Ingham McGhie, PE Department, St Margaret’s Academy.
I, alongside other members of the St Margaret’s Academy PE department, attended the PE network meeting on Friday 10th January at Broxburn Academy. Each secondary school in West Lothian was well represented giving a rich and meaningful meeting. The focus of the meeting was to give a set of pupils a practical grade for National 5 (badminton) as a type of moderation process.
We were asked to give 4 different pupils a grade based on the national 5 performance documentation. Where possible we did this individually to allow for professional dialogue to occur afterwards and so we marked the pupils based on our professional judgement. When we met after the moderation exercise there was a long discussion around the marks that people gave and the nature of the assessment. I had very similar marks to two other teachers for all 4 of the pupils. However there were big differences with other teachers’ marks with some being very low and others very high. After discussion around this, justification is necessary and it would be beneficial for the SQA to provide the authority with a video of a practical performance with grading to allow the teachers to see the standard required.
There was also a discussion based around the performance assessment for national 5 physical education. Pupils will now be graded on a one off performance in a challenging context. This will be viewed as a practical exam where they have one chance to perform at their best. Some teachers are really for this idea as it acts as an exam for the pupils. However some teachers, including myself, think this is going raise some challenges for the pupils. For example if a pupil is being graded on football and within the first 5 minutes of the game gets tackled badly and injured and cannot continue to play then that would mean that pupil does not get a practical grade and would fail the course.
Following this discussion we all met as one large group again to discuss the verification of national 5 and what the SQA were looking for. This in itself was a really beneficial exercise, especially as one of the teachers is a verifier for SQA and could give us specific information.
The afternoon was very informative and I learned a lot, especially as a newly qualified teacher. I would thoroughly recommend that all subjects organise network meetings similar to this one as you learn a lot through sharing good practice.
