Celebrating Physical Education in 2014

Given that we are able to watch sports all day every day, one must still appreciate Olympians for their pursuit of perfection, desire to better their personal best, and the dedication it takes to get there. After the classy ceremonies, breathtaking performances, and personal vignettes of athletes ended, I expected thoughts about the 2014 Olympics would end too. But, then some of the champions found their way back in the spotlight when Dancing with the Stars returned to the air. It was an eye-opener when they introduced the USA gold medal ice-dancers, Davis and White, a twosome who had been a dance team since childhood as competitors instead of partners. Then the mold was broken altogether when Amy Purdy, a double leg amputee snow-boarder who took the bronze medal in the Para-Olympics was introduced too.

The entire line-up got me thinking of physical education, where it was when I started teaching, the good things that have changed in our field, and what we should be celebrating today. Ann Purdy should be celebrated not only for what she has done but for what she can teach others. She lost her legs but not her spirit. She will probably be motived to test her limits until the end of her days because she embodies the philosophy of taking what you have and learning to use it to the best of your ability. Much of her spirit is inside, but someone had to teach her and they did.

Watching her deal with her limitations as she learned a fabulous dance routine, watching her perform it – and she was good – reminded me of my quandary when I started out teaching. My school district would not allow kids with disabilities to participate – period! Physical educators were told to have the kids sit out. At the time – and I am not ancient – I simply assumed that we didn’t have a disabilities program because my administrators were not up on educational law and just didn’t know better. Boy was I naïve.

Believing that no kids should be made to sit out and simply keep score, and being a just-out-of-college idealist, I felt for my disabled student whose twin got to play while she sat on the sidelines dying to do the same. I also thought nothing of going to my principal to share what I knew about the law and asking him to create an Adapted Physical Education class for our kids. I never imagined that neither my professional concerns nor the law would fail to motivate my district to do what it should, or that school administrators would consider me a troublemaker for bringing it up. In fact, I thought they would jump on it and satisfy the law, the student, and me. But it didn’t happen that way.

We waited a year for a class to be formed for all the kids who were made to sit out, but it didn’t happen. It seemed my district felt that if no one knew about the law and no one was calling them on it (other than me), they could save money by not staffing a class for children with disabilities.

Fortunately even as a novice teacher, I wasn’t the type to see frustrated students be made more of a victim to their own handicap than was necessary. I knew that there were things they could do safely, so after waiting for what seemed like an eternity to me and my student, I told her mother that her voice would probably pull more weight than mine. It did. Now, I look back I can see how far we have come.

What I applaud about our profession is that we have teachers everywhere who teach kids what they can do – physically disabled or not: teachers who find a way to start at a point where everyone is successful; teachers who enable students to feel good about themselves as they learn; teachers who have the patience to build confidence in students who are afraid to perform in front of others; and teachers who don’t allow the atmosphere to be poisoned by ridicule, bullying, or unsportsmanlike behaviors.

We know that all children have different strengths and weaknesses regardless of their motivation and effort. We know that there are performance levels that most will never reach. But there is a baseline where – if teachers can find it – kids will be successful. Finding it is important. Once students realize that they can do what is asked it is easier to convince them to keep on trying. Students who are able to accomplish a task start acquiring the physical and emotional building blocks needed to motivate them to try to learn more and do it joyfully.

How great it is to have a whole class run to the gym, eager to participate, involved, and feeling as if they are in the game. It’s possible, but teachers must set the tone. That starts with ensuring that every student is successful, that every student feels needed and understands, as do their classmates, that they have skills that can contribute to the success of their teams and classmates. If we as teachers accommodate everyone in class by finding a starting point that works for all and build from there, it’s a win-win for everyone, because once a student gains confidence, even the most skeptical and disengaged will come around and start to take on the “I will try attitude” of Amy Purdy. When they do, they will learn the joy of participation.

How do we do that? Here are a few tips I’ve learned over the years:

• Keep it simple! Start at short distances, low heights, minimal speed, big targets, easy goals, and limited expectations.
• Delay introducing equipment until students have repeated the movement pattern you want them to use at least ten times. Why? Because once they start worrying about where the ball goes, if they can hit it or not or catch it or not, their focus will wander. Some students who are not immediately successfully may get so uptight that they will be unable to do anything but feel incompetent.
• Start by teaching the motion and rehearsing it as a warm-up activity each day. You want them paying attention to the motion, the footwork into the motion, the follow-through, doing it alone at first before adding complexity. Each day’s warm-up can reinforce the proper patterns and ensure that students are comfortable with the movements needed for the activity.
• Introduce equipment remembering that you want students to have plenty of repetition. After the first day of a unit, leave the equipment out so students can use it when entering the gym or field. The early birds will love playing or practicing rather than sitting and waiting for the rest. Don’t worry about discipline. If the kids are busy you will not face discipline problems. Get as much equipment into their hands as you can, making sure that there is no waiting time for practice. If you have no choice and cannot do that, organize class so that everyone has equal access to equipment.
• Start with the basics. They will have already learned the right movement pattern via the warm-up so you can concentrate on proper weight transfer, follow-through and aiming at a target in future drills.
• As students achieve success increase the distance, backswing, and speed, making sure to keep reminding them of the weight transfer, follow-through, and accuracy. Not all activities have specific equipment – dance, gymnastics, fitness, swimming to name a few – but all activities have correct movement patterns that need to be rehearsed to learn them well, so stick to the principles of repetition in those activities too. Break down harder skills into small, learnable segments, and choose when to rehearse them in sequence.

Positive thinking and early success is so important to children when first learning something new. The challenge for teachers is knowing how to break down the learning sequence so that all the parts are correct and come together in a smooth and flowing motion.

If you need assistance you can find it in my book, Complete Physical Education Plans for Grades 5-12 where I share teaching progressions for every unit and every level. It is there in detail because it works.

Cheers to all of you who guide kids, regardless of ability, to a healthier attitude, a fitter body, and more active life style – for the fun of it.