Module 6

 As with physical literacy, leadership is a learned skill that needs to be fostered in our students from a young age. Not everyone of our students will fall into that leadership role, however it is important to make sure that if we recognize it in our students that we do what we can to develop and pull it out of them. Just like within ourselves, being a leader does not mean that we need to be in the forefront of the school community. This was a concept that I understood to be true through the discussion on the teacher mind frames. Some teachers are the leaders who are more in the eye of the community and some are more silent leaders, encouraging our students to meet and exceed the expectations that we have for them.

This is why I really connected to the mind frame that; teachers who have high expectations of their students are more likely to lead then to have high expectations of themselves and their own achievement. As I mentioned in the module, it is through my experiences and opportunities that I have grown to adapt and mold my mind frame that we need to set expectations and goals for ourselves and that it never helps to lower the expectations that we have, it will only lower our standards that we set for ourselves in our lives. Therefore, as teachers it is our responsibility that we get to know our learners so that we can understand what they are capable of and make sure that their expectations of themselves meet what we expect from them.

The environmental stewardship activity in the module was also an eye opener for me that is something that I would like to explore further in my teaching practices. It really resonated with me, especially this past semester as for an extended period of time we were not able to take the students outside due to the air quality, and it was a good recognition of the fact that more often then not we take the environment for granted. I also really liked the part of the conversation where there is potential for cross curricular teaching in this area. I would like to take this on a personal inquiry project as I am also a history teacher and part of the Canada and World Studies department, that I recognize that there is so much potential for collaboration amongst teachers when talking about the environment and how we can consider it in out teachings.

I also really liked the readings on constructivist teaching approaches and plan to consider implementing this towards my teaching practices. I especially liked the portion talking about social constructivism. I agree with many of the arguments that were made about how our students are more guided through social interactions then directions spoken at them from their teachers. Therefore, I think that by implementing more opportunities for things like TGfU and experiential learning the students will be more engaged and likely to buy in to continuing to take HPE classes. This is something that I feel can be done individually and collaboratively within the department, as well as the whole school community.

I think that in terms of my own leadership possibilities, my presentation on School Connectedness, as well as my professional development opportunities on achieving excellence together, and the encouragement towards the importance of physical education, are all areas that I can look to capitalize on. I believe this, because they are areas that are important to me as a person and sort of what I consider passion projects as a teacher. A major goal for me as an educator is to one day have a fully functioning successful boys and girls lacrosse programs that have a fully functioning lacrosse intramural program running parallel to it so that students have the opportunity to develop their skills and practice to improve to make the teams and for the students who don't want to have the competition have an area to play the sport with ease of mine. As well, the idea of being healthy and active for life is another personal passion of mine that I have made a sort of mission to impart on the world and am looking forward to being able to help change the mindsets of students and stakeholders alike. I think that through the potential implementation of the example programs that I included in my culminating task will help to show how important it is to encourage our students to be physically healthy for life and how that translates to so many other aspects of their lives. This module has provided me with so many tools to understand how I can go about looking to implement and run these programs successfully.