So this week I have been teaching three practical lesson relating to circuit training for AS Level PE practical assessment. The first two practical lessons were massive reflections as the lesson did not go as planned as I expected. Firstly, rather than demonstration particular exercises for the lesson, I provided students with a sheet showing the exercise and a brief description on how to perform them. Afterwards, students attempted to try the exercise. This was a problem. Why? Because I didn’t demonstrate! How are the students suppose to know how to perform the correct technique without being shown? Demonstration is key and I consider to be visual learning. Demonstration is an essential teaching approach in supporting the learning of a skill at any level or grade and is the most supportive of all teaching approaches (Mooney, 1990) cited by Matteson and Freeman (2006). A positive for the circuit training sheets is that it provides students with visual thinking. Visual thinking is a learning style where the learner better understand and retains information when ideas, words and concepts are associated with images. It seemed that the first two groups seemed to found it difficult to visualise the exercise they were doing because of the lack of demonstrations from me and descriptions on the sheet. However, the third grouped performed better because of the advantage that they were shown demonstrations as well as the sheet. I feel this benefited them more as they gained two types of learning in which they were able to understand what they doing a lot better compared to the other two groups. This was an reflection in which I had to think about the plannings of lesson more in depth to prevent this from happening again.
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