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That
was Then…This is Now:
Celebrating PETE’s
Past While Facing The Challenges In
Its Future
PLEASE
FEEL FREE TO VIEW THE ACCOMPANYING POWERPOINT
SLIDES WITH THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE,
OR JUST LISTEN!
[slide 47]
Even if most PETE professors do not
become directly engaged in the conduct
of P-12 programs, we will continue to
have our most traditional influence
on schools by preparing new teachers
for them. This brings us to the last,
and perhaps most important challenge
faced by the PETE professoriate today:
aligning the content knowledge, performance
skills, and PCK offered in our pre-service
programs with the public’s and
policy makers’ growing expectations
for P-12 PE - that it can be a major
force in teaching school-aged kids to
learn and maintain physically active,
healthy lifestyles. This is the almost
singular imperative for P-12 programs
today, and PETE needs to examine the
alignment of its core values and knowledge
to those learning outcomes.
[slide 48]
As Russ Pate told us last night, “The
future role of physical education will
depend on its ability to provide deliverable
outcomes that are consistent with society’s
needs and expectations.” Translated,
that means we need to have P-12 programs
that can address the health needs of
school-aged kids (as future adults),
and from that, PETEs need to prepare
teachers who can effectively offer programs
based on content and knowledge that
leads to increases in kids’ physical
activity and improvements in their health.
For decades we have used two primary
arguments for our contribution to the
preparation of new teachers who can
lead children and youth to adopt physically
active lifestyles. The first argument
says that we should prepare teachers
who can help their students to be skillful
movers. This argument claims that once
they are skilled, students will enjoy
movement more, and then be more likely
to be physically active outside of PE.
The second argument is that we should
prepare teachers who can offer curriculums
that feature many and different movement
forms. This argument claims that each
student will likely find something in
that array of games, sports, fitness,
dance, etc. that attracts them to become
regularly engaged in one or a few movement
forms on their own - again, outside
of PE time.
In turn, these arguments are used to
determine the content, skills and PCK
needed by new teachers, outlined in
the NASPE Standards for Beginning Teachers,
and promoted by PETE professors in their
programs. At best, these represent only
indirect ways for children and youth
to learn and maintain active, healthy
lifestyles; skill competence and movement
choices are necessary, but not sufficient
factors in the complex equation that
leads kids to become physically active
for a lifetime. By extension, then,
this represents necessary but not sufficient
content knowledge, skill performance,
and PCK for new and experienced PE teachers
who would attempt to teach their students
how to become physically active for
a lifetime.
[slide 49]
In an article published in the November
2009 issue of Journal of Physical Activity
and Health, Daryl Siedentop presented
a summary of the research on physical
education interventions that have shown
to be effective in promoting increases
in out-of-school PA and improvements
in health-related fitness measures.
The most successful interventions are:
comprehensive, long-term, structured
for high rates of MVPA, pursue targeted
health-related learning outcomes, have
a high “fun quotient,” promote
skill development as a motivational
mechanism, and provide sufficient amounts
of PA time during and after the school
day. And, they are led by the school’s
PE teachers.
We need to ask ourselves - if that’s
what it takes to effectively teach physically
active lifestyles to kids, how well
does the content, skill and PCK of pre-service
PETE programs align with that kind of
P-12 PE program? Our observation is
that we are almost totally mis-aligned
for that purpose.
[slide 50]
Nearly 20 years ago Jim Sallis and Thom
McKenzie coined the term “Health-related
PE” to describe the kinds of programs
that would be designed for those learning
outcomes; In early 2010, Thom solicited
suggestions from those who have adopted
the concept of health-Related PE to
now call it Health-Optimizing PE, which
more clearly reflects both the integrated
knowledge base and the ultimate learning
outcome for those kinds of physical
education programs. Dr. Housner and
I both endorse this new label.
[slide 51]
Writing with his colleague, Sean Bulger,
my absent co-presenter make a great
case that PETE programs ought to be
radically changed, so they can adequately
prepare “…Sport, Physical
Activity, & Fitness Education Specialists
(SPAFES) with a depth of expertise sufficient
to meet the expanding health, wellness,
and physical activity needs of schools
and communities.” Lynn tells me
that he and his other PETE colleagues
at WVU are a long way from seeing eye
to eye on this idea, but to their credit,
they are having a dialogue--which is
all we are advocating at this time.
Take comfort, the revolution is not
knocking at your front door, yet, but
it’s coming, and our prediction
is that it will have fully arrived by
the next NASPE PETE conference in 2012.
We are now learning about a National
Plan for Physical Activity, which is
now in development by a coalition of
prominent agencies. Once it hits the
streets in 2010, this plan will be widely
used to inform parts of public health
policy at the state and national levels,
including policies that will directly
affect the learning outcomes and content
of P-12 physical education programs.
We all need to be ready for questions
about how our PETE programs are aligned
with this plan and we should expect
to be criticized when the truth comes
out. As Russ Pate suggests, PETE faculty
are about to lose the freedom we’ve
enjoyed to design programs that suit
our many philosophical views and value
orientations; instead we will be held
accountable for delivering programs
based on the views and values of parents,
other taxpayers, and policy makers.
If you doubt that, take some time to
look at any one of the many pieces of
legislation in nearly every state that
would increase time in the school week
for physical education - every one of
those bills refer to PE as the delivery
mechanism for increasing kids’
physical activity, improving fitness,
and reducing obesity--not skill development,
not socialization, and not tactical
awareness.
[slide 52]
Faber, Kulinna, and Darst (2007) offer
us a good start on what the content,
skills, and PCK of Health-optimizing-PE
teacher education might look like. At
the teacher level, teachers would need
to know how to: cooperate with classroom
teachers and other school personnel;
integrate physical activity and health
knowledge across the entire school curriculum;
involve the community; find and use
available resources, such as those on
the internet; develop incentive programs
to promote out-of-school PA; design
and assess PA journal logs; and be positive
role models.
[slide 53]
At the school level teachers would need
to know how to do things like: design
and use age-appropriate playground equipment
and play spaces; introduce a variety
of activities in their curriculum; design
and lead before, during, and after school
extra-curricular programs that promote
PA; be effective promoters of PA; make
announcements about programs and successes;
plan PA-based family nights at school;
and work with the school’s food
service personnel to plan and provide
healthy food choices to children.
Again, if this is the kind of content,
skills, and PCK needed for effective
health-optimizing PE, we would encourage
every PETE faculty to begin to discuss
how closely their programs are designed,
implemented, and assessed to achieve
those outcomes. I’m among those
who will quickly admit that I don’t
know to get this done, but I do know
that every PETE faculty (including my
own) needs to be discussing this.
[slide 54]
After more than 40 years of making great
strides to evolve and mature as a community
of researchers and teacher educators,
we think it is time for PETE to continue
to evolve and mature, by doing again
what Hoffman and others asked for in
1971 - to find empirically-based and
field-tested ways to describe and promote
“Best Practice” in the design
of P-12 curriculums, teaching and learning,
teacher education, and teacher development
- only this time we think by bringing
those efforts to bear on the establishment
of health-optimizing physical education
for our schools.
Oddly enough, this effort has the ability
to re-unify our academic departments
with the need for interdisciplinary
and integrated new programs. Few, if
any, PETE professors have the expertise
to do this without the help of their
departmental colleagues in the disciplines
of health, sport, and exercise. Expect
resistance, but if money talks, you
can inform your colleagues that NIH
currently funds 1,100 grants with the
term ‘physical activity’
in them, and hundreds of foundations
are just itching to spend money in that
same way.
Even as we document the many successes
in PETE over the last 40 years or so,
we need to understand that our best
and most important work on behalf of
the school-age kids in this country
must be ahead of us, not behind us.
Maybe for the first time ever, PETE
is in a position to be a key part of
a solution, not a perceived part of
a problem.
[slide 55]
On behalf of Lynn and myself,
I again thank the 2009 NASPE Pete conference
organizing committee for this invitation,
and Steve Jeffries at pelinks4u
for giving us the opportunity to share
this with you.
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