Category: PHE Current Issues

This category includes essays and articles on a wide range of topics. Read what’s good and what the challenges are about current teaching and coaching practices, and what physical and health education must do to thrive in the future. It’s a place to share, discuss, and debate ideas. Read and join the conversation.

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Ninja Warrior Night: Teaching Students to Overcome Obstacles…Literally!

I’m always looking for fun ways to motivate my students to develop their athleticism. I’m constantly searching for creative ways to have the students work on setting goals and mapping out plans to achieve them. I want to teach my students how to overcome obstacles and not give up. And I’ve discovered I can literally do just that with a physical education inspired version of TV’s American Ninja Warrior course!

TV shows such as Wipe-Out, American Ninja Warrior, Ninja Warrior Junior & Titanare wildly popular among our youth right now. The high intensity, high-risk style of competition is the reason for their popularity. These shows always have my children and I on the edge of our seats, hearts racing, muscles tensing, almost willing the athletes to get through to the next obstacle. These shows are inspiring children, teens, and adults to become more physically active and try new things outside their comfort zones. With this in mind, I decided a school-wide competition would be a great teaching tool to motivate my students to rise up, challenge themselves, and learn what they are capable of.

Every year, the students in my school look forward to our Giant Obstacle Course. Year after year, we set up in class different obstacles that are both fun and crazy while challenging the students’ strength, endurance, and overall fitness. So, this year, my co-worker and I designed the course to resemble the show American Ninja Warrior. We made our version of the quad steps, rope swings, rolling log, warped wall, Tarzan ropes, cargo climb, jumping bars, salmon ladder, unstable bridge, devil steps, rope junction, cliff hanger, monkey pegs, etc. I have to brag for one moment! The course was AWESOME! Everyday you would find my coworker and I playing on the course any free minute we had. Even some of the teachers and staff would come in during their class PE period and play.

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Healthy Choices to Starting the School Day

Student lives are packed with school, homework, entertainment, social media and much more. This leaves little time for healthy eating and exercising. Understanding how to fit healthy meals and exercise into busy school days affects the ability of our students to meet the high demands of a busy life while simultaneously maintaining short and long-term health. Physical activity, good nutrition, and a healthy mind set, build the foundation for a well-rounded childhood. Questions about whether or not to eat breakfast, what to eat for breakfast, when to exercise, and how many hours of sleep are needed, are often confusing topics with many differing opinions. In this article, we address some common topics relating to how to start the day based on research-proven strategies for dealing with the fast-paced environment in which today’s students live.

Habits
Habits are regular tendencies and practices followed with little conscious effort. Habits are born out of long-term consistent routines. The more consistent students are with sleeping, eating right, and exercising, the greater likelihood they will become habits. Although changing our daily lifestyles can be difficult, one effective strategy is to set the goal of practicing 3-4 new behaviors for 30 days. These new goals should be written down and read daily. After 30 days students often discover that the new behaviors are taking less effort and starting to become second nature “habits.” But remember, it’s important to ensure routines (e.g. to eat breakfast everyday) are also consistently healthy (i.e. include meals that are well-balanced). Because lifelong habits can good or bad for your well-being, it’s vital our students’ choices are good!

Have Plenty of Choices
School-age children often don’t like doing the same thing over and over again. Routines that don’t include variety can become boring. But including variety doesn’t have to take away from the goal of developing consistent habits, but rather emphasizes the importance of providing choices within behaviors. Students need to have plenty of healthy choices for food and different options for staying physically active. Mixing it up is fun, refreshing, and something to look forward to doing rather than disliking.

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A Tribute to George H. Sage: Scholar, Teacher, Coach, Athlete

On February 11, 2019, physical education and kinesiology lost one of its long-time leaders.  Professor Emerita George H. Sage (University of Northern Colorado) was a renowned scholar in the area of sport sociology having authored more than 20 books and 200 scholarly articles.  He was among the first of the scholars in physical education and kinesiology that identified a disciplinary area of study and was among the early researchers in sport sociology.  His text Sociology of North American Sport, coauthored with Stan Eitzen, is a classic text and is now in its 10thedition.

George Sage, 12/27/1929 – 2/11/2019

George began his career as a high school physical education teacher and coach, first at College High School in Greeley, Colorado while working on his masters’ degree at Colorado State College (now UNC) and later at Chandler High School in Arizona. Sage next served as a graduate teaching assistant at UCLA while working on his doctorate.  During this time, he studied basketball with legendary coach John Wooden. He then taught and coached (basketball) at Pomona College while working on his doctorate at UCLA. After earning his doctorate, he accepted a position as assistant professor and head basketball coach at his alma mater. From 1963 to 1969 his teams posted a 95-36 (.725) winning percentage, a school record. After he left coaching in 1969, Sage focused on teaching and research.

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Tribute to Roberta (Robbie) Park: Exemplary Physical Educator and Sport Historian

Roberta J. Park, or Robbie as she was known by her close friends and colleagues, was a lifelong proponent of physical education. In addition to being a renowned physical educator she was a passionate scholar in the field of sport history with a specialty in the history of health, exercise, and physical education in the 18th and 19th centuries. She edited a number of seminal books and monographs as well as many chapters in books and monographs. She published more than one hundred articles in virtually all of the important journals in the field of physical education and kinesiology.

Roberta Park, 07/15/1931 – 12/05/18

Robberta delivered lectures and research presentations in all parts of the world, often as keynote speaker or in an honor address. Her research output is truly outstanding and her extensive work on embodiment, sport, health and physical practices in historical context is widely admired. One of her most important contributions to the field was a substantive review article entitled “A Decade of the Body: Researching and Writing about the History of Health, Fitness, Exercise and Sport, 1983-1993” published in the Journal of Sport History in 1994.

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Adventure Education Class Creates Path Toward 50 Million Strong Success

SHAPE America’s 50 Million Strong by 2029 commitment has a very clear vision: To get all of America’s school-aged youth physically active and healthy by the year 2029. Less clear, is how America’s physical and health educators can successfully accomplish such a challenging mission. But what many teachers have recognized is that a workable approach is to accept that “it starts with me.” While individual teachers don’t control what happens outside of their school, they do control what they choose to do and choose not to do with their own students. What follows is a description of how one teacher is attempting to change the way that his students think about and approach physical activity.

Not long ago, Peter Toutenhoofd – Mr. T. as he is known to his students – a physical educator from South High, Sheboygan, WI received a PEP Grant. He asked himself, “How might my students best benefit from this funding?” Mr. T decided to take a non-traditional approach and to create an Adventure Education program. Here’s what he did:

Students were first given a formal definition of Adventure Education and then asked to rewrite it into their own words. This process allowed Mr. T to check for understanding and ensure teacher and students were thinking similarly. Next a “Full Value Contract” (FVC) involving PEEP (physical, emotional, environment, and personal elements) was explained and students were challenged to design one they could all agree to for the class. Once this FVC was written and modified, all participants were required to sign it. Some of the key elements in the contract included the following:

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50 Million Strong by 2029: Tracking Progress Toward Achieving Our Goal (2018 Update)

What was described in my previous post was step one of the assessment plan presented at the 50 Million Strong Forum at the SHAPE America Convention in Boston 2017.  Step one involved the use of nationally available high school and middle school level data to track our 50 Million Strong progress and guide our actions. In addition to the discussed behaviors addressed in YRBS and policies addressed by SHHPS and SHAPE of the Nation, teachers must be able to assess the national health and physical education content standards.   Students must learn the skills, knowledge, competence and desire to be physically active and make healthy choices and so we need to track program success in the national standards.  To this end there is a need for additional assessments teachers can use that showcase student mastery of key knowledge, and skills.  These are being developed by additional task forces. A brief overview is given below.

Assessment Rationale for use Examples
NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE MEASURES

National surveillance measures of health behaviors (mostly self report), state and national policy (selected items from YRBS, SHAPE of the Nation, SHHPS)

 

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50 Million Strong by 2029: Tracking Progress Toward Achieving Our Goal

(Publisher’s Note: This article is based on a presentation made by the author as part of the 50 Million Strong by 2029 Forum held at the 2017 SHAPE America National Convention.)

 In 2016, SHAPE America made a commitment to ensure that by 2029 all of America’s youth will be “empowered to live healthy and active lives through effective health and physical education programs” (SHAPE America 2016).  Since then, many people have asked how will we ensure that we are making progress toward this goal, or how and when will we know if we have achieved it? To this end, SHAPE America President Steve Jefferies appointed a Measurement Advisory Panel tasked with wrestling with these issues and identifying how we should begin to measure progress.

The Advisory Panel included the following professionals:

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