EDITORIAL

Open Source PE Lessons: Let's Share the Wealth!

"Open source" is a phrase familiar to the technology community. Open source advocates believe that better outcomes can be achieved through broad cooperation. This includes the free sharing of knowledge and resources. Open source thinking exemplifies the TEAM approach: Together everyone achieves more. The downside of this approach is that some people risk receiving less for their achievements. Not surprisingly, for the talented this can be a rather unattractive option. So what does this have to do with physical education? Everything, especially as we try to elevate the quality of our teaching and remain relevant in 21st century public education.

Currently, thousands of American health and physical education teachers wake up each morning thinking about the lessons they will teach that day. Some will turn to carefully crafted lesson plans closely matched to meaningful K-12 curriculums. Others will do what far too many have always done: Make up instruction on the fly. As disparaging as this remark might sound it's easy to understand. Facing a packed daily teaching schedule, who has time to write quality lesson plans? Detailed lesson planning for many teachers ends with college graduation. Starting careers with only novice instructional and classroom management skills, lesson planning takes a backseat to survival. And to survive it's a lot easier to keep kids busy and active rather than to attempt meaningful instruction.

It's pretty ironic that the most practice teachers get planning lessons is during their undergraduate preparation. This is when they typically know the least about the wide variety of curricula available for instruction. It's when as PETE majors they personally possess only a narrow repertoire of activity knowledge and skills. Few have experience managing large groups for instruction, or dealing with behavioral issues. And at this time they know little about how to break down skills for instruction, design practice tasks, and give meaningful feedback.

If this wasn't hard enough, what do we do to make this already challenging environment even tougher? We ask them to write lesson plans usually on topics they know little about and have never before attempted to teach. Even worse, we assign this task to individuals who for the most part did not choose to become health and physical education teachers because of their exemplary writing skills. It's a losing combination, and yet for years we've persisted doing it despite the fact that for many physical educators it will be their last lesson writing experience.

Here's where the concept of "open source" makes sense in physical education. Some people are capable of writing outstanding lesson plans. Some people aren't. Why aren’t we sharing, and having everyone use top quality instructional resources? What's the point of forcing people who are not good writers or planners to create something destined to fail? Surely it makes far more sense to spend the limited time we have with novice teachers helping them improve their practical teaching skills so that they can quickly move beyond survival teaching into meaningful instruction?

Unfortunately, as part of professional practice we've come to accept "lesson planning" as an inherent and essential teaching skill. It isn't. Musicians don't design and build musical instruments. Contractors don't design buildings. Authors don't build the computers they use to write books. What's important to move physical education forward is that teachers have access to top-quality lessons and have the skills and knowledge to implement them. Part of this skill set, of course, requires the ability and sensitivity to know when and how to modify and adapt lessons to meet student needs. But this is entirely different from developing and writing quality lesson plans.

If from the outset we put top quality lesson plans into the hands of PETE majors and novice teachers we'd greatly increase their chances of success. They'd quickly learn what meaningful instruction looks like and begin modeling it. When they step into schools they'd have a framework to support their instruction. The expectations of quality physical education teaching would be quite clear to them. Switching to the "on-the-fly" teaching method would be unnecessary because they'd immediately have high quality resources to guide their teaching. There would be less of a reason or justification for poor teaching or non-teaching.

The benefits of this approach would of course go beyond simply helping out PETE or novice teachers. All of us, at some time, find ourselves novice teachers when challenged to teach an activity or subject matter that is new to us. Open source lesson sharing would help us all. It would reduce our reticence to try new things. Above all it would save countless wasted and frustrating hours. But there's more. Open source thinking is not limited to enhancing public school physical education teaching.

Similar scenarios to those described above are endlessly repeated in today's physical education professional preparation programs. There are certainly far more similarities than differences between the nation's PETE programs. Nevertheless, teacher educators, although occasionally aided by textbook authors, devote hours to class preparation. In truth, we aren't all equally as good at this task. And the hours we spend planning lessons would be far better spent with our students or on service or research. It makes no sense. Faculty devote an unfathomable amount of time to creating classroom slideshow presentations. Many of these are awful, not because of a lack of trying but because our training never included principles of visual design and delivery. Consequently, we far too often perpetuate "death by PowerPoint" experiences often while simultaneously lecturing on teaching effectiveness.

Open source thinking is an idea whose time has come. Who wouldn't want access to some of the brilliantly creative instructional resources others have presented? Sign me up! It's not even as if there is a huge market for selling them. If we truly want to improve the quality of physical education teaching and justify our existence in tomorrow's public schools, we need to work smarter. We need to question traditional ways of doing things and become more innovative in our thinking. We need to find ways to be more generous in our sharing. Helping others to teach better benefits all of us. And teaching physical education better is vital for our survival.

Steve Jefferies, publisher pelinks4u