What Should We be Doing in Physical Education?

After many years as a physical educator, I’ve learned that three key ingredients have to combine for students to successfully learn athletic skills or improve their physical abilities; potential, effort, and opportunities. Eliminating or limiting any of these parts drastically reduces a student’s chances of success. Even more importantly, I’ve also learned that as a teacher I can most directly influence the creation of learning opportunities.

Potential involves a combination of genetic factors, environment, and prior experience with the skill being attempted. For example, it’s likely that a student who is shorter will find it difficult to out-rebound a taller player. People who tend to be better jumping hurdles have longer legs and gymnasts tend to be shorter and muscular. When it comes to environment and prior experience, if I have students who have spent time at softball tournaments watching parents and siblings play, they tend to have greater know-how and aptitude when it comes to swinging bats versus peers who have never held a bat or seen a game.

We also know from research that there tends to be a transfer of skill between certain types of activities. Doing activities that have similar elements to previously learned skills affects how one performs. Students in my classes that pick up unicycling the quickest tend to be skateboarders first, horseback riders second, gymnasts third, followed by everyone else. In all likelihood, they learned faster because of their prior involvement in balance oriented sports. Being familiar with the environment, like surfers living near the ocean or skiers in the mountains, influences people’s potential to achieve. A Sherpa used to living at a higher altitude has a body better prepared to climb higher on Mount Everest. Clearly, physical educators and coaches have very little control over genetic and experiential factors such as these that affect a student’s performance potential.

Success is also dependent upon adequate effort. Although as physical educators we can and should do our best to motivate our students. I believe that effort has to come from within the person attempting a skill. If I were to drag somebody up Mount Rainier, I didn’t help them to become a better climber. I can try to motivate students with praise, incentives, positive, corrective, or negative feedback, but ultimately students mostly control their effort and willingness to persist when facing learning challenges.

What all this means to me is that the way in which I can best contribute to student learning is to focus on creating appropriate learning opportunities. As a physical education teacher of 13 years and a coach for 18 years, I’ve tried to give students extra practice chances, and use more and varied equipment, different teaching approaches and various activities to improve their chances to succeed. This is at the core of the business I am in: I want my students learn, understand, and improve their performance in a wide variety of skills so they have many physical activity options to pursue beyond school.

Think about your own skill set. As an adult, what you can or cannot do probably depends a lot on your physical build and the environment in which you grew up. I’m convinced that my primary jobs as a physical educator is to figure out ways to maximize learning opportunities and give all of my students tastes of success that will spur them on to becoming physically active for a lifetime.

I know that not all of my students will do every activity I teach beyond school. Nobody does. Who could have enough time, financial resources, and physical ability to do everything! I see physical education similar to a shopping mall. People don’t go into every store. They go into the ones that interest them the most. Consequently, I teach multiple units to elementary students to offer opportunities to those who enjoy team and individual activities. When they are in my class, my main concern is that they get many chances to do the skill correctly. I believe these experiences will help motivate them to continue doing these skills later. That is the strength of my program. I want them to feel successful enough to pursue the activity further and hopefully at a higher level. That’s about the most I will influence their amount of effort. As far as impacting their potential, I’ve found that having a classroom environment that is exciting, dynamic, organized, and uses different instructional strategies has the highest impact on student success.

Today, the public school education system is requiring more assessments of student learning. This has both good and bad consequences for physical education. Assessments are beneficial for teachers to see how students are progressing or for identifying students needing extra assistance. Done correctly, assessments can also help motivate students by helping them to understand where they need to improve.

But putting too much time or resources into assessments rather than instructional equipment and decreasing activity time seems to me to be counterproductive. Here are the facts: Out of 180 days of school, my students have an average of 55 days of PE. In that time, I’ve elected to teach cooperative games, racquet sports, volleyball, unicycling, juggling, diabolos, bowling, hockey, jump roping, dance, basketball, tumbling, golf, soccer, softball, Frisbee, and fitness assessments.

Recently, I’ve cut down the time spent on fitness assessments because I felt I was measuring their genetics more than how my activities were affecting their fitness. I saw the biggest improvements in fitness levels over the summer. It’s probably from playing outside for two and a half months instead of sitting in a desk or slowly walking down hallways. Our fitness tests cover curl ups, pushups, shuttle run, PACER, broad jump, vertical jump, 40 yard dash and sit and reach. These can take 3 days to assess. If we do this twice a year, it takes away over 10% of the curriculum time. Instead, I try to keep skill tests to a quick spot check to see where they are at, but mostly I try to focus my time on giving feedback and keeping people on task. I use peer and self assessments with several skills to free me up for teaching more skills.

When I think about my own elementary PE experience, I couldn’t tell you what my batting average was or how many goals I made in hockey or soccer. I can tell you that I enjoyed playing with my friends, was given opportunities for swimming, flag football, basketball, relay races and more, and learned lots of skills. We didn’t have a single written test or piece of paper to show us how athletic we were or were not. Now it seems that not only am I the physical education teacher, but I’m expected to incorporate math, reading, and writing into my subject. When I do this my 55 days of activities dwindles and yet expectations for my program to succeed increase. It just doesn’t make sense.

Here’s an analogy. When you go to a professional basketball game there are many people working to make that event happen. There is a head coach, assistant coaches, players, trainers, equipment managers, referees, cheerleaders, team owners and commentators. Behind the scenes there are statisticians, photographers, TV analysts, camera crew, music DJ, event coordinators, food and merchandise vendors, tickets salesmen, agents, security people and someone running the scoreboard and clock. There are more people involved but you get my point.

As a physical education teacher, I am the head coach of my class but I’m increasingly being expected to be a statistician, referee, commentator, cheerleader, event coordinator, equipment management, trainer, security, clock manager, etc. It’s simply not realistic to add math teacher, reading and writing instructor or any other subject to my instructional plate in the future. I wouldn’t expect a classroom teacher to also teach the motor skills I focus on during my instruction time. For us to succeed in our mission of preparing young people with the skills and knowledge they need to lead physically active lifestyles, the focus of physical education must be on facilitating a wide variety of motor skill experiences in the limited instructional time we have available.