Psychological Skills Training: Mental Rehearsal, Phase II1

Continuing our Psychological Skills Training series in pelinks4u, this month’s article is the second in a two-part series on Mental Rehearsal (1st part December 2013). Today’s article combines previously learned skills that can be accessed from the pelinks4u archives (links below). A coach’s script and a handout for athletes to use when practicing at home are provided.

Psychological Skills Training series: previous issues

  1. Training Your Athletes to be Mentally Tough
  2. Mental Training Tools
  3. Goal Setting and Self-Confidence
  4. Imagery
  5. Relaxation and Energization
  6. Self-Talk Skills
  7. Energy Management
  8. Stress Management Skills
  9. Breathing Easy Drill
  10. Staying on the Ball Drill
  11. Mental Rehearsal, Phase I

Coach’s Script for Mental Rehearsal: Phase II

Bring to practice: Coach’s script, copies of the athlete’s handout, balls or other items connected with your sport, pencils or pens, dry board markers or chalk.

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Improve Your Coaching Health: Developing a Structured Format for a Year-End Assessment

Imagine that your team has just finished a dismal season having shown few signs of progress. Or perhaps the feedback in your community has been overly negative about your program. Alternatively, maybe your program is winning but you want to take it to a higher level of performance. As coach, what can you do to initiate significant change in a positive direction? What would your plan for improvement and change look like?

Even if your program is currently successful, what follows below are a series of suggestions for coaches designed to improve programs and nurture coaching health. These suggestions offer a unique, structured and proactive approach that is coach initiated and will result in a self-generated improvement plan. Also attached to this article are four sample tools you can use to gather data. You can adapt these Excel formatted tools to suit your needs.

Common sense tells me that any good coach already has a general or formative idea of what makes his or her team good or bad, what caused every loss, and what led to every win. In this article I’m going to present you with a structured approach that will give you a summative program assessment with specific, supportive data as to why your team won or lost games.

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Nutrition in the Gymnasium

Recently my wife, Kelly Strong, lost an elementary level health educator in her district. Losing this important resource made the district examine what it could do within the physical education curriculum to meet this need. The elementary physical educators created a committee to develop nutrition lessons they could integrate into PE classes. They met and looked at the current elementary health education lessons and modified them to be applicable to physical education settings. As you know, eating right contributes significantly to our health. What follows are some examples of the lessons the teachers developed to teach nutrition. They illustrate some of the many ways physical and health educators could collaborate to integrate curriculum in a more meaningful way for their students.

Lesson 1: Fruits and Veggies (k-2)

Student Learning Outcomes – At the end of this lesson the students will be able to: 1) identify fruits and vegetables, 2) connect fruits and vegetables to their appropriate sections on “MyPlate,” and 3) understand how many servings are suggested per day.

Introduction – Have the kids brainstorm a list of fruits and veggies on chart paper, “Which ones grow on trees/vines?” “Which ones grow in the ground?” (some kids actually think fruit snacks are a fruit!). Show the MyPlate website (or applicable hard copy materials) and explain that fruits will be red and veggies will be green during today’s lesson.

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Advocating for Our Profession: Crafting Your Message (Part 3)

part 1 | part 2

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:

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Secondary Online Physical Education: Walking a Tightrope

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.

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Adult Behaviors Should Guide Physical Education

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.

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It’s all about Student Learning! National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K – 12 Physical Education

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.

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