After many years as a physical educator, I’ve learned that three key ingredients have to combine for students to successfully learn athletic skills or improve their physical abilities; potential, effort, and opportunities. Eliminating or limiting any of these parts drastically reduces a student’s chances of success. Even more importantly, I’ve also learned that as a teacher I can most directly influence the creation of learning opportunities.

Potential involves a combination of genetic factors, environment, and prior experience with the skill being attempted. For example, it’s likely that a student who is shorter will find it difficult to out-rebound a taller player. People who tend to be better jumping hurdles have longer legs and gymnasts tend to be shorter and muscular. When it comes to environment and prior experience, if I have students who have spent time at softball tournaments watching parents and siblings play, they tend to have greater know-how and aptitude when it comes to swinging bats versus peers who have never held a bat or seen a game.

We also know from research that there tends to be a transfer of skill between certain types of activities. Doing activities that have similar elements to previously learned skills affects how one performs. Students in my classes that pick up unicycling the quickest tend to be skateboarders first, horseback riders second, gymnasts third, followed by everyone else. In all likelihood, they learned faster because of their prior involvement in balance oriented sports. Being familiar with the environment, like surfers living near the ocean or skiers in the mountains, influences people’s potential to achieve. A Sherpa used to living at a higher altitude has a body better prepared to climb higher on Mount Everest. Clearly, physical educators and coaches have very little control over genetic and experiential factors such as these that affect a student’s performance potential.

The Common Core is a national movement to adopt common standards and assessments for English language arts and mathematics. These standards aim to create assessments that will not vary among states and will determine whether students are meeting those standards. Common learning goals provide a clear direction for what educators and parents should aim for. It creates a level playing field for all students independent of the state they reside in. Common Core Standards are designed to make the student college and career ready. The goal is to have the students succeed in a global economy and society. Students are provided with rigorous content that creates an environment in which they have a deeper level of understanding.

A common response when physical education teachers are told that they need to incorporate English Language Arts and Mathematics into our curriculum is frustration. We’ve become accustomed to doing things that work well for our students, and us and heard the call to keep our students moving as much as possible. Then about the time we get comfortable with what we’re doing, it seems that learning standards change or a new curriculum is adopted and we’re expected to do something different. The adoption of the common core standards has brought a huge paradigm shift in education. Teachers are being asked to get their students to think in different ways and to demonstrate a deeper level of understanding. With the common core’s primary focus on English Language Arts and Mathematics, physical educators, not unexpectedly, are concerned about how this is going to affect their teaching.

As states and school districts deliberate ways in which they can effectively integrate common core standards into instruction, it’s vital for physical educators to be part of the discussion. Something we should have learned from the introduction of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) more than a decade ago is that we put the future of our profession in a precarious state if we allow ourselves to be excluded from educational reform efforts.