such as learning to sprint would be a benefit to athletes in any sport

The PSI model of teaching is widely respected as an effective, interactive and student-cantered teaching model. Each student has her own workbook that leads her through the course at a pace matching his/her own ability, making her less dependent on the teacher. The workbook series "runs" the course, not the instructor, so s/he can spend more time working with students who need extra attention (Carr, 2001)

 

The typical structure of any one of the first five lessons is summarized below:

· Attendance: Students sign their name on the sheet by the whiteboard

·  Introduction: Introduction by learning wall. We will do this in the sports hall and then complete the    
class on the sports pitch. I will go through how the pitch will need to be sit up and assign certain students the responsibility of setting up the pitch.

We will then have to walk up to the pitch

· Warm Up: The students will complete the warm up task that is on the sheet. It will be an activity that will raise the heart rate before beginning the lesson

· Task: The students will complete the task without receiving any instruction from the teacher. They will record the result, and at the end of the class we will compare the result to the result at the end of the class

· Demonstration: Teacher demonstration of the focused skills followed by student demonstration

· Main body of lesson: Use task sheets to complete warm up and tasks of focused skills. 

·  Assessment: Self-assessment, peer assessment or teacher assessment will be carried out during the main body of the lesson after completing each task

· Reflect: Students rate their effort for the lesson and tick the correct box in the on the sheet 

·  Conclusion: Tidy up the equipment and walk down to the sports hall. 

As these students are 1^st Year Students, I will be only using elements of PSI and not implementing a full-blown PSI Model. If I had these students for 3 years, I would introduce different elements of the model year by year until they are ready to complete a full module using all the elements of PSI in Senior Cycle.

 I will use demonstrations at the start of every class. I will use either teacher demonstrations or use ICT to show the skill at the beginning of each lesson. I will use external cues as the key teaching points

The students will mainly be working in pairs through out the scheme. This will be similar to the Cooperative Learning in Gymnastics. I will incorporate peer assessment through the scheme which will allow the students to give feedback to their partner. This is something that they had to do in the Gymnastics Scheme. At first, they were not giving very effective feedback, but over the course of the scheme the feedback they were giving improved a lot. Giving feedback, is a skill that needs to be developed, and it’s not something that the students will be effective at straight away. 

At the end of each lesson the students will reflect on both their learning and participation during the class. Reflecting, is a skill that is important to develop for the students because it’s a key element of the New Junior Cycle. 

 

At the start of each class the students will complete the task without receiving any instruction. They will record the result. At the end of the class they will then complete the task again and compare results. At the end of the 6 weeks the students will participate in a Mini-Olympics. They will be completing events but prizes will be given out based on improvements rather than the students that finish 1st

“The skills associated with these activities can, at junior cycle, begin to be applied to modified forms of standard events. The element of competition inherent in athletics is presented here with reference to the abilities of the individual student. Hence the students’ experience of competitive situations is in the context of personal goals rather than relating performance to that of others (JCPE syllabus, pg 23). 

 

Pupils' literacy skills will be developed through the following activities:

The teacher will also use lots of questioning through the lesson to assess the students. There will be some lower order questioning, but the teacher will use higher order questioning as an Assessment for Learning 

The students will also be carrying out both self-assessment and peer assessment throughout the scheme. They will be helping each other learn and improve the skills. The mini Olympics at the end of the scheme will act as a Summative Assessment. The students will see if they have improved their skills during the Scheme

All of the events will help the students work on there balance. Some of the events require a great deal of balance and it will be a challenge for the students

For the events like shot put etc. there will be a focus on developing the students object control skills. When we are developing these skills some of the tasks used will work on the students catching skills also.

Most importantly, events such as javelin throwing will require a combination of locomotion, balance, coordination and object related skills in order to perform task correctly and effectively. This will further increase the opportunities to develop their FMS.

(Levy, 2008)
There are a wide variety of ability in this class. There are some students that are very skilled while at the same time there are some students that struggle with the basic skills. The PSI model would allow the students the opportunity to work at their own level. The students can select skills that they feel are suitable for their own skill level.

Introducing the students to PSI would be appropriate at this stage because they would have learned some of the skills in previous models such as the Cooperative Learning Model. In the Cooperative Learning Model the students will have to be responsible for their own learning.

While I think that the model suits the class group, I thought that I needed to adapt the model to suit the particular class group. The first thing is that the students are working in pairs instead of by themselves.  

I'll also use teacher demonstrations for the tasks. This is so that the students get a visual aid for learning and we do not have ICT devices available for the students.

For the first few weeks i will also gradually build up to giving the students more freedom. I will have tasks that are differentiated i.e there are different difficulties but I don't think that the students are ready to be given complete dependence from the teacher