Last week I was approached by the Sport Science department about working with them on a GCSE PE (year 10) inquiry on healthy living, and specifically diet. As the planning time was very short (they started on Saturday), this was a great example of the ‘straight-out-of-the-box’ value of the Investigative Journals. Before I met with the Head of Academic and Curriculum PE I did a bit of digging around, and found Inquiry-Based Learning in Health and Physical Education which gave us some great ideas to use as a springboard. Co-incidentally, a PE PGCE student at our school had arranged a while ago to meet with us next week about using FOSIL in PE, so this is likely to be a useful resource as a starting point for that discussion too.

As usual, we started with the desired outcome (an understanding of the UK guidelines on healthy eating) and the length of time available (2-3 weeks, with 3 lessons per week, for all 4 GCSE PE sets) and worked outwards from there. We decided that the common “healthy lifestyle leaflet” approach might not be the most effective, particularly because the topic is covered similarly in Junior Science further down the school, and wanted something students might find more interesting and engaging.

We decided on the inquiry question “Can restrictive diets be healthy?” (i.e. diets that have some rules about what/when you can and cannot eat). This could be anything from a vegetarian diet, to more ‘modern’ diet trends such as Paleo or intermittent fasting, and could include diets imposed by health conditions such as diabetes or Coeliac disease. They would each choose one restrictive diet to investigate, and the final product would be a week’s meal plan (designed to follow the UK healthy eating guidelines as closely as possible within the constraints of the diet) with a paragraph with clearly referenced sources about whether they considered that diet to be healthy. The group could then conclude the topic with a discussion of the different diets they had chosen if the teachers wanted to. One advantage of this inquiry topic is that there is a lot of misinformation out there about different diets, so it is an excellent opportunity to do some source evaluation in a context where students can see clearly why it matters.

To support the inquiry we decided to use the Upper School version of the Investigative Journal, and to remind students of the work they had done on CRAAP testing in Year 9 Chemistry.