Pod I’s Peer Review

Overview

This is an important topic, and I appreciate how thoughtfully you delivered it. I have never been a student athlete, so I can’t speak from experience about the mental health issues that exist within competitive sports. Nonetheless, your explanations of the issues, rationales, and strategies regarding the topic are insightful and engaging. As a draft, this learning design environment is highly functional and contains sufficient information to accurately educate your audience. Your use of interactive engagement tools was helpful. With a few tweaks, I think this could be a highly valuable teaching tool for young student-athletes.  (Kevin)

Additionally, from the perspective of someone who played sports in high school, I think a course like this could be greatly beneficial; I remember pressure from coaches, feelings of insecurity/guilt after making mistakes or not being “good enough”, and loss of motivation. Sports have ups and downs that can take a toll on mental health, and this course has the potential to equip athletes with knowledge and skills to address that. (Jessica)

Strengths

Your choice to use constructivism and experiential learning as the main learning approaches is effective because your resource supports meaningful learning activities rather than simply asking learners to memorize concepts. Learning new ideas by watching videos or reading tedious articles feel disengaging for learners, especially if they do not have opportunities to apply what they are learning. However, you made your resource engaging by creating activities that encourage learners to connect the content to real-life and personal experiences. For example, the scenario-based quiz helps learners apply the concepts they learned to real-life sport contexts. As for the personal wellness plan, it allows learners to connect the topic to their own lives and reflect on strategies that could support their wellbeing. These activities make the learning more active and meaningful because learners are not only receiving information, but also applying, and making personal connections. (Tommy)

The Google Classroom format worked quite well for organizing all the information you were delivering. The integration of quizzes and discussion posts was helpful for learner engagement. The educational videos were well-selected and offered valuable insight into the ways mental health in sports has already begun to change. Your focal topic was concise, but you did a good job teaching it. 

I appreciate that you chose a topic which is specific but pervasive in sporting communities. Mental health is very important, but competitive sports have such a long history of unhealthy coaching and training routines that ignore mental anguish, if not seek it out. Your inclusion of prominent pro-athlete voices helps make this learning design impactful for young people, because the performance stress often comes from comparing themselves to these global sports icons. (Kevin)

The course’s organization is good, the progression makes sense for the topic, is easy to follow and introduces a clearly outlined rubric in the beginning to help learners know what is expected from them. The inclusion of different methods for testing/ consolidating knowledge is good, the variation in activities keeps students engaged, and I liked that you gave athletes a tactic to address mental health issues in sports so they can apply the information they’ve learned into their personal lives.  (Jessica) 

I liked the way each unit follows a clear learning cycle: students are introduced to the material, watch educational videos, complete a Google form quiz and then respond through reflective discussion. I think this structure works well because it gives learners multiple chances to process topics. The quizzes help basic understanding while the reflective discussions encourage students to think more deeply about how mental health and stress apply to real athletic experiences. This balance makes the course feel more supportive. (Maximillian)

Areas to improve

I think one area you might consider improving for your learning resource is the learning outcome. I may have missed them or you might be still working on it, but it seems to me that learning outcomes are missing in your resource. I think if you could add a few sentences for learning outcomes, your resource will show how your assessment plans and activities are connected to your intended learning outcome. Also, I am not sure if this was intended, but you put dotted lines in some sections of your resource. You might consider removing them.  (Tommy)

I had difficulty navigating some parts of Google Classroom. I’m not sure how to proceed to the next unit after completing the quiz or discussion post activities. Some of the readings you assigned seem a little above the level I would expect 14-18-year-old student-athletes to engage with. You might want to consider abridging them to highlight the most critical information. 

I also felt that some activity prompts could use more explanation. I really like the idea behind the Personal Wellness Plan assignment, but I think it was too open-ended. Consider expanding on it to include a template or checklist for what the plan should include, so that student-athletes can personalize it to their sport’s expectations. The plans could prompt them to develop mental health strategies to for weekly training, as well as specific mindfulness strategies for before big events, and healthy unwinding strategies for after wins and losses. (Kevin)

As Kevin said, some of the readings seemed a bit long, I would’ve gained a lot of insight from the course as a former student athlete, especially the videos (since they were shorter), but would’ve skipped the readings, which you could make optional. Although you might have just been in a rush when typing and it’s an easy fix, there are some typos or sentences that could be improved in your unit 3 content for the section “summative- personal wellness plan” section. (jessica)

One area you could improve is by adding more feedback or follow-up after the Google Form quizzes add discussions. For example, after each quiz, you could include shorter explanations for the correct answers so students understand why an answer is right or wrong. For the reflective discussions, you could add a short instructor summary at the end of each unit that highlights common themes from students’ responses. This would help learners connect their individual reflections back to the main ideas of the course and make them feel more complete. (Maximillian)

Final thoughts:

Overall, your learning resource is well organized and formatted, the use of google classroom is fitting for the subject matter and supports the learner engagement activities you chose. While the structure, subject matter, and rubrics are clear, you could add more concise instructions and refine activity prompts. The length/ reading level of the resources could be adjusted, or perhaps made optional for those who want to learn more. Although there are small adjustments you could make to improve, your learning resource is generally well crafted, this topic isn’t discussed enough and you did a great job of introducing it, breaking things down, and teaching athletes how to address it.