Sink or Swim? How to Produce Annual Improvement

This year the USA Swimming National Championships were held the week of June 25 – 29 in Indianapolis, IN. Many swimmers, some more widely known than others, all put forth their finest effort to try and capture their best performance ever and a chance to compete on the US National Team at the World Championships.

Like many sports, in swimming you can have your top performance but still fall short of beating your opponents. However, you must reach a time standard in order to reach the National Championships in the first place. This established standard is a goal all swimmers can aspire to in their training, when they begin to understand how they measure up across the national swimming spectrum (I wish they had one of these standards for my drop shot). If indeed a swimmer is to consider him/herself an ‘elite’ swimmer, they should be able to set these time standards as goals, and work to improve their times annually in order to accomplish these goals at the peak of their swimming primes.

In 1999 USA Swimming initiated the Olympic Trials Project. This project was established because, “Continued success at the international level is one of the primary goals of USA Swimming. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the factors that relate to success in swimming. One means of learning about success is to study the characteristics or qualities of successful individuals; to profile our elite swimmers.”¹

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Physical Education or Recreation

My mom is a leopard, the kind that can’t change her spots. She lives in the moment, says what comes to her mind, and doesn’t look back. It’s history, over and done with. I am my father’s daughter, every sentence measured and every action reflected upon. My reflections often border on rumination, obsessing over the smallest misstatement for hours, days, or even years.

So this article is my latest rumination, more a sharing of questions than an article for information.

Recently, a colleague made a statement to the effect that the majority of physical education teachers are no more than recreation directors. My immediate, uncharacteristically, defensive response was, “I am not a recreation director.” Of course, later, I reflected on the moment and analyzed the statement.

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Preparing for the New School Year

The title of this article is one that could be deceiving until you understand what I mean, and how it should be food for thought. Preparation (for the new school year) should have started many years ago in the college years by acquiring pride in physical education, and the planning it took to become a teacher. As I regress, having retired in 2003, I can look back over many successful years and why they were successful. What made them so extraordinary?

 

 

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NFL Network Physical Education Teacher of the Year

I was fortunate enough to have been named the 2013 NFL Network Physical Education Teacher of the Year. The whole experience was something I will never forget! From filling out initial paperwork, to participating in a phone interview, to actually getting the phone call saying that I had been selected, was a memorable process.

It all started with writing some essays describing my teaching. Writing can be a bit of a hassle, especially in our profession. We don’t often think that there is a place for writing in our work. We are, after all, in the business of creating people that learn to enjoy how to move in ways that benefit them. We strive to teach in a way so that things can make more sense to our students. Just like any other subject, the more you understand the more you learn to enjoy it. By seeing the connections between activities clearly you develop a better understanding! On the surface, writing in class would seem to take away from our primary mission of teaching students to enjoy moving. But there may be a place for it.

One side note on writing. Our district has decided that writing is so important that it should be included in every subject. They describe it as “talking out of the tip of a pen.” To their credit, they did not dictate to us how often and how much writing each subject should include. They basically left it up to us. All they asked is that we look for the best place to include it. Where did it make the most sense to include writing? We were allowed to come up with those answers.

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A Dream for Physical Education

I write this preparing to fly to Singapore to attend the country’s biennial conference for physical education teachers. Smaller than most US states, Singapore’s education system is government coordinated and dedicated to sustaining the future needs of one of today’s most successful Asian nations. Supporting this mission, the country’s physical education leaders are focusing on creating effective school PE programs that will reverse the sedentary living trends threatening the nation’s health. It’s no easy task. Similar to the US, obesity is trending upwards in Singapore. And Singaporeans, like most nations worldwide, are seeking solutions.

 

For two reasons, as a physical educator I’m not inclined to take much responsibility for worsening obesity. Obesity’s tripling over the past 30 years has paralleled most of my professional career – a spectacularly unimpressive record that I’d prefer to ignore. But more importantly, physical educators simply don’t have much control over most of obesity’s causes. Reports of worsening obesity do however alarm me, because it is symptomatic of declining physical activity and physical activity is something that I do believe physical educators should be trying to promote.

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Summer: The Ultimate Planning Period

As children excitingly await the end of the school year and the beginning of summer, sometimes they forget that teachers look forward to a break, too! In addition to relaxation and a chance to reconnect with family and friend, summer can be the ultimate planning period for professional development as it allows brainstorming typically not possible during the workday. Some of that brainstorming, we believe, should include designing creative program extensions which serve as a way to showcase our programs to parents and colleagues.

 

Both authors also believe, unfortunately, that physical education teachers traditionally do a poor job of this when compared to our specialist brethren, art and music teachers. Annual elementary school field days held in the spring are one of the few times that physical educators extend their program into the entire school community. Art and music teachers, on the other hand, tend to extend their programs throughout the school year.

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Physical Education: Nothing Lasts Forever

Last month, I suggested that the newly created Let’s Move, Active Schools initiative offered physical educators a special, necessary, but time-limited chance to transform K-12 physical education. I’m optimistic that some teachers will respond to this challenge, but concerned that for far too many business will continue as usual. It worries me when colleagues assume that physical education’s future in public education is somehow guaranteed. It isn’t. Ask any of the dozens of teachers around the country whose programs and positions have been cut in the past few years.

Like most of us, those teachers assumed their jobs were secure until suddenly, and often with little warning, they found themselves victims of the current obsession to raise academic scores, or victims of budget cuts resulting from the economic recession. Too late and without much support they protested their relevance. Instead, they discovered that many education decision-makers neither appreciated nor valued physical education’s contribution to children’s education. Like switchboard operators, typists, milkmen, travel agents, elevator operators, and others in vanishing professions, these unfortunate physical educators learned that nothing lasts forever.

Physical educators are forever destined to be the victims of the decision-making whims of others unless we show more initiative in shaping our professional future. It was this desire that motivated the creators of NASPE’s PE2020 initiative that began in 2011 with a national forum at the San Diego national AAHPERD Convention. The resulting recommendations proposed a framework for futuristic thinking. Since then, some of the suggestions have contributed to a rethinking about where physical education should be headed.

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