Many of you know me from my teaching, resources, speaking, and social media presence. I've been practicing and sharing in public since 2010 and a lot of my work may be very familiar to you. What you probably don't know me for is the instructional coaching that I do as a P.E. pedagogy coach.
Coaching teachers is where I turned my focus after stepping away from teaching in 2020. That journey started off with me having to come to terms with the fact that I didn't know how much I didn't know. After wiggling my way through it for the first couple of attempts, I decided to hunker down and focus on building my capacity as an instructional coach.
After more than a year of learning, practicing, tinkering, and reflecting, I'm at a point where I feel that I have a strong sense of clarity of my purpose as a P.E. Pedagogy Coach and can clearly communicate my approach to coaching.
This approach is what will guide the professional growth experiences that I design for my work both here on ThePhysicalEducator.com and at #PhysEdU: the professional growth membership community that I launched earlier this summer. Sharing a common vision is important for achieving great things together, so I wanted to take a second to explain my vision clearly to you here.
#PhysEdU is a professional community for physical educators that was designed with one purpose in mind: to help you unlock and grow your potential to be an outstanding physical education teacher.
As a leader within this community of ours, my purpose is to ensure that every child has access to effective, meaningful physical education by focusing on empowering the most critical asset that schools have to deliver such experiences: the physical educator.
To achieve this purpose, I aspire to help radically transform P.E. teachers’ approach to teaching and support their development towards becoming Full-Stack Physical Educators.
In practice, a Full-Stack Physical Educator (FSPE) has the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs required to provide effective, meaningful physical education in a sustainable way throughout their career.
The term "Full-Stack Physical Educator" is a reference to the three interconnected areas of focus (or "stacks") that my approach is built on:
Let's look at each of these stacks separately:
To help guide teachers through their transformation towards becoming Full-Stack Physical Educators, we will work together on empowering their teaching through evidence-based pedagogical approaches and best practices.
Each teacher is their own person and each teaching environment is unique. My goal is never to make teachers fit into a mold. Instead, the focus on my approach is on helping teachers identify opportunities for growth within their practice, craft goals that will drive that growth, and then provide personalized coaching to help them reach their growth goals.
In other words, I want to help you unlock your own potential and grow into the kind of teacher that you want to be.
Passion and purpose can be great motivators in our quest to grow as teaching professionals. More importantly, they can make that quest fun.
Using evidence-based approaches, we're going to work together to help you ignite (or rekindle) your passion for teaching. I also know how having a crystal-clear understanding of your purpose doesn't only drive you to be your best, it also serves as a razor that can help you conserve energy and attention and focus those resources on maximizing your impact as an educator.
Every person has a right (and – in my opinion – a duty) to find the North Star that will help ensure that every decision they make, action they take, or effort they put forth isn't just a reactive, emotional response to the day-to-day events that happen at work. Instead, those uses of energy should be proactive, intentional choices that help close the gap between where that teacher is on their growth journey and where they want to be.
As your coach, my job is not to tell you what that North Star should be but rather to provide you with the star map and telescope you need to discover it.
Finally, health is the key to sustainability. Without it, you'll end up burning out too early and fail to fully share the gift that you are with this world.
In every aspect of #PhysEdU, my goal is to ensure that health and wellness are baked into the experience. Not only do I want to help you build the capacity required to protect your well-being as a teacher, I also want to help you learn how to leverage your physiology and psychology to help maximize the impact of your work.
I'm a burnout survivor. I know the toll that it can take on sense of self and how sub-optimal wellness levels can dramatically limit the impact that you can have through your work. If all I achieve here is make sure that you never have to experience that toll, then this work was worth it.
So there we have it: my purpose as a P.E. pedagogy coach and the approach I will use to achieve that purpose.
I hope that this purpose is one that you can connect with and that these three stacks – teaching, motivation, and health – are ones that you value as much as I do.
If you're still on board, then let's get to work! Check out the #PhysEdU membership page to learn more. I hope to see you on campus!
Happy Teaching!
