This category focuses on how to effectively teach middle school, junior high school, and high schoolers. Learn more about how best to connect with and instruct students who are transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and how to motivate them to be physically active and make healthy lifestyle choices.
The language we use when teaching physical education skills and knowledge is more formal, complex and sophisticated than in informal out-of-class conversation. Authors Phoebe Constantinou and Deborah Wuest have created an informative and downloadable handout that defines academic language in physical education, explains its importance, and gives tips for implementation.
Toolkit for Enhancing Academic Language in Physical Education
“What are we playing in gym today?” is in all likelihood the first question asked every day by every class in every gymnasium across the country and possibly the entire world. It may be an overly simplistic answer to the lack of respect for our content area, but conditioning students to ask, “What are we learning in PE today?” instead of “What are we playing in gym today?” would mark a small step toward educating the next generation about the merits of physical education.
However, it then becomes incumbent upon us to be able to provide an answer to this new and improved question, each and every time a student enters our classroom. Our classroom, the gymnasium, while different in size and equipment, needs to look, feel, and operate like a learning environment. Allowing the educational hierarchy to view us as different, and more often than not as less important, guarantees that we will continue to remain educationally second-class despite the rising need for PE.
So what would it look like if we operated like a typical academic classroom, yet still stayed true to the physicality of our domain?
The new Presidential Youth Fitness Program promotes healthy lifestyles, empowers students and parents, and supports quality physical education. Here are five things physical educators should know about the program:
It’s a model: The Presidential Youth Fitness Program (PYFP) provides the tools, resources, and a checklist of criteria the partners believe should be part of a quality fitness education process in a quality physical education program. It’s up to you how you want to incorporate them into your curriculum.
Sportsmanship for me is when a guy walks off the court and you really can’t tell whether he won or lost, when he carries himself with pride either way. – Jim Courier
When I first thought about the theme for this month’s article, it struck me how much sports have changed. I wondered, “Is this change occurring in the right direction?” Simultaneously, I thought about the hodge-podge of events and activities that have transformed the direction PE has taken. I concluded that both sports and PE are at a crossroads awaiting choices we must make about our professional future.
Today, there is a host of negativity, especially in professional and college sports, towards sportsmanship. What character is really being addressed, taught, and built in sports? All too common are taunts, verbal abuse of officials, bending of the rules, individual showmanship that goes far beyond the “look at me,” pounding of chests, throat slashes, and the abrasive interviews following big games.
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:
Nine years ago while serving on the Board of Directors of NASPE, a high-school teacher asked me for “our position” on secondary online physical education (OLPE). This Southwest teacher was concerned about his school district’s hasty adoption of online learning. He wanted to know more about online learning but felt conflicted. As an award recipient for his effective teaching and service on behalf of the school, department, and state association he said, “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.” At the time, NASPE had no official position. We realized one was needed! This was a tipping point. The wonders of the digital age and online learning were intersecting with school physical education. More than a few physical education programs and teachers were being asked to transition from traditional, face-to-face teaching, to online instruction.
Subsequently, NASPE published a position paper entitled Initial Guidelines for Online Physical Education (2007). The skinny was that “no published evidence of OLPE learning existed, that OLPE should meet national standards for learning, that a hybrid model was a reasonable instructional alternative until research was available, and that OLPE was an exciting and attractive – yet untested – alternative to delivering quality PE.” Later, NASPE published the paper Appropriate Use of Instructional Technology in PE (2009). Reasonably, NASPE advocated technology as “a tool for learning if used appropriately for instructional effectiveness…that it could supplement, but not substitute, for effective instruction.”
As long as school physical education survives or thrives (see Mike Metzler’s recent pelinks4u essay for thoughts on this), physical educators will always be concerned about what to teach and how to teach. Recently, the Shape of the Nation Report (SON, 2012) reported that 30 states now grant credit for online physical education, however, only 17 states require certified PE teachers. It made me wonder who teaches these courses in the other 13 states? Some futurists predict that by 2020 half of all secondary education courses will be delivered online. If true, before long many school physical educators will be challenged to walk this instructional tightrope.
Twenty-five years ago, the Assistant Commissioner of Education for New York State (L. Meno) asked all twenty-six content areas in New York public education (Math, English, Science, Social Studies, Music, Home Economics, Physical Education, and so on.), to justify their content area’s impact on “Adult Behavior.” In short, he was asking about the significance of each content area and why it was important to society. It was an interesting question. It forced us to question the impact and importance of physical education to ourselves and to society.
At the time, I was asked to chair the committee responsible for responding to the Commissioner’s request. It gave my colleagues and I a chance to reflect upon the impact of physical education on adult behaviors and to identify what was critically important about our content. Why should parents and community members be willing to continue to support New York state’s physical education requirement and be happy to fund it through their school tax dollars?
The question posed to us also assumes, and rightly so, that what we do in public school physical education with children has an impact on their behavior later as an adult. It made us think about the fact that when children have negative experiences in physical education it will likely result in negative feelings about physical education and physical activity as adults. Persistently scoring in the lower half of a fitness or skill test also risks negative outcomes. It seemed obvious to us in New York state that we had far too many parents and school administrators who after having negative experiences in physical education as children grew up unwilling to support the physical education as it currently existed.
