Tips on teaching a mixed ability Physical Education lesson

Every classroom in every school across the world, will have a mixed ability class. No child learns at the same pace, so we need to make sure that the lesson being taught is diverse for every child in the class. We need to help the lower ability child but also challenge the higher ability child. Here we discuss how you can do this.

Learning environment – Make sure the PE session is set up for a positive environment. All children need to feel comfortable within the environment to be able to learn. Make sure they know you are there to help them if it is too hard or there if they have achieved the task already.

Teaching style – All children will learn in different ways, we make sure as the teacher in PE to use all the styles. Kinaesthetic, audio and visual that way every child will understand in one of the ways.

Variety – Make sure you do not stick on one task for too long, ensure that there are lots of different tasks that can be adapted for the lower learners and harder tasks for the higher learners. By using variety, the children will stay on task and not get bored at what they are trying to achieve.

Pace of the PE lesson – Make sure you are changing the pace depending on how quickly the child is achieving the set goals. You need to keep all children on their toes and learning, so you may have some children still on first task but others on the 3^rd or 4^th tasks.

Collaboration – This is hard as you need to trial it and see what happens. Put a group of mixed ability’s together to see if the higher learners can help the lower learners achieve the goal. If not keep them separated and get the children to do different tasks, sticking with the same learning outcome but making sure you are able to make it easier and harder.

Homework – Set homework tasks for the children to practice at home. With the lower achievers, allow them to continue with the task that they were doing and the higher expand on the task.

Evaluation – Get the children to evaluate what they have done within the class. It is great when the lower learner can describe how they can make something better, at least you then know they understood what they were meant to be doing. Higher learners will be able to describe what they were doing and how they can make it harder for themselves the next time.

All of the above are a few points we think of when teaching the children who are mixed ability’s, it is trial and error with some as it may not work. Our PE Specialists are constantly gaining new ways of adapting for the ability of the class, every school, class and child are different.