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September 14, 2017

Reforming Physical Education: What's Next

As I've become more active on Twitter, I'm learning that there are a lot of people out there asking the right questions, but not a ton of people wither have the answer or are willing to provide it. What sparked my interest most recently was a shared tweet from Adam Lleva {@MrAdamPE} regarding an article titled School PE is Part of the Childhood Obesity Problem by Niall Moyna. Naturally from the title of the article, I was immediately defensive. Here's another "expert" who knows nothing about what physical education actually is, how we teach it, or why what we do matters. Against my better judgment, and mainly because Adam shared it, I decided to give it a read anyway. I'm glad I did because it raised some very important questions that I think have realistic and attainable answers.

Did you read the article? It starts off identifying what those of us in the physical education realm already know - our students are not meeting minimum requirements of physical activity to maintain health. We can relate this to a few factors, but one that the author names directly seems to have had the greatest impact - increased screen time. He cites a study from Irish Life Health indicating that 98 percent of parents admitted to their children having daily screen time of some kind. While this is the only direct link Moyna discusses, there are many other contributing factors to the rise in childhood obesity, most directly their nutritional intake. Processed foods and fast food are dominating the menu of busy working families. Combine this downward trend in food quality to increased sedentary time and we've got a caloric balance issue that is impact millions of children every day.

So what is the authors call for change? Start with the schools and how we're educating our students on healthy habits. Where do these changes happen? Health and physical education. He makes an argument I can support fully, "If our children were leaving school unable to perform basic mathematics, we would examine the mathematics curriculum without delay. Why, when too many of our children are leaving school overweight, unfit, and destined for a life of ill-health, are we not challenging what they are being taught in PE?"

Niall, I've got a few of those answers to that question. First, it's a great question and the answers are going to be frustrating to read for those of us who know why reform needs to happen (and why it hasn't happened yet).

  1. Education and training for professionals in the field. Colleges and universities across the US are cutting their teacher training programs for health and physical education. Departments are closing and often being forced to move to smaller schools and communities. In Richmond, VA - Virginia Commonwealth closed their health and physical education training program simply because the department chair was retiring and they could find no one to fill it. Two years later, that same program is now up and running again thanks to some very passionate advisers and educators. Additionally, many professionals are trained to teach using the sports-based model. We love team sports, great! The switch, however, needs to be made to a skills-based model of teaching. Simply put, instead of teaching football for two weeks and limiting our students to one sport, one ball, and one version of a throwing mechanic, we should transition to a throwing unit where students can experience multiple games, sports, and activities using throwing technique. I'll be writing another blog post down the road about the benefits of the skill-based model so stay tuned! This is very simply put as the benefits of the skills-based model are enormous, but for the sake of this post, I'll leave it at that.
  2. School districts across the US are cutting physical education time or cutting programs all together. Most elementary students receive PE once a week and one 15-20 minute recess a day. Secondary students are mostly receiving physical education every other day, but wait... they also take health. Some schools function on a semester style system that has students in physical education for the one semester and health for another. Other schools function on a rotation schedule between health one week and physical education the next or a two week switching pattern. In my current school, sixth and seventh grade students have HPE every other day for 90 minutes, but every two weeks they are in health for those 90 minute class periods. We know that our health curriculum is just as important as our physical education curriculum... do you see the conundrum yet? Many teachers, especially at the elementary level, have adapted to teaching health concepts with physical education concepts in the gym. I have seen brilliant methods designed by educators who smoothly convince third graders that their soccer balls are red blood cells moving through their veins and arteries, while the playground balls are white blood cells that defend the body from diseases, while the taggers are viruses trying to infiltrate the body. Brilliant, right? Sadly, not all educators are this creative. More educators need to invest in professional development opportunities, but that's easier said than done given how expensive conferences can be, especially if you have children of your own. Reforming the curriculum is a great idea, but what good does it do if programs are continuing to be cut?
  3. Programs are being cut for many reasons and I believe that people don't know exactly what we do as physical educators. The most important question I have is this... How can we convince districts to invest the man power and money needed to have proper curriculum reform when we can't get them to respect what we teach? Secondly, once we've convinced our districts to change, how can we then move reform up to the state level? These are the tough questions and the only answer I have is advocacy. We have to be advocates for what we teach every single day, in every single class, outside of school, when communicating with parents, when interacting with other educators, when interacting with peers... I could make this list go on endlessly. We have to advocate our purpose and why our subject is valuable 24/7. We have to stop tying in why we're valuable to other subjects while we're at it. Do you think math teachers justify their importance by how their subject helps English? No! So why are we!? Yes, increased physical activity improves academic performance, but that one fact does not define our purpose or what we do! Physical education and health education are important subjects on their own. We don't need to justify what we do by how it impacts other subjects. I bought into the idea for the longest time that the impact physical activity has on academic performance was the game changer in justifying physical education in schools. I listened to a life changing speech at the Virginia Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance in November 2016 by the keynote speaker, Dr. John Almarode, from James Madison University. My favorite quote from the amazing keynote was something to the effect of, "Why are you saying that your class benefits students in math? What if they have a bad math teacher? Do you want to be responsible for that outcome?" MIND BLOWN. Of course I don't want to be responsible for that. He then talked to us about how to appropriately advocate for what we do because what we do is valuable. We have some of the biggest impact on students life outcomes. Health and wellness is knowledge they will need for the rest of their lives. What we do matters and we can get people to listen to us and invest in us by advocating appropriately.
  4. We have little to no control over what our students do outside of school. This is the primary factor as to why physical education, no matter how amazing, simply will never be enough to end childhood obesity. We can't control what our students parents allow them to do outside of school. We can teach them to be competent in every activity known to man, we can teach them how to eat well, we can teach them life skills, we can teach them until we are blue in the face... But until parents and families decide to make changes in their lifestyles, habits won't change. I can get a kid moving for 90 minutes every other day. I can't change the fact that when the same child goes home, he's allowed to eat whatever junk food he wants while he sits and plays video games all night. We've all heard the colloquial phrase, "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink." If mom and dad are still feeding them pizza every night or stopping at McDonald's four times a week, I can't fix that. I had a student once who brought 24 chicken wings for lunch every single day. When it came time for PE, he wanted to move, he wanted to play! He was a great kid and the type of student who was willing to try anything, but he could not overcome his diet and his lifestyle at home. Nothing I did could possible change that. It's an issue with the way society and culture have changed. Despite this inhibiting factor, you can bet that I will keep teaching until I'm blue in the face because hopefully one day, enough of these students will have learned the right way to be active and the right way to eat and there will be a cultural shift. That is the ultimate goal!
I am very fortunate to teach in Virginia. We have some of the best schools in the country and our learning standards (known as SOLs) are better than most. I'm also fortunate to be part of the curriculum team for my county. Is our curriculum perfect? Of course not, but it's definitely better than it was two years ago! Even if the curriculum wasn't perfect, there are always going to be educators (in any subject area) who intentionally or unintentionally don't follow the curriculum. Some of our own are perpetuating the "old PE" methodology in class and it hurts those of us attempting to move the profession forward.

Many counties throughout the country struggle with change. Prior to teaching in my home state, I taught in North Carolina for two years where the standards were very different. Thankfully, due to working for a charter school, I was able to have some flexibility in what I was teaching. Being a first year teacher, I had the opportunity to create my own curriculum for both health and physical education. I had an executive director who went to school for health and physical education and was incredibly supportive of my program. Small town politics got in the way and when he left, the new director did not hold the same value for health and PE. Our program suffered and I began hitting a constant wall of "No's" for things as simple as consistently teaching a health curriculum that had been previously approved.

While I agree with what the author, Niall, is saying, I don't think curriculum reform is the only piece to the puzzle. In fact, I think there are many other obstacles that need to be tackled in order to make solid, attainable curriculum reform possible. As physical educators, we can be the vehicles of the change we wish to see. The road won't be easy and it won't be pretty, but think of the change we could make if we try? In order to see these goals come to fruition, we have to start giving our all to our programs.

What to hear more? Join the discussion on Twitter @jessbaylissPE

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