Hello Teachers 

The main goal of this blog is to share my beliefs, resources, strategies, and methods about teaching Physical and Health Education in the IB MYP Program. Before joining IB school I went through a Teacher Preparation Program certified by the University British of Columbia, so I had an opportunity to learn the IB program for 1 year before joining the school to teach MYP. We are very few teachers that had this opportunity most of the teachers know the Program while they are already teaching and they easily make mistakes and get frustrated between what they know and what they have to learn while working. 

To give my support to the new teachers in the IB program I will be sharing a lot of resources to help them and address topics that will give them ideas on how to deal with some situations related to teaching and learning. 

For the experienced teachers, I look forward to learning from you, discussing and collaborating so together we can support new teachers. 

My name is Elves Domingos Tembe,  I am a Physical Health Education teacher and Learning leader from Mozambique, currently teaching MYP ( Middle Year Program).

In this text, I will talk about the process I take to plan an MYP – PHE Fitness Unit, in case you have any questions or doubts feel free to write in the comments section below, and don’t forget to like, and follow me to receive all texts I will be writing.

Let’s start 

This is a real situation: 

Before closing the school, I discussed with my head of department the units we will be teaching when we come back from the holidays. Looking at our curriculum overview we saw that it’s time to focus on Fitness Unit. In my current school, because they have been teaching for a long time they have their Curriculum Overview well structured and a lot of units planned but the head of departments always gives me an opportunity to bring my ideas to the units. 

This is different from the school I come from because I was the only PHE MYP teacher, so I had to make decisions myself and create a curriculum overview it took me 2 years to have an established Curriculum overview, and when I moved to my new school I was surprised with a number of resources they had, it’s difficult to start from the beginning and I left my country thinking that I would start from the beginning but they had a lot of units, resources to support students and teachers. 

But being a new teacher I decided to learn from them and follow their curriculum overview. I did not want to change the sequence of the units that were being taught, the only thing I do is to plan the units in my own way and discuss them with my head of department. 

So now I will show you how I planned the fitness unit: 

My units have to be special and motivational for the students, I want to tell the students the unit title and see their faces shine and start asking questions. So I asked myself, what I will call this fitness unit? 

It’s for grade 10, I start to think about my students, and what they like, and I thought about calling the unit BATTLE, but I was not happy because just battle would be open. What pushed me to be battle, during the conversation with the HOD we decided that the students would identify their areas of improvement in components of fitness then a classmate would help them to beat their best. So it would be a battle between their current level of fitness with what they want to achieve.

I made a short research about the battle, I added Fitness Battle and I liked what I found, so my Final unit Time will be 

FITNESS BATTLE (ME VS ME)

After having a unit title I move to the MYP guide to look at the concepts. And the first one is the key concept – Make sure you choose only one key concept, about the related concepts I normally work with 2 but during my training and the IB workshop I did I learn that you could use 1,2 or even 3 related concepts. For me, 2 is enough to explore with the students. 

Let’s look at the key concepts.

For MYP-PHE we normally use the highlighted concepts, so for my unit, I decided to use CHANGE if you ask, why? 

We want students to focus on their fitness, look at their current level of fitness and work in order to be a better version of themself, so CHANGE is a concept that we can explore in order to learn how this change works in the world and how it can work for people sound them and for them? 

The next step is to decide about the related concepts, lets’s see the option we have, remember I will only select 2 but you can work with 1,2 or even 3. 

For the related concepts we can use any of the options we have in the table, for my unit students will work in pairs we already discussed that with my HOD, and we want them to coach each other to have a coach-client relationship, and for that exploring, INTERACTION is a better option for me, and because of the changes, they will have to make I thought about CHOICES that they will take into consideration on their journey of change. 

So I am ready to come up with my conceptual understanding I have all I want, and teachers that have been teaching for a long time use skip this point, but is very important to have a conceptual understanding before moving to the Statement of inquiry. 

KEY CONCEPT: CHANGE

RELATED CONCEPT: INTERACTION AND CHOICE

CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING: Healthy interactions and choices can bring change. 

Now I am ready to create my SOI, sometimes this process is very fast and sometimes it takes me days to decide which concepts I will explore so that my students can benefit from them and make an interesting bridge from the school to the real-life situation. Sometimes when I am about to sleep I see myself thinking about the concepts I want at which statement of inquiry will be exciting for my students. 

Now we need a Global context and area of exploration to be able to come up with a statement of inquiry for that I always look at the document and read them again, it’s important to plan your units with all these resources, and I will make sure I leave them here for you. 

Lets see the Global context and areas of exploration: 

See the complete document here. 

To choose the global context I normally look at the area I would like to explore with my students. Again we are talking about Fitness and our key concept is CHANGE, now what I want my students to understand in this world that will require them to change so that they can achieve desired goals, I go for LIFESTYLE CHOICES, that is an area of exploration of the IDENTITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS. 

Now I can move to the final step which is the statement of inquiry, we have

KEY CONCEPT: CHANGE

RELATED CONCEPT: INTERACTION AND CHOICE

CONCEPTUAL UNDERSTANDING: Healthy interactions and choices can bring change. 

GLOBAL CONTEXT: IDENTITIES AND RELATIONSHIPS, Area of exploration: Lifestyle choices. 

What we need to do now, is to create a sentence with all those concepts and we will have our Statement Of Inquiry – SOI. 

It is not easy to come up with SOI, and it can be frustrating to find a great sentence that will make students discuss and ask questions about it. 

When I learn to come up with an SOI my head of the department at that time was JANE WARUTERE and I was doing my training she told me don’t worry you can always improve your SOI. Students can also give you ideas that you can use to improve the SOI and remember always that you are creating an SOI for the students it’s important you ask yourself if they will be able to understand, especially if you are working with grades 6 and 7. 

I always do this with paper and pen, because I know that I may come up with 10 or more SOI, but because I have been doing this for some time now it’s not so complicated. 

Healthy Interaction may contribute to change in lifestyle choices

So this is the SOI, If you see I am using the actual words, for example, change I wrote change and not changing, this is because I receive a challenge to plan my unit like this from Dominique Dalais a IB workshop leader, he said can you try to use the words the way they are for the units and I liked the idea. If you want and think that instead of change you want to say Changing feel free to write the concepts like that you won’t be wrong.

Because I am a Portuguese speaker just to certify sometimes when I am alone I take the sentence to Google Translate just to see if it makes sense. 

All is good with my SOI now I can move to the last part of the Inquiry section which is to come up with inquiry questions, these questions students will explore during the units, and they may come up with more questions when you introduce the unit to them is important for you to write down those questions and use them while the unit is going on. 

Remember you need to come up with 3 times of questions: FACTUAL, CONCEPTUAL AND DEBATABLE. 

It’s important to relate these questions with the concepts that you will be exploring because you want students to research and learn about those concepts, see my questions below and feel free to give more ideas in the comments. 

Factual — What is healthy interaction? What is change? What is the difference between change and choice? 

Conceptual — How can healthy interactions help you to change your lifestyle choices? How can I know that I need to change my lifestyle choices? 

Debatable — Is it appropriate to deny the change in lifestyle choices? 

I don’t want this text to be very long I will stop here and next text we can talk about Objectives, Summative and ATLs. 

See the summary of what we talked about on the flyer below, note that this unit is still not approved by my current HOD, after his feedback and suggestions I will write a text to share with you. 

Please share your comments, ideas, and suggestions about the text you just read and let me know if it was helpful for you so I can continue writing more similar texts.