If you asked a lot of people, they would tell you physical education wasn’t the highlight of their day. One University professor is looking to change that.
LSU kinesiology adjunct instructor and Chair of the Louisiana Physical Education Standards Committee Kathy Hill both helped write new physical education standards and joined other educators to hold workshops to teach K-12 teachers how to implement them.
“Our aim is to teach young people about being fit individuals,” Hill said in a press release. “We’re not talking about marathon runners, but someone who can go through the daily routine of their lives without being exhausted, overweight or having high blood pressure.”
After coming up with the guidelines, Hill and the committee decided that simply writing them was not enough.
“When we finished the writing, we all kind of looked at each other like ‘Now what?’ and we decided we couldn’t let it just lay,” Hill said. “We embarked on this notion that we were going to get out and train as many teachers as we can, bring them to the table, and let them see the new standards and see how they can start implementing them in their classrooms.
Hill and the committee held workshops in 13 parishes and taught the new standards to over 1,000 physical education teachers.
Two other members of the LSU community, pedagogy doctoral student Kelly Simonton and instructor K-Lynn McKey, were invited by and served on the committee with Hill.
“When Kathy asks you to do something, you don’t say no,” McKey said. “Being at LSU, which is obviously our flagship university, we thought we needed to have a hand in it. All the meetings were primarily in Baton Rouge, so it was important that LSU’s name be a part of it.”
Hill said the committee drew ideas from the examples of other states when writing the new standards.
“At that first meeting, we looked at probably 15 states, and we kind of zeroed in on three or four states that we thought had something we could live with and were easy to read and easy to implement,” Hill said. “We didn’t want a really tough document like we had before. It was huge. We wanted to streamline it and make it more user-friendly.”
One change proposed through the workshops was to get students active as soon as they got to class.
“A traditional P.E. would be a warm-up: run laps and do push-ups and sit-ups,” Simonton said. “This doesn’t translate to a lot of activity, and doesn’t translate to people enjoying what they’re doing or meeting the standards, unless it’s the fitness standard, which is only one of our five.”
According to a draft of the new standards, rather than focus purely on fitness, the new standards aim to make students “physically literate.” Fitness is a part of this, but the standards also aim to teach students skills needed to perform physical activities, know the implications of those activities, participate in them regularly, and value physical activity and its contributions to a healthy lifestyle.
The new standards also encourage teachers to teach their students more about strategies for games rather than focus on specific skills.
“With traditional P.E., we teach passing one day; we teach dribbling another day; we teach shooting on the third day, and then days four and five we’re playing a game,” McKey said. “I haven’t taught offense, I haven’t taught defense, I haven’t taught strategies. We can teach games and they can practice those skills, but it’s not sport.”
Simonton compared physical education to math saying students wouldn’t learn anything if their teachers asked them to solve problems that they never truly understood.
The committee also discussed dodgeball and its implications.
“Our biggest thing was elimination games,” McKey said. “The kid that needs the most practice with throwing and catching is typically the kid that gets eliminated first. What is the point of that? It goes back to math. If you do one problem and get eliminated then you don’t get to do math anymore. You’re never going to learn.”
The workshops also showed teachers what a physical education class should look like. Younger children should be learning basic skills and start learning strategies and playing games in middle school. By high school, students should be learning to do more complex things like set personal fitness goals.
Undergraduate teacher education program instructors K-Lynn McKey and Kelly Simonton run through the routine of their physical education workshop on Wednesday, Feb. 7, 2018 on LSU Campus. They conducted a series of workshops to educate K-12 teachers in East Baton Rouge Parish in August.
