Author: Lynn Hefele

What I Learned During Recess Today

I would like to share an incident that occurred while I was teaching the other day. At the time, I found the actions of one of my students to be unconscionable. Now, as I look back, I consider the incident both comical and pivotal.

It was a beautiful fall day, 65 degrees, clear with no wind, so we decided to take our classes outdoors. While I love being outdoors, teaching outside at my school does not provide for the best learning environment. The outdoor space consists of a grassy area the size of a soccer field, a small blacktop, and a playground. Therefore, during the lunch periods we are competing with the myriad of distractions that come with seventy-five children at play.

We were working on kicking a stationary ball, so we chose to kick a football off a tee. We used dynamic football warm-ups to begin the class. These warm-ups consisted of agility courses in which the students had to jump small cones, run through hoops, and zigzag through larger cones. Between the kicking stations and the warm-up, we set up 72 cones and 40 hoops. It took nearly a half hour to precisely line up all the cones and arrange all the colorful hoops.

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The Geometric Shape of Physical Education

I just returned from a successful weekend road trip. I say successful because of the 5 hours that I personally drove; I only missed one exit, resulting in a short 10-minute detour from our destination. For those of you who know me this is a huge accomplishment. In recent years, I rarely make it to a destination without multiple U-turns. The worst was when my husband woke from a nap in the passenger’s seat to find that I had traveled three quarters of the way around the Washington D.C. loop and was heading back north on our trip from New York to North Carolina! I emphatically insist that if the co-pilot stayed awake during the entire trip these things wouldn’t happen. But the truth is that once I get on the highway and point my wheels between the dotted white lines, the driver in me goes on autopilot and my mind travels elsewhere toward solving the problems of the world.

Okay, maybe I am exaggerating. Truthfully, I could be thinking about grocery shopping, my next bulletin board, or our new puppy, but over the last 2 years I have also had a recurring philosophical debate with myself – “What geometric shape best represents physical education in today’s society?”

This internal discussion began after reading Knowledge/Skills and Physical Activity: Two Different Coins, or Two Sides of the Same Coin? (Blankenship, 2013). In it, Bonnie questions the direction of physical education. She refers to physical education and physical activity as being two sides of the same coin. The image of physical education as a coin with two sides got me thinking about my beloved Springfield College Triangle and the Humanics Philosophy.

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Practicing skills is like eating kale – It needs something more

Personally, I like kale, though I haven’t always enjoyed it. Likewise, while I could eat kale plain, I prefer it sauteed in garlic and olive oil or better yet, blended with bananas and strawberries in a smoothie! Practicing skills is the same to me. I have always loved to move but I definitely needed competition, challenge, or socialization to make it palatable for me in my younger years.

Over the past year, I have noticed a recurring theme at conferences: the role of games in physical education. Here is my take on the topic.

Literature Enhanced Physical Education

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Taking the “LEPE” into Literature Enhanced Physical Education

Like many elementary school physical education teachers, early in my career I began creating an imaginary world in which my students could practice their skills.  Many of the activities simply changed themes as Disney changed heroes and heroines.  The beauty and brilliance of motivating students through their imagination is that when young children are pretending, they aren’t embarrassed, intimidated, or fearful of failure because they have lost themselves in the characters and setting of their imaginary world.  All students – big, small, heavy or tall will move with purpose when they become Ninja Turtles, Power Rangers, dinosaurs or Spongebob.

About ten years into teaching, I found myself entertaining the students with a descriptive fictional scenario of the activity they were about to engage in when it dawned on me that there could be more to the story than just the opening scene.  I realized that pushing my curriculum into the lives of Hollywood cartoon characters was a backward approach.  Developing unique characters and a fantasy world to fit my curricular needs would be more educationally sound.  A full-length screenplay could do more than just motivate students to move; it could educate students on how to move.  By taking each unit and developing a storyline to fit the skills and strategies the students needed to learn, the philosophy of Literature Enhanced Physical Education (LEPE) was born.

It has been five years since the first teacher resource, Clean Up Your Backyard was published.  In those early years, LEPE struggled to find a place in the physical education community. The idea of reading in the gymnasium seemed irreverent to many and I struggled to get people to appreciate my philosophy.  Then…along came the Common Core State Standards and many in the PE world decided to take a look at this new teaching tool.  While the intentions of LEPE are to motivate and educate children in physical education, LEPE stories have the ability to meet any number of Common Core Standards for Listen and Speaking, Literature, and Informational Text.

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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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What are we Learning in PE today?

“What are we playing in gym today?” is in all likelihood the first question asked every day by every class in every gymnasium across the country and possibly the entire world. It may be an overly simplistic answer to the lack of respect for our content area, but conditioning students to ask, “What are we learning in PE today?” instead of “What are we playing in gym today?” would mark a small step toward educating the next generation about the merits of physical education.

However, it then becomes incumbent upon us to be able to provide an answer to this new and improved question, each and every time a student enters our classroom. Our classroom, the gymnasium, while different in size and equipment, needs to look, feel, and operate like a learning environment. Allowing the educational hierarchy to view us as different, and more often than not as less important, guarantees that we will continue to remain educationally second-class despite the rising need for PE.

So what would it look like if we operated like a typical academic classroom, yet still stayed true to the physicality of our domain?

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Marketing Physical Education

Think about your favorite restaurant. What is it about that particular restaurant that makes it your favorite? Chances are it is the combination of quality products, good service, and a great atmosphere that keeps you coming back for more. If any one of these three areas were below standard would you return? You’d probably think twice before recommending the restaurant to your friends.

Now think about your physical education program. Your students may or may not have a choice whether or not to frequent your classroom, but if you are trying to promote your program, then satisfying customers should be your first order of business.

First, take a look at your product. Do you have a quality physical education program that has a variety of skills on the menu? Although students often seem to prefer to play certain games, remember that they only know what they have experienced. Varying your content and using a variety of strategies, technology and also differentiating the instruction will keep students from getting bored and will motivate them to move with purpose. Furthermore, students who find your classes intellectually as well as physically challenging will be more likely to talk about, “What they did in PE today,” to their parents.

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