Category: Middle & High School

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.

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Marketing Physical Education

Think about your favorite restaurant. What is it about that particular restaurant that makes it your favorite? Chances are it is the combination of quality products, good service, and a great atmosphere that keeps you coming back for more. If any one of these three areas were below standard would you return? You’d probably think twice before recommending the restaurant to your friends.

Now think about your physical education program. Your students may or may not have a choice whether or not to frequent your classroom, but if you are trying to promote your program, then satisfying customers should be your first order of business.

First, take a look at your product. Do you have a quality physical education program that has a variety of skills on the menu? Although students often seem to prefer to play certain games, remember that they only know what they have experienced. Varying your content and using a variety of strategies, technology and also differentiating the instruction will keep students from getting bored and will motivate them to move with purpose. Furthermore, students who find your classes intellectually as well as physically challenging will be more likely to talk about, “What they did in PE today,” to their parents.

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Promote Physical Education By Making Connections

As a public school physical educator do you ever feel that you are the “best kept secret” around? Because what you do and what you offer children is so vitally important, do you find it hard to believe that no one really knows, or understands what you are really all about? Do you sometimes think to yourself, “If only they knew!”

Well, what are you waiting for? Why not let others know the importance of your physical education program? In fact if you want others to support your program and appreciate your teaching it’s vital to make time to become a PE promoter. But here’s the key: you need to do it in the context of how you fit into what others are trying to do, whether they be kids, staff, parents, or school board members.

Too often, physical education is viewed as simply a scheduled break in a classroom teacher’s day. Of course this is not the case everywhere. Thankfully there are people who understand the importance of PE and respect its place in the school’s curriculum. If you are already a part of one such building or district, congratulations! Your hard work promoting your program has been successful. Keep up the good work! Hopefully, this article will give you more ideas you can use to continue your PE promotion efforts.

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Should we be Concerned about Increased Public Support for Physical Education’s Mission?

In case you missed it, there was what appears good news for school physical education and its mission this fall. Here’s a sampling:

According to a CDC report, the worrying perceptions many of us have had of ongoing program and position cuts and declining support for K-12 physical education were wrong. In the recently released 2012 School Health Policies and Practices Study (SHPPS), a 10% increase was reported in the percentage of school districts requiring elementary school physical education over the past 12 years.

At the middle school level there was almost a doubling of the percentage of states providing lesson plans and tools for evaluating students’ progress. And nationwide there was a 20% increase in districts adopting policies requiring schools to follow national, state, or district PE standards.

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Preparing for the New School Year

What are YOU doing to prepare for a new school year? Truthfully, if you are a proactive athletic administrator and/or coach, you are preparing all year long. This Coaching and Sport Section will cover several areas of concern for interscholastic athletic program administrators, and may help teachers and parents understand the challenges an athletic program endures behind the scenes.

Spring 2013 I had the opportunity and pleasure to tour Dorman High School campus with director of athletics, Flynn Harrell. This month I called upon him to respond to some questions about the challenges of an athletic administrator preparing for a new year. Thanks To Flynn I was able to pull the following article together.

Here are two links to documents used by Dorman High Athletics that can be used for ideas within your own athletic department. One is Dorman High School Athletic Policy, and the other is Spartanburg School District Six Coaches’ Manual 3013-14.

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Sink or Swim? How to Produce Annual Improvement

This year the USA Swimming National Championships were held the week of June 25 – 29 in Indianapolis, IN. Many swimmers, some more widely known than others, all put forth their finest effort to try and capture their best performance ever and a chance to compete on the US National Team at the World Championships.

Like many sports, in swimming you can have your top performance but still fall short of beating your opponents. However, you must reach a time standard in order to reach the National Championships in the first place. This established standard is a goal all swimmers can aspire to in their training, when they begin to understand how they measure up across the national swimming spectrum (I wish they had one of these standards for my drop shot). If indeed a swimmer is to consider him/herself an ‘elite’ swimmer, they should be able to set these time standards as goals, and work to improve their times annually in order to accomplish these goals at the peak of their swimming primes.

In 1999 USA Swimming initiated the Olympic Trials Project. This project was established because, “Continued success at the international level is one of the primary goals of USA Swimming. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the factors that relate to success in swimming. One means of learning about success is to study the characteristics or qualities of successful individuals; to profile our elite swimmers.”¹

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Physical Education or Recreation

My mom is a leopard, the kind that can’t change her spots. She lives in the moment, says what comes to her mind, and doesn’t look back. It’s history, over and done with. I am my father’s daughter, every sentence measured and every action reflected upon. My reflections often border on rumination, obsessing over the smallest misstatement for hours, days, or even years.

So this article is my latest rumination, more a sharing of questions than an article for information.

Recently, a colleague made a statement to the effect that the majority of physical education teachers are no more than recreation directors. My immediate, uncharacteristically, defensive response was, “I am not a recreation director.” Of course, later, I reflected on the moment and analyzed the statement.

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Preparing for the New School Year

The title of this article is one that could be deceiving until you understand what I mean, and how it should be food for thought. Preparation (for the new school year) should have started many years ago in the college years by acquiring pride in physical education, and the planning it took to become a teacher. As I regress, having retired in 2003, I can look back over many successful years and why they were successful. What made them so extraordinary?

 

 

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