PESS Training Day

I know it’s the last week so everyone is probably frantically trying to finish everything off and get it ready to hand in so are probably not spending so much time on the blogs, but felt I had to blog about a training day I had last week as it is so relevant to the whole of the inquiry I have been working on.

PESS (Physical Education and School Sport) is a project in partnership with the Welsh Governments and Sports Wales that was introduced in 2001 to “improve standards in physical education and develop the quality of P.E and school sport” (PESS in the vales of Glamorgan)

Dance is one of the units of PESS in schools and aims to “To make Dance activities accessible to both teachers and pupils by providing a range of practical ideas to support the teaching of Dance including planning, delivery and assessment.”

I had heard of PESS before but only had access to limited information as the training that is provided by them is specifically for schools and school teachers.

An opportunity arose through a dance organisation that I am involved in for a number of dance tutors in my area to receive a free 1 day training course about PESS. It was provided to help inform us what PESS is all about and become more aware of the knowledge and training that primary school teachers have about dance, as we do a lot of dance projects in and with primary schools in the area.

Areas that PESS approach to dance teaching covers include:

-What is dance?

-Why teach dance?

-Basic dance actions

-Variety – direction, levels, pathways, shape, speed

-Spatial arrangements – formations, relationships

-Making dances

-Chorographical devices

-Planning

-Making links to other subjects

-Creativity

-Success for all

-Questioning

-Pedagogical approaches

-Developments and application of skills

PESS training is not normally offered to dance teachers as we are seen as ‘experts’ in this area. For certain aspects this is true as we would be well equipped with knowledge of dance skills, steps, choreography etc. But there a number of other aspects in the training with regards to how to teach e.g. Use of visual aids, Resources, Critical learning skills/Questioning, Success for all, that could be very useful to some dance teachers.

Because PESS looks at dance in an educational context differentiation is built in as this is something that is well established within a school environment. If you are teaching dance within a school you are going to get a class of really mixed ability and varying levels of enthusiasm towards dance and so PESS is prepared to cater for these in a number of different ways. When it came to my own research in specific dance class environments outside of a school context some evidence shows that perhaps not all dance teachers are as prepared in their knowledge or use of differentiation in dance.

It was interesting that this opportunity came up just last week and how it links in with a lot of the work I have been doing in my own research project. Pess encourages differentiation in dance which is great to see, but perhaps this type of training should and could be available to a wider audience too?

References

Physical Education and School Sport in the Vale of Glamorgan: http://www.valeofglamorgan.gov.uk/working/education_and_skills/schools/school_improvement/pe_and_school_sport.aspx

PESS Approach to Teaching Dance. Available from: http://www.sportwales.org.uk/system-pages/search-results.aspx?terms=PESS

PESS approach to teaching dance, Key Stage 2, Interactive CD Rom.