What Should We be Doing in Physical
Education?
By George
Goss, McKenna Elementary, WA (home
page)
After
many years as a physical educator, I've learned that three
key ingredients have to combine for students to successfully
learn athletic skills or improve their physical abilities;
potential, effort, and opportunities. Eliminating or limiting
any of these parts drastically reduces a student's chances
of success. Even more importantly, I've also learned that
as a teacher I can most directly influence the creation of
learning opportunities.
Potential involves a combination of genetic factors, environment,
and prior experience with the skill being attempted. For example,
it's likely that a student who is shorter will find it difficult
to out-rebound a taller player. People who tend to be better
jumping hurdles have longer legs and gymnasts tend to be shorter
and muscular. When it comes to environment and prior experience,
if I have students who have spent time at softball tournaments
watching parents and siblings play, they tend to have greater
know-how and aptitude when it comes to swinging bats versus
peers who have never held a bat or seen a game.
We also know from research that there tends to be a transfer
of skill between certain types of activities. Doing activities
that have similar elements to previously learned skills affects
how one performs. Students in my classes that pick up unicycling
the quickest tend to be skateboarders first, horseback riders
second, gymnasts third, followed by everyone else. In all
likelihood, they learned faster because of their prior involvement
in balance oriented sports. Being familiar with the environment,
like surfers living near the ocean or skiers in the mountains,
influences people's potential to achieve. A Sherpa used to
living at a higher altitude has a body better prepared to
climb higher on Mount Everest. Clearly, physical educators
and coaches have very little control over genetic and experiential
factors such as these that affect a student's performance
potential.
Success is also dependent upon adequate effort. Although
as physical educators we can and should do our best to motivate
our students. I believe that effort has to come from within
the person attempting a skill. If I were to drag somebody
up Mount Rainier, I didn't help them to become a better climber.
I can try to motivate students with praise, incentives, positive,
corrective, or negative feedback, but ultimately students
mostly control their effort and willingness to persist when
facing learning challenges.
What all this means to me is that the way in which I can
best contribute to student learning is to focus on creating
appropriate learning opportunities. As a physical education
teacher of 13 years and a coach for 18 years, I've tried to
give students extra practice chances, and use more and varied
equipment, different teaching approaches and various activities
to improve their chances to succeed. This is at the core of
the business I am in: I want my students learn, understand,
and improve their performance in a wide variety of skills
so they have many physical activity options to pursue beyond
school.
Think about your own skill set. As an adult, what you can
or cannot do probably depends a lot on your physical build
and the environment in which you grew up. I'm convinced that
my primary jobs as a physical educator is to figure out ways
to maximize learning opportunities and give all of my students
tastes of success that will spur them on to becoming physically
active for a lifetime.
I know that not all of my students will do every activity
I teach beyond school. Nobody does. Who could have enough
time, financial resources, and physical ability to do everything!
I see physical education similar to a shopping mall. People
don't go into every store. They go into the ones that interest
them the most. Consequently, I teach multiple units to elementary
students to offer opportunities to those who enjoy team and
individual activities. When they are in my class, my main
concern is that they get many chances to do the skill correctly.
I believe these experiences will help motivate them to continue
doing these skills later. That is the strength of my program.
I want them to feel successful enough to pursue the activity
further and hopefully at a higher level. That's about the
most I will influence their amount of effort. As far as impacting
their potential, I've found that having a classroom environment
that is exciting, dynamic, organized, and uses different instructional
strategies has the highest impact on student success.
Today, the public school education system is requiring more
assessments of student learning. This has both good and bad
consequences for physical education. Assessments are beneficial
for teachers to see how students are progressing or for identifying
students needing extra assistance. Done correctly, assessments
can also help motivate students by helping them to understand
where they need to improve.
But putting too much time or resources into assessments rather
than instructional equipment and decreasing activity time
seems to me to be counterproductive. Here are the facts: Out
of 180 days of school, my students have an average of 55 days
of PE. In that time, I've elected to teach cooperative games,
racquet sports, volleyball, unicycling, juggling, diabolos,
bowling, hockey, jump roping, dance, basketball, tumbling,
golf, soccer, softball, Frisbee, and fitness assessments.
Recently, I've cut down the time spent on fitness assessments
because I felt I was measuring their genetics more than how
my activities were affecting their fitness. I saw the biggest
improvements in fitness levels over the summer. It's probably
from playing outside for two and a half months instead of
sitting in a desk or slowly walking down hallways. Our fitness
tests cover curl ups, pushups, shuttle run, PACER, broad jump,
vertical jump, 40 yard dash and sit and reach. These can take
3 days to assess. If we do this twice a year, it takes away
over 10% of the curriculum time. Instead, I try to keep skill
tests to a quick spot check to see where they are at, but
mostly I try to focus my time on giving feedback and keeping
people on task. I use peer and self assessments with several
skills to free me up for teaching more skills.
When I think about my own elementary PE experience, I couldn't
tell you what my batting average was or how many goals I made
in hockey or soccer. I can tell you that I enjoyed playing
with my friends, was given opportunities for swimming, flag
football, basketball, relay races and more, and learned lots
of skills. We didn't have a single written test or piece of
paper to show us how athletic we were or were not. Now it
seems that not only am I the physical education teacher, but
I'm expected to incorporate math, reading, and writing into
my subject. When I do this my 55 days of activities dwindles
and yet expectations for my program to succeed increase. It
just doesn't make sense.
Here's an analogy. When you go to a professional basketball
game there are many people working to make that event happen.
There is a head coach, assistant coaches, players, trainers,
equipment managers, referees, cheerleaders, team owners and
commentators. Behind the scenes there are statisticians, photographers,
TV analysts, camera crew, music DJ, event coordinators, food
and merchandise vendors, tickets salesmen, agents, security
people and someone running the scoreboard and clock. There
are more people involved but you get my point.
As a physical education teacher, I am the head coach of my class but I'm increasingly being expected to be a statistician, referee, commentator, cheerleader, event coordinator, equipment management, trainer, security, clock manager, etc. It's simply not realistic to add math teacher, reading and writing instructor or any other subject to my instructional plate in the future. I wouldn't expect a classroom teacher to also teach the motor skills I focus on during my instruction time. For us to succeed in our mission of preparing young people with the skills and knowledge they need to lead physically active lifestyles, the focus of physical education must be on facilitating a wide variety of motor skill experiences in the limited instructional time we have available.
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