What I Learned Today!

You can always teach an old dog new tricks and I for one, (sigh,… Am I really becoming an old dog?), love to continuously learn both personally and professionally. “Life is a great school” is one of my mantras and just the other day while teaching, I had one of those “ah-ha” moments and it has changed how I plan to move forward with my teaching.

Now, for many of you this might be obvious, but for some reason I had never asked my students the simple question, “What did you learn today?” Now, I always ask some basic questions at the closure of my lessons, such as, “Who can tell me what strategy you used in the game today?” or “What was this activity really about?” or “Who do you think was a good leader in your group and why?”

Although I always get a few raised hands and hear some great responses, the other day I had a class that kept looking at me kind of quizzically as I fired off my questions until I finally asked, “What did you learn about today?” So many hands shot up and answers came flying out of their mouths! “I learned how to work with my group,” “I learned how to help solve a problem,” “I learned how to balance my (pool) noodle.” I was thrilled! This simple yet very specific question personalized the answer from each student.

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Now that the New Year’s Resolutions have Come and Gone…What’s Your Line?

By now, many of our New Year’s resolutions have come and gone. Good intentions don’t have the best track record when it comes to longevity. Well meaning ideas don’t always last. That being said, what is it that we can do to keep our students and us motivated for the long haul?

Most of us work hard to present physical activity to our kids in ways that connect with them. Ultimately, we want our kids to take ownership of their own fitness and to find the best way that they can use it to be healthy and productive people, no matter their age. But teaching them to how to motivate themselves can sometimes be challenging.

Few teachers don’t have “go-to sayings” that they fall back on in their classes. These expressions speak to the heart of our programs. Goodness knows that if you are looking for these, a quick Google search will overwhelm you with options. However, rather than risk asking you to do something like that, I’ve found a few phrases that have stood the test of time for me no matter what I happen to be teaching at the time. See what you think.

The first is a staple of mine that I introduce to my students on the very first day every September:

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50 Million Strong: Utilizing the Universal Design for Learning to Reach All Children

50 Million Strong (50MS) includes all children as seen on the photo on the 50MS literature from SHAPE America. This image depicts children that come from diverse backgrounds with a range of skills and abilities. Our job as educators is to address the needs of all students, including those with disabilities. Because many physical education teachers have only one or two courses related to teaching inclusively, programming can be difficult. We have assembled a few important points that every teacher must keep in mind:

  1. Children with disabilities are children first!
  2. All children must have access to the curriculum and be offered similar units of instruction as their peers even if they are in a self-contained, modified, smaller class, or an inclusive class. In other words, physical therapy does not count as physical education.
  3. When conducting assessments, they must be assessed with everyone else and their scores must count towards educational outcomes.
  4. If they have a paraeducator who works with them in physical education, the para should be trained to ensure that the child is safe and receives the best education.
  5. Adapted Physical Education (APE) is a service NOT a placement. APE can be delivered in any setting. It is how the class is taught; not where it is taught.
  6. Lastly, the Universal Design for Learning approach should be adopted as a teaching strategy so that every child who walks in to the gymnasium will access the curriculum.

The Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is a teaching approach that takes into account every child and their learning style. It started in 1990 with the passage of the American’s with Disabilities Act, addressing the primary barriers to educational opportunity.

UDL embraces the ethos that every child be included, and have access to the general education curriculum. Variations in equipment, rules, instruction and environment are planned when the lesson is created and NOT as an afterthought at the bottom of a lesson plan.

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Healthy Hearts Lead to 50 Million Strong Kids!

(This essay was originally published on SHAPE America’s member Exchange [February, 2016] and is reprinted with permission.)

February is Heart Month. Time again for America’s physical educators and health educators to celebrate the value of what we do best: keeping kids healthy.  In our increasingly sedentary and fast-food-focused world, cardiovascular disease remains the nation’s leading cause of death. It’s estimated close to 1 million lives are lost annually, which represents about one of every 2.5 US deaths. None of us remain untouched.

Because many of these deaths are the result of poor lifestyle choices they are often preventable. Inactivity, poor nutrition and tobacco use are chief among the causes, which makes the work of health and physical educators top among the solutions.

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Turner Ashby High School Dream Trail

The end of 2014 was the beginning of an incredible professional journey for me. It launched the building of a dream that had been brewing inside of me since the day I walked into my first teaching assignment during the summer of 1997 at Turner Ashby High School in Bridgewater, Virginia.

Farmers Insurance offered the Dream Big Teacher Challenge open to applications from any K-12 public education teacher in the country. Our school’s proposal was selected as one of 15 finalists in the country and 1 of 3 schools selected in the Eastern Zone. The voting competition lasted for 2 months and on December 8, 2015, Turner Ashby High School was announced as the Eastern Zone winner of the $100,000 grant! The planning and building of our paved fitness started moving forward. This yearlong journey is documented and can be viewed at www.cindyferek.weebly.com

In 2013, the CDC reported that, “2,163 teens in the United States ages 16-19 were killed and 243,243 were treated in emergency departments for injuries suffered in motor vehicle crashes. That means that six teens ages 16-19 died every day from motor vehicle injuries.” The pain of those numbers unfortunately had become a reality at our school. We had lost 4 teenagers at the high school in the last 4 years and many more in our school district.

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Can Health and Physical Education Avoid a Kodak Moment?

Remember when a family member or friend excitedly shouted, “Kodak Moment!” They’d whip out a camera, quickly gather people together and cement a memory of the occasion on film. It’s not uncommon to hear the same expression today but in an entirely different context.

kodak

Kodak has a fascinating history. It was back in 1888, when chemist George Eastman flipped the world of photography. His invention of consumer cameras and roll film transformed photo taking from a small, complicated, specialized profession to a hobby for everyone. Eastman and the Rochester NY company he created, successfully dominated the world of photography for close to a century.

But then something unanticipated happened. In 1973, Kodak hired Steven Sasson a bright, young 24-year old engineer. Uncertain how best to use his talents they offered him a couple of options. Sasson chose to investigate a newly emerging technology that promised to transform electrical signals into images. Two years later, he proudly demonstrated his creation in front of Kodak’s bosses: The world’s very first digital camera. Sasson predicted that digital photography would within about 20 years replace traditional cameras, film, and prints.

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Mobilizing Your Students through Performance Based Assessments

In the world of physical education, there are times when the internalization of teaching models, concepts and strategies is, in my opinion, rushed or incomplete. Models that are not specifically designed for physical education are often either glossed over due to the perception that “we are different” and they do not fit in our discipline, or they are quickly dismissed. For example, what I hear in regard to performance-based assessments from other PE professionals is something to the effect of, “Yeah, we do that every day. Our students perform a skill and we assess it.”

Girl on race track

Although the verbiage matches (performance and assessment), if you stop there the opportunity for tremendous student growth is lost. Performance-based assessments (PBA) are much more than performing a skill. They provide students choices in an area of study, while allowing opportunities for them to both explore an essential question and share what they have learned. There are four main components to a PBA:

  • Instructional Component: Takes place in the classroom with the teacher. This is where a lot of the brainstorming and teacher guidance occurs. PBAs are student driven and student centered with the teacher guiding the instruction, making suggestions, and monitoring the overall process.
  • Choice Component: Allows students choices in what they explore, how they explore it, and what the end result ends up looking like.
  • Research Component: Students take time either at home, in the class, or both to search for and find information that will help them to complete the task and answer the essential question.
  • Action Component: The project is brought into a real world setting and the information gathered is shared in a meaningful way.
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