Blog

If you teach Community and Family Studies, you know there is a lot of content to get through. It can be easy to fall into the pattern of teaching the content, working through the syllabus dot points, giving our students an example and moving on to the next thing.

This week on The PDHPE & CAFS Podca...

Ask a NSW primary teacher when PE happened this week and you will often get a pause.

It rained. Sport got bumped for a numeracy block. The casual took them out for Dodgeball. My own daughters once came home from a PE lesson with the librarian and told me they had learnt about recycling.

None of this i...

Same athlete, same skills, two competitions a fortnight apart. She bombed one and won the other and the only variable was what was going on in her head.

That story sits at the centre of episode 187 of The PDHPE & CAFS Podcast, part two of my conversation with Sami Palmer. Sami is a world champion t...

Your students can define arousal. They can define anxiety. They can tell you what the inverted U hypothesis shows. Then a question asks them to apply it to an athlete in a scenario and the marks fall away.

That is not a content problem. It is an application problem. And it is a hard one to fix when...

Your  Health and Movement Science  students know the content.

They can recall it. They can talk about it. They hand in work that looks like they understand it.

So why are they still losing marks?

This is the question that comes up again and again from Health and Movement Science teachers across N...

Your Health and Movement Science student can define stroke volume. They can list the principles of training. They can talk you through every dot point in the focus area.

And they still come back with a four out of six.

This week on The PDHPE & CAFS Podcast I unpacked why that keeps happening and i...

Your students know the content. You have taught it. They can talk about it. And then the paper comes back and it is three out of six.

Sound familiar?

This week on The PDHPE & CAFS Podcast I am naming the four mistakes I keep seeing Health and Movement Science students make. Not knowledge gaps. Hab...

Have you ever walked out to the oval on a Wednesday, looked at your class and thought "I honestly do not know if I am teaching this properly"?

If so, you are in good company. And I want to be really clear with you. You are not the problem.

I am a high school PDHPE teacher and I love PE. I love wha...

Let me ask you something. When did you last feel completely confident teaching sex ed?

If you had to think about it, you are in good company. Teaching sexual health and respectful relationships is one of the trickiest parts of NSW 7-10 PDHPE. The content shifts. The students change. And most of us ...

There is one task sitting in both your HMS and CAFS courses that quietly decides how ready your students are for Year 12. And most of us are wasting it.

It is the big student-led research task. In Health and Movement Science it is the Collaborative Investigation. In Community and Family Studies it is...

We need to re-think the way we are teaching Health and Movement Science. I have already heard from teachers whose elite athletes and strong writers have dropped the course. We can fix this.

Mistake 1: Teaching content without bringing it to life

There is a lot of content in this syllabus. I know. ...

Body Image Starts Younger Than You Think

Body image starts to develop as young as two or three years old. Not Year 8. Not the moment a phone lands in their hands. As soon as a child becomes aware they have a body.

And it gets harder to read. Around a third of six year old boys already want a more mu...