In this three-part series of articles on advocating for our profession, I explained why we need to advocate and I focused on the single most important audience you really must plan to advocate to – your school board. In this last article I want to get down to the difficult but key task of actually creating an effective advocacy message.
But first let me restate my three rules of advocacy because I’ll refer to these three rules as I explain how to develop an advocacy message:
Advocacy is preventive medicine and in this second in a series of three articles on advocating for your profession it’s worth reviewing the first of the three rules of advocacy that I laid out in Part 1. The First rule of advocacy is Do Some – It Works.
For advocacy to truly be preventive you must do some and one of the best places to advocate is with your school board. School board meetings are public venues where a wide range of decision makers and policy influencers are present. It’s a perfect setting in which to direct and influence the discussion and understanding of health, physical activity, and the role a quality physical education program plays in the development of our children. When and what you present to the School Board will be crucial in determining how effective your advocacy is and whether it is truly preventive medicine.
In my previous article, I pointed out the parallels between martial arts and job protection and made the case for an offensive-defense strategy. In martial arts you want to make your opponent think twice before even attempting to hit you. In physical education, offensive-defense is what you do when times are good to ensure that your district will not even consider attacking your program during tough economic times. The time to advocate with your school board is not when there is trouble but when things are going well and you have a positive story to tell.
We have all had the following experience; you have just finished what you felt was an outstanding presentation to your students and as you gaze at their faces you would bet your next paycheck that not a one of them really listened to anything you just said. Interestingly, if you made that bet you would likely lose that paycheck because most of us who have taught for a fair length of time have also had another type of experience. Years later, a student you viewed as a “slacker” and who you would have sworn was not taking your lessons to heart comes back to visit, and much to your surprise they are in great shape and doing well, and tell you how much your PE class helped them.
Advocating for your profession, similar to teaching, can sometimes seem like a fruitless effort. While passionately advocating for what we believe in we secretly doubt that the message is getting through. Advocacy is also like teaching in that the results of what we do are rarely immediate and almost never predictable. Trying to predict when and if that student who appeared disinterested in your classes will take your message to heart is impossible but we deliver the message anyway. To further our chances of success most teachers also learn to deliver information frequently and consistently. When I taught middle school our 6th graders did not really seem to understand the sermon of health and fitness that I was preaching but somewhere in the following three years, after repeated exposure, I discovered that the vast majority of them saw the light and started to understand the importance of maintaining their health and fitness.
Recently I went through an advocacy scenario that followed this pattern. My district eliminated one of our two elementary school physical education positions. I wrote a letter to the superintendent before it happened and advocated for the re-instatement of the position after it had been eliminated. No immediate result was evident and I was sure that the message had fallen on deaf ears. One year later the position was restored. Now I am not claiming that my advocacy alone accomplished this or even that it was the leading cause (many other people also spoke up including elementary class room teachers), but it was part of the effort and in the end someone listened.
