Within this category, essays and articles focus on effectively teaching children in the pre-school and elementary grades. It’s a great place to find teaching tips and get advice from experienced practitioners.
There are several ‘tools available for our tool belts’ as teachers of physical education when it comes to quality assessment procedures. In this article, we would like to SPELL one out for you!
Assessing student learning is a vital component of the teaching process and can act as a way to celebrate student achievement. Surveys, checklists, rubrics, rating scales, e-portfolios, etc., are just a few examples of possible assessment instruments to demonstrate and assess academic growth.
Recently, I was getting ready for the start of another school year. We all go through the same basic checklist: lesson plans ready for the first week, storeroom all set to get the equipment out, office put back together, and new supplies put away and ready to use. You may have even purchased a new pair of sneakers to start the year!
But let’s get to the deeper question. What motivates us to prepare every fall to begin a new school year? Why do we keep coming back year after year? Whether you are a rookie just starting out or a “seasoned veteran” who over the years has seen things come and go in education, why do you keep coming back? Why don’t you take a better paying job somewhere doing something else? Why don’t you retire the minute you are able to?
My guess is that we all got into teaching for very similar reasons. We wanted to help kids. We all liked being active in some ways ourselves and wanted to use that love of movement to teach kids the same appreciation.
Not long ago I was preparing to schedule student teacher observations and field experience visits. I then discovered it was that time of the year when standardized tests took over our schools. Schedules change and teachers and administrators are overly stressed ensuring proper procedures are being followed. Some students care a great deal, while others not a bit. And of course the purpose of all of this testing is to tell us how our students, teachers, and schools are doing, and to compare each of them with others around the state, county, region, and nationally.
Perhaps your health and physical education classes have escaped the specter of standardized tests? Or maybe you are accountable for fitness tests, motor skill assessments, or have to create your own student-based learning outcomes? In either case, I believe that most teachers, parents, and administrators will tell you these standardized tests fail to adequately express the full story of what America’s students, teachers, and schools are achieving. Stories of great academic achievements rarely reference test scores. There is so much more that my students, my fellow teachers, and I do that can’t be easily assessed by standardized tests. These are the real victories that I believe are most important, and I think we should celebrate more than the means, medians, and standard deviations the testing agencies report to us.
I first saw the first “brag board” at the fitness center where I worked out. People could post their latest accomplishments, goals attained, and personal bests. I decided this was a great idea I could use to celebrate students’ real progress toward becoming lifelong movers that was not revealed with fitness tests. My original brag board started out as a white board where students could write their accomplishments in and out of class. For younger grades, I would often be the person to select content. For example, my second graders told me they were able to do the swing step while jumping rope at recess so I told them to put that on the board. The white board was short lived and quickly replaced by a large sheet of white paper. I did away with the white board because we quickly started to run out of room but I didn’t have the heart to erase anything. The papers create a lasting celebration of student success.
Over the past several years there has been a renewed interest in the meaning and importance of play. Play has been featured in the New York Times Magazine, Taking Play Seriously, and in two fairly recent books, Stuart Brown’s Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul (2009), and Bateson’s and Martin’s Play, Playfulness, Creativity and Innovation (2013).
As part of my doctoral program in the early 1990s at The Ohio State University (Building a Bridge Between Athletics and Academics), I was fortunate to study the importance of play and many of the early play theorists. These included the 18th Century educator Jean Jacques Rousseau who in Emile wrote about the importance of play for children.
Rousseau began with the idea that children should be outdoors and active. In so doing, the child would develop his senses through his experiences. The senses would then provide the background against which ideas took shape. By moving and touching everything, seeing, and hearing, tasting and smelling, the child would begin to associate the objects of the external world with the five senses (Mechikoff, 2010, p. 160).
For most of us the school year is coming to a close. But for teachers, it’s a good time to reflect and think about what worked, what didn’t work, and the reasons for both. To get a head start for the next school term, I find it helpful to create a calendar with large space blocks to enter pertinent daily comments. Entries can include behavior issues, positive lessons, and accidents, parental concerns, or anything you think important for future use.
These entries can help remind you of past problems you can avoid and the details of events you might need in a future meeting. With the advent of smart phones and tablets, you can also easily add daily reminders and notes into an App. But, sometimes it’s also good to have a back up just in case of a technology glitch.
Before packing your bags for a much anticipated and probably needed vacation, I encourage you to plan what needs to be done to take you through the first week of teaching. Even the relaxing part of your summer activities can combine refueling and refurbishing too. For teachers, learning never stops. Observing what young people are doing helps us to better appreciate what makes our students tick, and how they’ll likely react to our teaching and the lessons we are planning to present to them.
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.
May is National Physical Fitness and Sports Month and May 1-7 celebrates National Physical Education and Sport Week. My feelings are many on celebrating PE and sports. After nearly twenty-five years of teaching and coaching, my emotions have run the gamut from excited to disheartened, energized to deflated, motivated to total despair. I’ve worked for administrators who knew the value and importance of physical health and wellness as well as those who looked upon “gym” as the irksome and intrusive mandated break in between “real” teaching blocks. I wish I had a quarter for every time a classroom teacher or administrator has said on a bright sunny day, “Why aren’t you outside? It’s so beautiful out! Just take them out and run them!” – I’d be a zillionaire, and probably very tanned!
The reality is, it can be very hard to celebrate PE and sports when you don’t feel you have the support or positive attitudes necessary to feel relevant and appreciated. For me, it’s the students that keep me going, the occasional parent who lets me know how much I’ve made a difference in her child’s life, the student teacher who tells me that the many other programs that he or she has observed don’t offer what I do, or the colleague who once gave me a backhanded compliment by saying, “You work too hard and do too much.”
How To Celebrate
