A Focus on Meaningful Experience

Meaningful experiences transcend curriculum and context, regardless of facilities, curriculum objectives or country, striving to ensure students have a meaningful experiences in my class has become an important pillar of my educational philosophy. 

Defining Meaningful Experience

Over the past several years at Korea International School of Jeju, I've been fortunate to serve as the Department Lead of a great group of talented and motivated physical education professionals (thank you Kathie, Kevin, Sean, John, Rhys, Mun, Alan, Mark and Matt for your support). While many of us received training in different curricular backgrounds prior to coming to KISJ along with a variety of prior international experiences, providing students with meaningful PE experiences (MPE) in our classes, was an objective that we found unity in pursuing. The meta-analysis conducted by Steph Beni,  Tim Fletcher and Dierdre Chroinin (2016) outlines five central features of meaningful experiences; social interaction, challenge, opportunities to develop movement competence, enjoyment, and personal relevance. As a starting point, we began trying to define and describe how those features may be observed in our classes. Through a process of continual self-reflection and supplemental research conducted as part of my MEd, we began to develop a MPE rubric that we use as a source of on-going self and peer evaluation 

Becoming Intentional About MPE

While we continue to revise this rubric, we have more recently shifted the conversation towards intentionality and being explicit with students about the features of MPE. We've built in guiding statements into our Understanding by Design template in order to ensure that providing is a core part of who we are and made evident in the planning. 

As a part of our own professional development, we record a lesson of each department member who reflects on their own ability to address the features of MPE in their classes and sets appropriate goals related to one of the five features. In the spirit of on-going professional development, department members are paired with a cross divisional partner who observers them and provides feedback related to the specific feature the teacher has chosen to focus on. 
Nearing the conclusion of the school year, as the department lead, I complete a year-end evaluation over the course of 3 consecutive lessons to ensure that the features of MPE are adequately addressed. 
Through continued discussion and revision, we ultimately began to realize that the features were too inter-elated to confine to a rubric or checklist and thus the document became more a of a useful tool for planning as opposed to a rubric for teacher evaluation. ​