Promote Physical Education By Making Connections

written by Tom Winiecki, Mott Road Elementary School, Fayetteville, NY

As a public school physical educator do you ever feel that you are the "best kept secret" around? Because what you do and what you offer children is so vitally important, do you find it hard to believe that no one really knows, or understands what you are really all about? Do you sometimes think to yourself, “If only they knew!”

Well, what are you waiting for? Why not let others know the importance of your physical education program? In fact if you want others to support your program and appreciate your teaching it’s vital to make time to become a PE promoter. But here's the key: you need to do it in the context of how you fit into what others are trying to do, whether they be kids, staff, parents, or school board members.

Too often, physical education is viewed as simply a scheduled break in a classroom teacher's day. Of course this is not the case everywhere. Thankfully there are people who understand the importance of PE and respect its place in the school’s curriculum. If you are already a part of one such building or district, congratulations! Your hard work promoting your program has been successful. Keep up the good work! Hopefully, this article will give you more ideas you can use to continue your PE promotion efforts.

For those of you not as fortunate to have reached this point yet, read on. Based on my elementary PE teaching experience, I’m going to try my best to give you some tips in promoting what you do on a daily basis to help you to gain the respect that you so richly deserve. And in my view, it all starts at the ground level, with our students and the relationships we develop with them.
PE teachers need to be clear as to how physical education fit into the district’s master plan. We often say that we want to educate students to the best of their abilities but what exactly does this mean? What are we preparing our students for? What skills do we want our students to leave with and how do we expect them to apply those skills?

Often we already know the answers but just haven’t recognized it. We know that our lessons and scaffolded curriculums are designed to make our students physically stronger, aerobically fitter, and more flexible. We teach to help our students to enjoy movement. We use a variety of physical activities to make them better movers. And we know the positive connection between fitness to academic achievement. We know that as our students become fitter their brains work more efficiently and effectively.
We all know these things and most of us teach them to our students. All of this is a given. But the real question is, do our students actually understand and internalize what they are learning from PE? Can they apply physical education experiences to their own lives? Are we prepared to give them a solid answer (show them relevance) when they ask, “Why do I have to do this?” or “I don’t like football, why do I need to know what a post pattern is?” PE teachers need to resist the temptation to say, “Because I said so,” or “Because it’s in the curriculum.” Our students deserve better answers than these.

Connect PE to Things Important to Students

We need answers that relate directly to each of our students. We all know that we have some kids that just love to be active. Connecting what we do is easy for them. They enjoy movement for movement’s sake. But we also have kids that will question most everything we cover. It’s easy to get frustrated by the constant barrage of questioning. “I don’t like this,” “why do we need to do this?” This list can go on and on. As annoying and frustrating as these can certainly be, the best way to deal with them is to have an appropriate answer to them that relates directly to the student. It’s up to us to make these connections for our kids, before we can expect them to make the connections for themselves.

We need to help them understand that being physically active has benefits beyond the gym or playing fields. PE helps their body to function better. Students can understand that bodies are like cars or bicycles. If we let them get run down they may still work but often not as well as we would like or need in order to do the things we want to do. The challenge arises when you try to get students to take this seriously. They are young and invincible. Taking care of themselves is not really important to them just yet. That’s why we need to put what we have for them into a context they can grab onto.

If they like playing outside with their friends, they now understand how being aerobic in physical education helps them when the weekend comes. It helps them to keep playing without getting tired and having to stop. Now, every time they stop to tell you that they are “so tired,” or “so sweaty,” you can respond by enthusiastically saying GOOD FOR YOU!! Get that message across that getting sweaty is a good thing. It’s not gross. Help them to understand that getting tired with you today will make them a bit stronger tomorrow. Ask them if any of them want to get stronger. When all of their hands go up, tell them “Good, you’re all in the right place!”

Connect With Students Through Concepts

The practicing that students do with you when learning to throw a ball correctly can apply (transfer) to so many other things that they like to do. They may not like football. That’s fine. They don’t have to be in love with everything you teach. As teachers we want them to eventually find something that they like to do on their own. Perhaps soccer is more appealing to them? If so, we just need to show them the connection between football and soccer skills. For example, consider the follow through. For students to get a football to go where they want it to go, they need to learn to follow through correctly toward their target. Once students understand this concept, they can apply it to kicking a soccer ball or striking pretty much any object. A follow through is a follow through, whether it is with their hand or their foot. The context may change, but the concept is the same.

What if students don’t like floor hockey but love basketball. “Control” can now be your connection between the two activities. Control with a hockey stick and puck is keeping the puck always within two steps of you, all while keeping your head up and looking where you are going. That concept can easily be applied to a basketball. Once they understand the concept, they can see that control for a basketball is bouncing it keeping it close in front of them, looking up to see where they are going. The same concept can also be applied to control with a soccer ball.

Connect to Students’ Daily Lives

All of the character education you do each day has meaning to your students’ lives as well. Instead of simply encouraging students to following classroom rules to show that they have good sportsmanship you can take it a step farther. There are many ways you can connect what happens in your classroom with their daily lives. For example, you can point out that helping someone up accidently knocked over in a PE activity, or giving some friendly help on a skill is a behavior worth doing outside of the classroom.

It’s vital to put these important life lessons it in a context students can relate to. How about inviting a friend to their house to play. Ask them, would they want to play with someone that helps them up if they fall or get hurt? Or would their Mom be happy if they invited a friend over to play that always wanted to be first and didn’t take turns? We know the “right” answers and your kids do too. But now, your emphasis in your PE class has a direct carryover to their lives at home. Yes, they want a friend who would help them and yes, they would want others to see them in this way so they get invited to someone else’s house to play. You’ll be pleasantly surprised and impressed how your kids take to this and internalize it.

Connect Physical Fitness and Brain Fitness

All that you already do and teach about fitness and its relationship to wellness, health, and learning goes right here! Physical educators have a tremendous amount to give to their students, their families and to the community in general. Your entire PE program should embrace current research that suggests the better one's fitness level is, the better one's test scores will be.
According to brain researchers, once someone reaches a moderate level of sustained physical activity (within a target heart rate range), neurogenesis takes place.

In other words, brain cells actually multiply, and the synapses between those cells both increase in number and efficiency. Sounds like a pretty good deal for all educators, not just us! While exercise is not a "magic pill" that will automatically make you smarter, exercise does appear to ready one's brain to assimilate information easier. Show people that your classes are designed to reach this targeted aerobic threshold. Again, you are not just holding your program to the district's standards and expectations; you are basing what you do on current research findings. A pretty good selling point, I would think.

Making this body-brain connection is an opportunity to show your students how you are readying their brains for the rest of the school day. You can make the connection between a morning physical education class and the chance to function at a higher level in academic classes later that morning. Physical education can now be viewed as "Miracle-Gro for the brain!"

If you are not already familiar with the source, I found this information about the brain and physical activity and the quote about "Miracle-Gro" in the book, SPARK, The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by Dr. John J. Ratey. Without sharing the book’s entire contents to you, it dramatically covers exercise's effects on learning, stress, anxiety, depression, attention deficit and other areas. It begins by describing a physical education program in Naperville Illinois and how the teachers there were able to expand the acceptance and importance of their program by making the connection between exercise and learning. SPARK is a must read for any physical educator.

Beyond that, just stressing what increased fitness does for brains and bodies can help students make this connection. It is no longer getting stronger for strength’s sake or getting more endurance just to be able to run longer. Instead it means more endurance that enables students to focus longer in a classroom without starting to doze off. Also, the increased circulation of oxygenated blood to their brain helps them learn more effectively. Students can understand this makes it is easier for them to learn their spelling words or math facts! Again, it’s something that students can really grab onto.

In summary, making connections between the movement focused activities we teach our students and other important aspects in their lives is an effective way to promote physical education and helps students, parents, teachers and school administrators and to appreciate the value of our programs and our teaching.

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