Happy Holidays from everyone at pelinks4U!
Publisher Notes
In October, I raised some of the challenges I felt we faced in preparing future physical educators. These thoughts elicited a deluge of reader reactions and many of these responses were shared in last month's issue. One of the respondents was Dr. Corkie Hedlund who was impressed by the comments readers shared about professional teacher preparation in our colleges and universities. I invited Dr. Hedlund to expand on her thoughts in a guest editorial and I think you will enjoy reading her opinion! But you too are invited to participate in an ongoing dialogue on ways to improve the quality of physical education teaching. At the end of Corkie's editorial you'll find a link that will take you to the NASPE Forum and a location where you can post your own opinion. I urge you to share your thoughts. Agreement or disagreement is fine. We need more professional dialogue and to raise issues that we can all reflect upon. Please participate.

Once again, I would like to thank you for your ongoing interest and support for pelinks4u. We celebrate the conclusion of 10 years in existence. This would not have been possible without the great support of our many volunteer editors and editorial staff, our loyal site sponsors, and of course YOU our readers. It is greatly appreciated. Very best wishes from all of us for a wonderful holiday season and a healthy new year.     

Steve Jefferies
Publisher, pelinks4u    

Why PHYSICAL EDUCATION is a Joke and What We Must Do to Change It 1  2 >>
By Corkie Hedlund, Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas

(Dr. Hedlund taught public school physical education, coached, and officiated sports for several years in Indiana and Illinois. For the past 26 years she has taught physical education and coached at Ottawa University and served as the department chair for 20 years. She has been a consultant on “Writing Across the Curriculum” and co-chaired many NCATE accreditation teams in Kansas.)

I would like to contribute to the conversation addressing university educators and university education that began last month on pelinks4u. I have been a physical educator for over forty years; twelve of those years were at the junior high and high school level; the remainder have been as a teacher educator in HPER at a small college. Year after year we see the leaders of our profession decrying the fact that so many practitioners fail to teach as they have been taught, failing to implement “best practices.” Curiously they often conclude (or infer) that the problem is with the professionalism and dedication of the practitioners.

Throughout my career, physical education has been seen by many as a joke. The public doesn’t value our discipline, but they do value fitness for health. Our students don’t value our courses, but they do want to play and have fun; and, many of the graduates of our college programs and our practitioners don’t value what we do, but they do want to coach because sports and winning teams are valued in our society. Thus we continue to see physical education programs eliminated and reduced. Yet, I argue on a daily basis that of all of the school subjects, physical education is the most important subject in the school, and that it can and should have the greatest impact on our students, schools, communities, and world. Because the student is involved physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally in our lessons, we have the opportunity to impact them authentically (their beliefs, behaviors, attitudes, values, etc.), which in turn can determine how students perceive themselves and interact with other students in other classes, on the playground, in the community, and in the world. Helping students develop a habit of exercise, and giving them the confidence and the feeling of competence that will keep them active is far more important than how highly skilled or fit they become in our classes.

I write in support of readers who last month suggested that university teacher-educators first need to better educate themselves. The university education provided in most HPER teacher education programs, and emphasized in most methods textbooks, identifies skills and fitness as our “unique” goals and suggests that we must be just like all of the other academic subjects and demand high levels of achievement in those two areas. In addition, because our discipline is based in the biological and physical sciences, we are encouraged to have cognitive outcomes that further serve to make us equal to the academic subjects. We have fought for academic status on these bases for decades, trying to become more and more like the academic subjects (i.e. demanding the same credit and the same grades, giving homework, advocating that only the highly skilled and highly fit are worthy of “A’s, and so on). Our focus on proving ourselves to be “academic” has led us to create teacher preparation programs that reflect these values.

The result is that our new teachers complete professional preparation programs and go into their first positions with disastrously unrealistic expectations - eager to teach skills and fitness and ready to assess them. When public school students make it clear that it really doesn't matter to them whether or not they can dribble a ball with their non-dominant hand, new teachers face a huge dilemma. Based upon my experience new physical educators have several options, and the choice they make often is a pivotal one in their careers.

• New teachers can hold the “party line” and continue with a program that professes that it is important for all students to attain a high level of skill in every activity in the curriculum (that’s what is graded and reflected in the grade). Frequently this results in their students perceiving physical education to be a joke with clearly absurd expectations, ones that seem inconsistent with the world as they know it. The students know that it just isn’t important to be in the 90th percentile in fitness and skills. Then, if their “C” in physical education keeps them off the honor roll, out of an honor society, or impacts future educational opportunities, it is no longer funny and they become resentful of the experience.
• Another option is to just "throw out the ball" or just play games (the “busy, happy, and good” option). Research tells us that this is a very popular choice. Secondary physical educators are well known for their non-teaching. Elementary physical educators resort more and more to “the game of the day” curriculum or increasingly offer “free choice days.” All of these practices contribute to the well-deserved reputation of physical education being a joke.
• Some new teachers get caught in the middle. They maintain their value for achieving high levels of fitness and skills, but then start to grade on “attitude” and “effort,” thereby going against what they were taught. This results in both the teacher and the subject being perceived as jokes because of the inconsistency between what is taught and what is graded, and because the students perceive that their grade really reflects how much teachers likes them.
• Other new physical educators begin the quest to find out what IS important about what we do. If achieving high levels of fitness and skills is NOT really important, then what is? Interestingly, most of our professional advocacy focuses on health-related physical fitness, and on the affective outcomes used to justify keeping sport in educational institutions. Here the valued outcomes are identified as character development, moral and ethical behavior, fair play, responsible group membership, teamwork, respect, responsibility and the like (not attitude and effort). The problem is that no one has really helped practitioners understand how to teach these things. Yet these things have always been highly valued by society and promoted by the profession. They are presumed to be attained automatically through participation in sport and physical education, and some of them may be.

We know for a fact that students have learned a lot of things through participation in sport (and physical education) that we are horrified about (for example, trash talk, taunting opponents and officials, making fun of the less skilled, bullying, anything that you can get by with is fair, and more). Clearly, many people have concluded that physical education is a joke based on these sorts of unintended outcomes. Unfortunately, practitioners who try to build their curriculums around the intended affective outcomes are often perceived to be just more of those “throw out the ball” teachers as they struggle to find a meaningful way to address such lofty, difficult to measure outcomes.

• Finally, another option is to leave the profession and many do exactly that. Counselors’ and principals’ offices are well populated with former physical education teachers. Is it surprising that these same principals frequently fail to be supportive of physical education?

Sadly, the point at which practitioners discover that what they were taught in college doesn’t quite work in their classes is precisely the point in their careers where their education has failed them, and where our profession continues to fail them. Most likely, somewhere in their undergraduate program they heard about the "education through the physical" versus the “education of the physical" dichotomy, but the implications were not made explicit. Little was done in designing meaningful lessons and curriculum. Prospective teachers were introduced to cooperative games, outdoor education, and “lifetime activities.” However connections between these activities and outcomes like positive attitudes, teamwork, and the like remained superficial. When they went to conventions and workshops they mostly encountered “new” games and equipment.

It is no wonder that much of our curriculum seems so superficial and disjointed, consisting of a succession of activities, few of which are encountered for long enough to develop any real skill and yet our students still continue to be graded on their skill level. They are also supposed to be graded on their knowledge of the rules (most of which never come into play in class, like length of a quarter, and rules related to legal and illegal substitutions and time outs), and on the dimensions of the court (Who cares? Who wouldn’t consult a rulebook when laying out a court or field?), and other trivia like who invented the game and in what year? Why is it surprising that the public doesn’t take us seriously!

When physical educators realize that some of the affective outcomes have importance beyond the game and the class, Hellison's responsibility model may occur to them, but they probably have little or no idea of how that translates into a curriculum and not just a another surface level lesson or two. For those who implement Hellison’s model, it’s often required to having students point at a spot on a chart listing the levels of responsibility on their way out of the room; but there’s little reflection, little examination of the implications, and probably little meaningful learning. Others attempt to teach sportsmanship and teamwork and respect by “talking with the class” as they are leaving the gym or changing their shoes; the students respond with rote answers like “teamwork” or “sportsmanship” the same way that they say “Jesus” as the answer to every question asked during the children’s sermon at church. The result: Physical education endures more derision instead of meaningful learning.

Years ago, I surveyed a random sample of Kansas secondary physical educators. They overwhelmingly identified affective goals as the ones they valued most highly; fitness was second, motor skills were third, and cognitive skills were last. Valuing fitness, desiring to attain and maintain the necessary level for good health was the agreed upon definition of fitness. The agreed upon priority for motor skills was that the students would feel competent enough to participate in the activities experienced. The goal “achieving a high level” for fitness and skills was ranked decidedly last. Clearly practitioners value skills and fitness, but they do not see a high level of achievement to be the goal. This is where there is a critical difference between physical education in practice and professional preparation. There is no disagreement about the necessity for all students to achieve a high level in the so-called academic subjects (reading, writing, and arithmetic). But these Kansas physical education practitioners clearly identified that the valuing of fitness and feeling competent were their most prized goals; and they ranked the affective goals as being a higher priority than fitness and motor skill goals for secondary level students.

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