Just a head's up: this post is going to lean hard into my geekiness around curriculum.
Last year, I designed a bespoke set of curriculum outcomes for my school. This wasn't a curriculum or unit map for the year: I'm talking 100% custom designed outcomes that would serve as the foundation of all of the teaching and learning that happens in my PE program.
In this post, I would like to walk you through the "why" behind my decision to take this project on, the process I used to complete it, the end result of my efforts, and the observable impact that this work has had on my teaching and (more importantly) my students learning and experiences in physical education.
But first, let me tell you a bit about where I live and teach.
My family and I get to live in Kentville, Nova Scotia: a small town of about 7,500 people.
My wife and I made the decision to move here in 2021 from Montreal, Quebec to establish our roots and raise our boys. With about 1.8 million fewer people living here, Kentville definitely has a different vibe than Montreal. That said, we don't miss the big city.
Kentville is set in the heart of the Annapolis Valley, Nova Scotia's agricultural hub. The Bay of Fundy and its world's highest tides is about a 20 minute drive away, and the landscapes here are shaped by the Acadian dykes built centuries ago and the stewardship of the Mi'kmaq people for millennia before any European settlers arrived to Mi'kma'ki shores.
Our town is surrounded by green forests, tidal rivers, lakes, ponds, apple orchards, vineyards, and lush fields. You can always hear birds singing, and – despite it never getting old – we get to watch bald eagles flying in the sky on a daily basis.
Kentville is also celebrated as a recreation town. We have parks, fields, courts, beautiful trails and spaces for hiking, birding, and more. We also have the Harvest Moon Trail that cuts through our town: a "Rails-to-Trails" route that spans over 120km through the Valley. Our Active Transportation Network makes it easy for cyclists and pedestrians to safely navigate their way through town.
Speaking of cyclists, we have a lot of them. Kentville's mountain biking scene is one of the best kept secrets in all of Atlantic Canada with more trails, tracks, and features being added all of the time. It's hard to look anywhere and not see cars loaded up with trailers full of bikes. The Gorge, Bird Sanctuary, Bottle Rocket, the Sand Pit, and Burgher Hill's jump line are usually full of mountain bikers of all ages shredding their hearts out.
And that brings us to Kings County Academy (KCA): Kentville's public school that serves 700 students from Pre-Primary (a.k.a. Pre-K) to Grade Eight. KCA what drew me back in to teaching and where I currently teach P-2 physical education.
KCA played a big role in why my family and I moved to Kentville. The school has an amazing reputation and beautiful campus. It also offers a French Immersion program, which my eldest is enrolled in and my youngest will be part of once he becomes a Kodiak (our school's mascot).
The school could not be better located. Our building is right on the Harvest Moon Trail, across the street from the Kentville skatepark, Credit Union Rec Plex, and Bottle Rocket mountain biking trail.
Behind our school are beautiful forests in which we can hike, toboggan, observe flora, look for animal tracks, and even spot the rare fox or not-so-rare deer.
Ok, so why am I sharing this love letter to Kentville with you? Because it has to do with the focus of this post: how I designed a bespoke set of outcomes for KCA's PE program.
When I sat down to start writing my outcomes, I knew that I wanted them to be shaped by the place where they would come to life and serve my students. I want my PE curriculum outcomes and the town where my program exists to share the same DNA. In doing so, I believed that this would help make my program as meaningful and impactful as possible.
As a public school educator in Nova Scotia, I am expected to teach to our provincial outcomes for physical education.
Listen, I've spent my career trying to wrap my head around PE curricula. As I mentioned at the top of this post, I consider myself a curriculum geek. That said, here's what I think about Nova Scotia's outcomes for physical education:
They're not bad, they're just not great.
Nova Scotia's PE outcomes were refreshed in 2014 and then re...packaged (?) in 2019. While I understand the desire of the curriculum team to review the outcomes through an inquiry-based lens, the result definitely led to a bit of a confusing document. I'm sure this confusion was greatly amplified by (and I'm going based on what I've heard) a lack of professional development when the document was released.
Either way, it was now my responsibility to make sense of these outcomes and figure out how to bring them to life in my physical education program.
I started off by trying to codify the outcomes. I found the document itself challenging to read, so I simplified it by creating a spreadsheet in which I retyped all of the outcomes and their underlying indicators for each grade (P-5). I then assigned a code to each indicator using a Objective.Letter.Grade format. For example, O2.C.4 is the third indicator (C) under the second outcome (O2) for fourth grade (4).
With a simpler layout, I then tried to make sense of each outcome and indicator in Nova Scotia's PE curriculum document. When I would get stuck, I would refer back to the original document to review the concepts, skills, and guided questions shared there.
Finally, as a way to synthesize what I had learned about the curriculum, I created a series of posters in which I would share the outcomes and indicators in student-friendly language. I've always found that being able to explain a concept in accessible language is a great indicator of deeper understanding, so I grappled with this project until I felt that I had successfully wrapped my head around what it was that I was expected to teach to as a physical educator in Nova Scotia.
...and I still didn't really like them. However, at least I understood them better. Besides, things were about to change.
In 2023, I got to attend the PHE Canada National Conference in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island.
At the conference, I attended a session on the brand new Canadian Competencies for Physical and Health Education.
I instantly fell in love with the layout of the document. Big Ideas with corresponding Learning Themes, all of which can be explored through the lens of any of the four competencies (i.e. Move, Think, Feel, Act) with links to the Truth and Reconciliation Calls to Action.
Within the document, grade-level outcomes are provided that help unpack each of the Big Ideas, and I Can Exemplarscan help readers make sense of how these outcomes can be translated into student-friendly language.
This document felt right in so many ways. However, it wasn't written for teachers: instead, this is meant to be a guiding document for curriculum writers across the country to be used when PE curricula are being rewritten/updated.
I immediately got curious about what would be the steps I would need to take to bring the Canadian Physical Education Competencies to my program.
First, I needed to make sure that there was a case for me to be able to adopt the new competencies as an alternative framework that I could use to explore the Nova Scotian outcomes for physical education. Basically, I was trying to create something that I could point to in the case that someone would ask why I was not teaching to our provincial outcomes ("actually, I am. Let me show you how").
The result of this work ended up being a crosswalk document that put the NS outcomes and Canadian competencies side-by-side and showed where/when each of their respective indicators/outcomes lived in their counterpart.
Doing this work not only helped me discover overlapping ideas and learning themes, it also pushed me to reflect on possible gaps in either document. There were indicators from the provincial curriculum that didn't have a home in the competencies documents that I felt deserved to be "carried" over (and vice-versa).
What I'm trying to get at is that this process of comparing and contrasting pushed me to a) develop a deeper understanding of both the provincial curriculum as well as the national one, and b) develop a deeper sense of clarity regarding what I feel are "must-haves" in a PE curriculum.
As much as I loved the Canadian competencies, their big ideas, underlying learning themes, and outcomes, I still missed the outcome sequencing from the 2013 SHAPE America National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes.
There was something about the grade-level outcomes that just made sense. I loved how each outcome on its own served as a kind of puzzle piece to this bigger picture of "a physical literate person", and how you could see the long-term development of each outcome just by scanning horizontally across the page.
I knew what I wanted:
I knew what I wanted... my dilemma was that this set of outcomes didn't exist.
So that's why I decided to build it myself.
Trying to develop a bespoke curriculum guide, even if only for a school, is a heavy lift.
Luckily for me, we're living in the age of AI.
Before I dive into how I leveraged ChatGPT's artificial intelligence to create my outcomes, let me say this: when it comes to AI-powered generative chatbots, you get out what you put in.
If I went to ChatGPT and prompted it with "build me a PE curriculum", the result would probably be pretty lame. Also, if you expect ChatGPT to do all the work on a project this meaningful and personal to you, there's a very little chance that you'll end up satisfied with the result or motivated by the process.
Knowing this, I knew that I needed a strategy that was going to allow me to maximize my results. Here was my plan:
The first thing I had to do was to let ChatGPT know what it was that we were setting out to do. I let it know about my curriculum dilemma, shared the curriculum documents with it (i.e. the NS outcomes, Canadian competencies, SHAPE America GLOs, and my crosswalk document), and explained the steps that I wanted us to follow. I also asked the GPT to play the role of "a curriculum writer who specializes in physical education taught in Nova Scotia" as I've learned that I get better results for tasks that are more specific when I invite ChatGPT to play a role.
One of the cool/crazy things about ChatGPT is that it can learn and remember things about you. Knowing this, I asked the AI to ask me 20 questions about who I am as a teacher.
Here are the questions it asked me:
Know, you should know that I took A LOT of time answering these questions. Again, my goal was to provide the GPT with as much information as I could to help it think like me and predict how I would approach certain curriculum problems.
This step was also just a very good professional reflection opportunity. It felt like I was preparing for an interview that wasn't actually happening, and in the process gained a ton of clarity about who I am and want to be as a teacher.
The next step was to work with ChatGPT to build a portrait of a elementary school graduate from KCA.
For this step, I once again asked the AI to ask me 10 questions about what a grade five student at KCA would be able to do, know, and understand by the time school wrapped up in June.
Here are the questions ChatGPT asked me:
Again, I took my time to answer these questions. I knew that providing the richest answers possible here would ultimately allow me to create the most comprehensive set of outcomes that I could produce.
To answer these questions, I also leaned heavily on my experience in working for Kentville's Parks & Recreation Department. Although my time there was short (I got hired at KCA two months after I began), I did my best to learn as much as possible about recreation, leisure literacy, and the opportunities that people who live in the Annapolis Valley have access to.
I don't recall ever doing this kind of reflection prior to this experience. Sure, I've played with outcomes before... but I don't know that I ever sat down to think about what a kid's life could look/feel like thanks to intentional experiences in PE. Knowing that my own children will be going through the school was definitely a motivator for being thorough in this exercise, and it led to some really powerful and interesting rabbit holes that I ended up chasing down.
With the portrait created, it was time to start identifying the learning outcomes that would bring that portrait to life.
I asked ChatGPT to produce learning outcomes based on the portrait that we had crafted together. These outcomes were meant to represent what graduating students should be able to know, do, and understand in order to be able to live a life full of adventure, physical activity, and well-being right here in Kentville.
This process was... tedious. The initial product that the AI generated wasn't nearly as comprehensive as I thought it would be. That said, as the saying goes: "You can edit a bad page of writing. You can't edit a blank one."
I had something to work with, and trying to make sense of what I didn't like about the produced outcomes (e.g. what I felt was missing or needed to be reworded) ultimately led me to better understand what it was that I was looking for.
There is an infuriating sensation that comes with seeing a thing in your mind that you cannot bring into existence. However, there are few things as satisfying in life as seeing that creative process through. With this raw material that I now had, I was able to dive into some of the most rewarding curriculum work that I have ever experienced in my professional life.
While grappling with the outcomes, I started to see patterns in the skill, knowledge, and understandings that were outlined there. Through this work, I was able to identify five overarching learning areas under which each of the outcomes could find a home:
✅ Movement Competence: I can confidently participate in physical activity.
🗺️ Connection to Place: I can explore and appreciate the world around me.
💡 Lifelong Learning: I can take charge of my growth and learning.
❤️ Emotional Intelligence: I can connect with others and my true self.
☀️ Living Well: I can lead a healthy, balanced lifestyle.
Each of these Learning Areas got unpacked further into Learning Themes and Learning Focus categories (i.e. Learning Area → Learning Theme → Learning Focus).
For example, here is the Area → Theme → Focus for the Movement Competence Learning Area:
✅ Movement Competence [Learning Area | MC]
Using this structure allowed me to get as granular as possible and reflect deeply on the overall role of each area, theme, and focus within my curriculum. Again, this grappling helped me reflect on the purpose of each outcome and determine whether or not too much overlap or too large gaps existed within the outcomes that ChatGPT produced. The process was tedious... but I have never felt a greater sense of clarity regarding the "WHY" of the curriculum I teach.
In the end, the product of all of this work was a set of 53 graduate outcomes that were carefully designed to build my physical education program around.
Once I satisfied with the outcomes that I had produced, it was time to move on to the super-easy, incredibly low cognitive load task of backwards mapping each outcome from grade five all of the way back down to primary.
SARCASM.
If any of the work leading up to this step seemed intense, I promise you that it was a walk in the park compare to backwards designing all of the outcome sequences.
Once again operating with the "You can edit a bad page of writing. You can't edit a blank one." mantra that had seen me through to this point, I adopted the following process to produce the P-5 sequences for each of the graduate outcomes created in the previous step:
*This step was taken for two reasons. First, it pushed me to reflect on my reasoning and understanding of the outcome in question, once again allowing me to strengthen my sense of clarity. Second, it helped train the AI to learn how to think like me and predict how I would map out future outcomes, reducing the amount of editing required as we moved through the graduate outcome sequences together.
A lot of effort, sweat, frustration, tears, and heart went into building the bespoke set of curricular outcomes for physical education that I designed for KCA.
Despite the time and energy that was poured into this project, I am so glad that I pushed myself to see it through. I've designed something that is uniquely tailored to the lives of my students. In the process of building this scope and sequence, I learned more about where I live, who I am as a teacher, and what I believe physical education can be.
I am very proud of this work and just incredibly grateful that I have the space to get to express myself creatively as an educator on a canvas as wonderful as Kings County Academy here in Kentville.
Now that you know the behind the scenes work that went into crafting my bespoke curriculum outcomes, I guess it is time to show you how this scope and sequence has come to life (and will hopefully continue to come alive) in my teaching at KCA!
Stay tuned for more posts! Happy Teaching!
