Fired Up and Ready to Go

I looked down at the black fitbit on my wrist yesterday around noon, reluctantly tapped the face twice, and waited impatiently for it to respond. Soon the monitor revealed one full bar and a second slowly blinking back at me. Sitting all day is tough. I must have had an unsatisfied look on my face as I did the math…less than 1500 steps. I was frustratingly short of my 10,000 step daily goal. Last week while escorting my students up Mt. Si, a 4-mile hike outside Seattle with 4000 feet of elevation gain I had hit 10,000 steps before 8am. Sitting all day is tough. I had good reason to be sitting but I function much better when I’m moving.

I spent the past three days representing SHAPE Washington in St. Louis at the Leadership Development Conference (LDC). Aside from the inevitable seat time there were some obvious highlights. I met some impressive educators in our field from all over the country and used the many meaningful conversations to refuel my professional energy (it had taken a big hit over the last couple of months of school this year). I listened intently as some of the most respected leaders in physical education shared their collective vision for SHAPE America our newly structured national organization. I had the opportunity to sit in on a session by Dr. John Ratey, from Harvard University, as he discussed the abundance of research connecting moderate to vigorous physical activity to an increase in brain function. What he calls “miracle grow for the brain” could go a long way to making physical education a priority in our schools. It was an inspirational message.

However, what continues to rattle around in my brain today, as I fly to meet my family in California for what I think is a well deserved visit to Disneyland, is what our current SHAPE America president, Dolly Lambdin, challenged us within the first hour of the conference. After a painfully slow period of change within our professional organization (from AAHPERD to SHAPE America) that’s been at times both confusing and promising, our leaders have emerged from the experience with a visionary perspective. With CEO Paul Roetert, past-president Gale Wiedow, and president-elect Steve Jefferies providing their support, Dolly challenged us to consider an audacious national goal: All students in the United States will be physically active and healthy by 2025.

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High School Physical Education-Part 1: Going on Offense to Improve Programs and Prevent Program Loss

This article is the first part of a two part series.  The second segment will be published in the next issue of PHE America.

Recently, I was asked to participate in a college class activity in which students “defended physical education” before a simulated school board.  I, along with several others, served as “board members” for this activity.  Different groups were asked to make presentations to the board concerning proposed exemptions for band and athletics, or proposed decreases in the physical education requirement.  The activity was realistic because we in physical education often find ourselves on the defensive.  Challenges to our programs “pop up” and, in the defensive mode, we prepare statements or appear before school boards to defend them.

In recent years, I have written position papers for submission to school boards (solicited by physical educators or prepared on my own), and have presented to a number of school boards to defend programs. After involvement in several program challenges, I have come to believe that by the time a program challenge has reached the school board agenda, the battle has already been lost.  Indeed program losses, especially at the high school level, have been significant over time.

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Social Media in PE is No Marshawn Lynch

My local NFL team are Superbowl Champions. Last season the Seattle Seahawks dominated football and no one exposed the team’s superiority more than running back Marshawn Lynch. When Marshawn carried the ball and turned on “beast mode” more often than not he was a “game changer.” Fire, the printing press, electricity, transistors, and integrated circuits were game changers too. But social media?

 

In the last issue, I confessed my ignorance about the not-so-new forms of social media that seemingly everyone except me was using. It was time to get a Twitter account and as a few of you know I’ve since “tweeted” things I felt worth sharing. But I’m still puzzled. How the heck does anyone have time to read these twittering messages that pour on us in an almost continuous daily torrent? And that’s just the tweets, not even the information they point to. Apparently, today’s millions of Twitter users have huge amounts of free time waiting to be filled. Obviously I have time-management issues to resolve.

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Psychological Skills Training: Body Rehearsal*

Continuing our Psychological Skills Training series in pelinks4u, this article focuses on getting the most out of the physical motions of sport by paying attention to how the motion feels. To focus on how the motion feels, we will utilize previously learned skills you can access from the pelinks4u archives: Getting Loose (Dec. 2011), Breathing Easy (Feb. 2013), Staying on the Ball (June/July 2013) & Mental Rehearsal I (Dec. 2013). I am sharing a coach’s script you can use with your athletes, and a handout for athletes to use when practicing at home.

Psychological Skills Training series: previous issues

  1. Training Your Athletes to be Mentally Tough
  2. Mental Training Tools
  3. Goal Setting and Self-Confidence
  4. Imagery
  5. Relaxation and Energization
  6. Self-Talk Skills
  7. Energy Management
  8. Stress Management Skills
  9. Breathing Easy Drill
  10. Staying on the Ball Drill
  11. Mental Rehearsal, Phase I
  12. Mental Rehearsal, Phase II

Coach’s Script: Body Rehearsal

Bring to Practice: coach’s script, copies of the athlete’s handout.

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Back to Basics Coaching and Teaching Physical Education

When our school district developed our “Injury Prevention Initiative” a little over two years ago (see November, 2011 article in pelinks4u, “An Injury Prevention Initiative Based Upon the Functional Movement Screen [FMS]”), little did we realize the impact it would make. We initiated this injury prevention program by mandating all athletic teams incorporate the recommendations into their warm-up routines. Since then, we have cut the number of surgeries resulting from athletic injuries by over 40%.

The results were so dramatic that I’m now hounding our district’s physical education specialists to begin using these functional movement exercises in all of our elementary and middle school physical education classes. My thinking is based upon the huge impact Gray Cook and Lee Burton have made with their Functional Movement Screen and the exercises designed to enhance FMS scores and athletic performance.

This fall, I came across an article and video, “Yes, kids are stars on the playing field, but can they do a push-up?” (Nancy Cambria, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 21, 2013). I was pleasantly surprised by what was in the article and attached video, and started looking at what’s happening in our society to our youth-their activity levels, outdoor time, and obesity levels. The focus of Cambria’s article was:

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Celebrate Students’ Victories with a Brag Board

Not long ago I was preparing to schedule student teacher observations and field experience visits. I then discovered it was that time of the year when standardized tests took over our schools. Schedules change and teachers and administrators are overly stressed ensuring proper procedures are being followed. Some students care a great deal, while others not a bit. And of course the purpose of all of this testing is to tell us how our students, teachers, and schools are doing, and to compare each of them with others around the state, county, region, and nationally.

Perhaps your health and physical education classes have escaped the specter of standardized tests? Or maybe you are accountable for fitness tests, motor skill assessments, or have to create your own student-based learning outcomes? In either case, I believe that most teachers, parents, and administrators will tell you these standardized tests fail to adequately express the full story of what America’s students, teachers, and schools are achieving. Stories of great academic achievements rarely reference test scores. There is so much more that my students, my fellow teachers, and I do that can’t be easily assessed by standardized tests. These are the real victories that I believe are most important, and I think we should celebrate more than the means, medians, and standard deviations the testing agencies report to us.

I first saw the first “brag board” at the fitness center where I worked out. People could post their latest accomplishments, goals attained, and personal bests. I decided this was a great idea I could use to celebrate students’ real progress toward becoming lifelong movers that was not revealed with fitness tests. My original brag board started out as a white board where students could write their accomplishments in and out of class. For younger grades, I would often be the person to select content. For example, my second graders told me they were able to do the swing step while jumping rope at recess so I told them to put that on the board. The white board was short lived and quickly replaced by a large sheet of white paper. I did away with the white board because we quickly started to run out of room but I didn’t have the heart to erase anything. The papers create a lasting celebration of student success.

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Social Networking in Physical Education: Connect and Follow

I grew up in a time when you answered the phone in the kitchen and had to pull the cord into other rooms if you wanted privacy. It was a time when you never would have thought to change the channel on the TV during a commercial because it meant getting up off the couch. I played “follow the leader” and “connect the dots.”

Now, I can talk on the phone walking down the street. I can use it to watch TV with or without commercials. And, I use it to connect and follow hundreds of friends and colleagues at the same time! Boy, have things changed!

This past year, I finally decided to jump into the Physical Education social networking world. It is a vast world of hashtags and links, videos and podcasts. I’m both overwhelmed and inspired. After hours, days, and months of friending, pinning, posting, commenting and tweeting, I still have not come close to scratching the surface of the physical education network on the World Wide Web.

So, for those of you perhaps contemplating joining the online social media frenzy, I’m going to introduce you to three popular ways of connecting – Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook. Now YOU can join in the fun!

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