Toasting the new year offers physical education teachers the chance to rethink, reframe, and reteach. Thinking back over the last six months, have your classes been meaningful? Are your students learning? Did students’ faces light up like lightbulbs when they suddenly “got it?” That spark is part of the magic of teaching and learning.

Thoughtful physical education teachers strive for movement literacy, which requires student thinking, moving, and feeling. The acquisition of motor skills, physical fitness, core knowledge, personal and social development, and joy results from concise teacher language and communication (both verbal and nonverbal). Strauss & Feiz (2014) write that “Discourse is the social and cognitive process of putting the world into words, of transforming our perceptions, experiences, emotions, understandings, and desires into a common medium …” (p.1). The words teachers select, the images they create, and the frames students and teachers construct, matter in the classroom. Our words create our world, and as teachers, they create our student’s learning environment.