From 2012 - 2016 I was fortunate enough to work at Delia School of Canada, an Ontario accredited K-12 school located in Hong Kong, SAR China. I was also fortunate to serve as the Department Lead of a great group of motivated young educators (thank you Sean, Craig & Corey). As is the case in Ontario, Grade 9 Physical Education is the only compulsory physical education course required for students to receive their Ontario Secondary School Diploma. Hong Kong, like many other countries in Asia is full of highly academically motivated students and thus when it comes to choosing electives, Grade 10 Physical Education was a course that often fell far down the list of students desired choices. At the conclusion of my first year of teaching (2012-13), only 39% of Grade 9 students were electing to take the Grade 10 the following year. Moving into 2013-14 such, our goal as a PE team became to increase the % of students who continued to choose to participate in Grade 10 PE.  Our first step was to understand why students were dropping out of PE at such a large rate. 

The results seemed to be confirmed by the word map activity we did with students, where we asked them to write all the words they associate with PE. The larger the words appeared, the more frequently they were mentioned by students. While there are a number of positive outcomes student associate with PE, there is also clearly a lack of variety in activity offerings as primarily only team invasion sports are listed. 

Based on our survey of the students, the students indicated they there was not enough variety of in the types of activities (many found it was too sport based) while an equally large portion of students found difficulty demonstrating competency of the standards, specifically the skill-related assessments which often served as a reminder of more of what students couldn't do than what they had learned during the unit. 

For the next couple years we aim to respond to the students concerns by providing a greater breadth of activities. Rather than focusing on skill performance, we adopted a Game Sense model that focused on the evaluation of decision making while utilizing each students individual skill set. As opposed to emphasizing the physical domain, we aimed to make learning more personally relevant for students by reflecting on how other aspects of PE such as mental resilience are transferable to other areas of our lives. 

Value	2012-13 to 2013-14	2013-14 to 2014-15	2014-15 to 2015-16	2015-16 ​2016-17*
Number of G9 Students	107	80	105	92
Participated in G10 PE	42	36	61	60
% Retention	39%	45%	58%	*65%

*Projected numbers based on course selection, I left the school before actual participation data was made available. 

As the data shows, we were successful in our approach and positively changed our students disposition towards physical education. In 2013/14 I also piloted a senior level Personal Fitness course (PAF3O) which saw increases in enrollment each year. At the conclusion of each year we repeated the word association activity as we did above and while certainly not perfect, the change in focus from the physical domain, and traditional team sports to other personal types of physical activity is also evident in the student word associations. 

During the 2014-15 school year, our school messed departments together and I became the Head of Department of the Arts as well, which included both visual and dramatic arts. I was once again fortunate enough to work with two passionate educators - Peony and Vanessa who were motivated to increase retention in their classes as well. During department meetings we discussed how we could make our subjects more personally relevant for students by understanding how our classes help students develop creativity and critical thinking skills (for example) that will ultimately be essential later in life. To guide our professional development as a department and despite the diverse nature of our subjects, I led a book study on "Teach Like a P.I.R.A.T.E." by David Burgess with the purpose of building more positive relationships with students and providing more engaging lessons. As a credit to Peony and Vanessa's hard work and dedication, the department had a higher retention rate between compulsory and elective courses as well!