Capturing Student Voice in PE Class

 Submitted by: Adam Pratt, HPEC Comprehensive School Health Representative

Do you ever struggle to get rid of a good box? How about a solid coffee can? Well as a frugal (ok, maybe cheap) PE teacher working on a shoe-string budget, I figured I’d keep some old coffee cans around just in case I found some use for them. Originally I thought they’d serve my students well in our future outdoor classroom space, capturing bugs, rocks, and all kinds of natural things, but they ended up capturing something else. 

Student voice and choice is important in education. If you want to read more about why, you can visit https://www.pescholar.com/insight/using-student-voice-in-pe/ and dive deeper into the multiple articles outlined. But even if we know it’s important, how can we effectively capture it? I teach 550 students a day, across six grades, 45-65 students at a time, for just 30 minutes. Needless to say, I don’t think having a conversation with each student is likely a realistic solution. I also frequently use the “thumb check-in” (thumbs up, sideways, or down), but this can be difficult to quantify. Thankfully I’m remarkably stubborn when I want to try to improve my practice, so if student voice is deemed as important by the experts, I figured I better try to find a way to harness it!

This is where my handy-dandy coffee tins came into play. I decided to cut a hole in the lid of five cans and labelled them “Hate,” “Dislike,” “OK,” “Like,” and “Love.” (Sometimes I change the labels depending on the question asked). I then found some old wooden chips I had laying around (wait…am I a hoarder?) and figured they would serve as good voting tokens. My plan was to simply pose a “question of the week,” give every student a single chip, and on their way out of the gymnasium they could cast their vote anonymously.

While my original intention was to ask students a question every week, that goal may have been a bit ambitious (weird how I “just” teach PE and can be so busy, right? ;) ). Regardless, over the last two to three years, I’ve collected some interesting and surprising data. And while it may not meet university ethics requirements, it has informed, supported, and guided my practice. It has allowed me to justify certain field trips, gauge interest in guest instructors/programs, reconsider common misconceptions about certain activities, and served as evidence to support my desire to provide students with a variety of social-groupings during PE class activities. 

The questions I’ve posed and “data” I’ve collected has also sparked future ideas and conversations to try to more accurately capture student voice. This includes conversations about voting on a spectrum (not everything can be a love or a hate after all), as well as the idea to pose questions where students get multiple chips to vote so they can make more than one choice. In the future, I am also hopeful I will be able to select volunteer students who voted differently to have short conversations with them about why they voted the way they did. That way I can gather qualitative data to gauge their primary motive for voting certain ways (e.g., an activity being too challenging versus being put on a team they didn’t like).   

So the next time you see a coffee tin laying around the house and think, hey, that could be useful, I encourage you to keep it. You might capture something unexpected inside!

*If you have any ideas for questions you think I should ask my students, or want to share ways you’ve gathered student voice, please email me at hpeccsh@gmail.com* 

**My wooden chips came from an amazing dance residency hosted by SoundKreations - if you haven’t heard of them, check them out! You may even be able to access a grant to get them in for free!

***Here are some sample results of what I’ve gathered over the years:

Grade 3 Students (n: 96) - How did you feel about PE this year?
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
2	1	7	17	69
2.08%	1.04%	7.29%	17.71%	71.88%

Grade 3/4/5 Students (n: 331) - Favourite Group Composition in PE
Individual  (1 person)	Partner/Trio (2-3ppl)	Small Group (4-10ppl)	Large Group (10-20ppl)	Whole Class (20+ppl)
14	101	88	57	71
4.23%	30.51%	26.59%	17.22%	21.45%

Grade 3/4/5 Students who played Intramurals (comp and rec, n: 154)
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
4	5	6	29	110
2.60%	3.25%	3.90%	18.83%	71.53%

Grade 2-5 Students (n: 451) - How do you feel about “Top 10/Most Improved Lists” being posted?
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
38	24	114	78	197
8.43%	5.32%	25.28%	17.29%	43.68%