Andy Horne: 2015 SHAPE America Health Education Teacher of the Year Award Winner

“Health is the only subject matter that is going to affect a student’s life every day in high school and everyday afterwards. If you don’t have your health you don’t have anything at all. Younger kids need to learn why health is important and be able to make healthy decisions. If they are healthy they are more likely to be successful in other areas of their life.”- Andy Horne on why health is such an important part of student’s curriculum.

Recognized as the 2015 SHAPE America Health Education Teacher of the Year, Andy Horne of New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois has a passion for teaching and has found a way to bring fun and excitement into his classroom.

One of the special ways Horne teaches his students about their health is through the use of scholarly raps. He even has his own YouTube channel. Check out this Anatomy Rap!

See more of Andy’s raps at youtube.com/ahorne23. Right now he has 8 songs posted and is currently working on more. He has performed the raps in his classroom and has also performed at the high school’s dance recital.

Horne uses technology a lot in his classroom. He’s found that “engaging students with the use of technology and mobile devices in the classroom” is a great way to help them learn. New Trier High School is a 1 to 1 iPad school. This allows him to use various live polling and assessment technologies in his lessons. By using these technologies he is able to gage each student’s understanding and gauge opinions live in the classroom. He types questions on the screen and receives responses from all the students in the classroom, thereby giving every student a voice.

“Using technology in class is great as long it is helping the students to learn and not simply distracting them from the content of the class,” Horne notes. A novel way he uses the iPad is to sync it and collect data from their heart rate monitors. This way students can see live their heart rate and understand how their body responds to different activities. Horne’s found this to be a great way to teach students about exercise intensity and what they need to do to stay in their target heart rate zones.

Horne strives to bring health and wellness topics alive in his classroom. One way he does this is by allowing students to role-play. One of his most successful strategies is the performance enhancing drugs debate. He assigns students roles as different characters and allows them to debate why PEDs should or shouldn’t be banned. He also created an STD dice game, which helps break the ice to talk about this serious issue.

When asked, Horne offered the following six teaching tips to share with his health and PE teaching colleagues:

1. Don’t be afraid to take risks! Don’t be afraid to fail because this is how we grow as teachers. If you keep doing the same things over and over, you are not growing and neither are your students.
2. Continue to go to conferences and connect and learn new ideas
3. Expand your personal network. Always be looking for ways to grow as a teacher and as a person. Connect with other teachers and learn from them.
4. Utilize Social media-especially Twitter. It’s a great way to connect with other professionals and learn from them.
5. Pick a fellow teacher in your school who is going to push you and hold you accountable for growing as a teacher.
6. Make sure your curriculum is current and adaptive.

Andy Horne sees teaching as both fun and a learning experience. He enjoys the challenge of trying to connect with students and then seeing them become engaged and excited about taking responsibility for their own healthy behaviors. He likes helping them lay the groundwork for a healthy future life. Their youthful passion excites him. Horne’s favorite unit to teach is the sex education unit. It’s a subject the students want to know more about. It creates buzz and excitement and opens avenues to some great discussions.