In this three-part series of articles on advocating for our profession, I explained why we need to advocate and I focused on the single most important audience you really must plan to advocate to – your school board. In this last article I want to get down to the difficult but key task of actually creating an effective advocacy message.
But first let me restate my three rules of advocacy because I’ll refer to these three rules as I explain how to develop an advocacy message:
Nine years ago while serving on the Board of Directors of NASPE, a high-school teacher asked me for “our position” on secondary online physical education (OLPE). This Southwest teacher was concerned about his school district’s hasty adoption of online learning. He wanted to know more about online learning but felt conflicted. As an award recipient for his effective teaching and service on behalf of the school, department, and state association he said, “I feel like I’m walking a tightrope.” At the time, NASPE had no official position. We realized one was needed! This was a tipping point. The wonders of the digital age and online learning were intersecting with school physical education. More than a few physical education programs and teachers were being asked to transition from traditional, face-to-face teaching, to online instruction.
Subsequently, NASPE published a position paper entitled Initial Guidelines for Online Physical Education (2007). The skinny was that “no published evidence of OLPE learning existed, that OLPE should meet national standards for learning, that a hybrid model was a reasonable instructional alternative until research was available, and that OLPE was an exciting and attractive – yet untested – alternative to delivering quality PE.” Later, NASPE published the paper Appropriate Use of Instructional Technology in PE (2009). Reasonably, NASPE advocated technology as “a tool for learning if used appropriately for instructional effectiveness…that it could supplement, but not substitute, for effective instruction.”
As long as school physical education survives or thrives (see Mike Metzler’s recent pelinks4u essay for thoughts on this), physical educators will always be concerned about what to teach and how to teach. Recently, the Shape of the Nation Report (SON, 2012) reported that 30 states now grant credit for online physical education, however, only 17 states require certified PE teachers. It made me wonder who teaches these courses in the other 13 states? Some futurists predict that by 2020 half of all secondary education courses will be delivered online. If true, before long many school physical educators will be challenged to walk this instructional tightrope.
Twenty-five years ago, the Assistant Commissioner of Education for New York State (L. Meno) asked all twenty-six content areas in New York public education (Math, English, Science, Social Studies, Music, Home Economics, Physical Education, and so on.), to justify their content area’s impact on “Adult Behavior.” In short, he was asking about the significance of each content area and why it was important to society. It was an interesting question. It forced us to question the impact and importance of physical education to ourselves and to society.
At the time, I was asked to chair the committee responsible for responding to the Commissioner’s request. It gave my colleagues and I a chance to reflect upon the impact of physical education on adult behaviors and to identify what was critically important about our content. Why should parents and community members be willing to continue to support New York state’s physical education requirement and be happy to fund it through their school tax dollars?
The question posed to us also assumes, and rightly so, that what we do in public school physical education with children has an impact on their behavior later as an adult. It made us think about the fact that when children have negative experiences in physical education it will likely result in negative feelings about physical education and physical activity as adults. Persistently scoring in the lower half of a fitness or skill test also risks negative outcomes. It seemed obvious to us in New York state that we had far too many parents and school administrators who after having negative experiences in physical education as children grew up unwilling to support the physical education as it currently existed.
After three years of meetings, member reviews, and lots of re-writes, the National Standards and Grade-level Outcomes for K – 12 Physical Education are available on the SHAPE America (AAHPERD) website. This document was the work of the NASPE Curriculum Framework Task Force, which was charged with creating a framework (not a curriculum) that included the revised national K – 12 standards and newly developed grade-level outcomes. Physical educators had expressed a need for grade-level outcomes, which would fill a gap they saw between the standards and curriculum development.
This gap existed because standards are intentionally written broadly to reflect what students should have learned at the end of their physical education programs. In contrast, curriculum development requires an understanding of what students should know and be able to do at various points along the way. By identifying what students should know and be able to do at each grade-level, the new outcomes are designed to provide the guideposts to achieving the standards and a physically educated (now “physically literate”) individual. The completed document serves as a framework for public school physical educators to use for instructional planning, as well as a tool for communicating with parents, administrators, and policy makers about what students should be learning in quality physical education programs.
The task force members included two university professors (Stevie Chepko and me), two practicing physical education teachers (Brad Rettig and Dan Persse), a Director of Physical Education (Georgi Roberts) and a retired teacher and well-known author (Shirley Holt-Hale). From the beginning we knew that creating a curriculum framework would not be a quick or easy project, but we were convinced it was an important one for the field and well worth our efforts. The great support we received from K-12 teachers, other discipline specialists, and AAHPERD reinforced our commitment to the project. In this essay I’d like to expand on the research and thinking that guided the task force in its work, and how with its focus on student learning, the standards and outcomes document can positively impact and strengthen the future of our profession.
It’s been seven years since I grieved – in writing – that our educational system focuses on test taking while completely disregarding the needs of the bodies taking the tests. Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed. Physical education is still an undervalued stepchild. Too many of those in charge of our schools believe that academic skills pave the way to productive lives, and that good things will come if we keep kids at their desks all day and ignore their need for movement and exercise.
I think that is schizophrenic thinking. Would these same people happily fail to oil the engine of their car? Of course not! Their car would soon stop working properly and the computer chips inside would become useless. We should think of the mind as the computer and the car the body. Neither one can be ignored if we expect everything to continue working just fine. It is so clear to me, yet too many people simply don’t get it.
I know we are all busy enough doing our jobs and have little free time or energy to battle physical education’s detractors, but it’s vital that we generate grassroots support for getting our kids’ hearts working vigorously daily. This simply won’t happen unless students are taught routines that develop good habits. We all see that kids are not going out to play as they once did. Instead, they go home to “talk” on Facebook, or play a computer game or watch a show on TV. If we want our children to move every day, we have to get physical education and physical activity back into the daily school schedule.
PE Teacher: Should our focus in physical education be on teaching skills or getting students physically active?
PE Philosopher: Yes
I recently listened to America’s PE and sport philosopher-laureate Scott Kretchmar and just as intended it made me think. To the delight of our diminishing but indispensible cadre of PE philosophers, the seemingly frustrating and unresolvable conundrum that physical education teachers face is in fact answerable: Well at least from a philosopher’s world view!
February is the month I like to focus on rope jumping skills with my elementary students and the unit culminates with a Jump Rope for Heart event. People will often ask me, “How can you do rope jumping for an entire month?” The answer to that is simple. With my physical education classes meeting only two times per week for all the grade levels (I have 1st through 5th grades), each child actually attends only six classes (and that’s if they’re not sick or on vacation!). More often than not, I find that six classes is insufficient for this unit as there is so much you can do with rope jumping!
As a general rule (modifications apply for the younger students who are just learning versus the older students who are more advanced), the first week is spent on individual jumping skills (two classes worth); the second week is for partner jumping one day and long jump ropes the next; the third week is jumping stations (two classes). Our Jump Rope for Heart event is scheduled after school the last day of the unit. Tying in the heart with the high level activity of jumping rope is a great way to get more in-depth about the heart and how we can keep our bodies healthy through moderate to vigorous exercise. In years past I have also done a heart obstacle course, which is also fun. There are many examples of how to do this. One such example can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FoucFF9lDo? (also shown below).
For the stations, I include a jumping obstacle course that includes broad jump, leaping, low vaulting, plyometrics, hopscotch, and timed zigzag skier jumps. Other station areas include pogo sticks & mini-trampolines, long jump ropes, and short jump ropes (the students can work on their Kangaroo Club sheets here -full description follows!). My unit begins with an overview of how the heart works and why exercise is good for us. If you are a Jump Rope for Heart coordinator you know that there are many terrific resources available in the coordinator kit. The American Heart Association has excellent DVD’s with many jump rope skills (individual, partner, and long jump rope) that come with your coordinator kit if you decide to do a Jump Rope for Heart event. You can just google “Jump Rope Skills” for a wealth of resources but here are a couple of websites that show images of tricks: