I think I need to start tonight’s blog off with correcting
the title of my last blog….clearly I was TOO stressed to catch the mistake that
I forgot to put two o’s in the TOO of TOO stressed. And the work still
continues. I’m very glad that this will be the last blog: just one more thing
to cross off the list and not worry about any more! To be perfectly honest
though, I don’t really know what to write this final blog on. After so many
posts this semester I seem to be running out of ideas. So instead of writing
about what we read about in this weeks chapter (of which there wasn’t one), I
am going to end these blogs posts with a few thoughts about our assignments,
and how it connects to my life and the big idea that I’ve gotten out of this
course.
To start off, I’m going to discuss the topic that my group
chose for our genius hour, something that was a very important topic to all of
us, and something that I think relates to a lot of what we’ve been learning
about in the course. Actually, that’s probably all I’m going to talk about
because I have so much to say about it! The major idea that I have gotten out
of this class is simply about 21st century learning; that we need to
bring our classes and teachers out of the rut everyone is in and into the 21st
to make learning more relevant and effective. That’s the “big picture” that I’ve
seen permeate throughout this course. However, I think that this can be interpreted
in many ways besides simply creating an integrated curriculum, or bringing
technology into the classroom: there are countless opportunities to make
classes more applicable to students lives, and actually relevant for them to
participate in.
This all comes back to what my group did for our genius hour
project. Being in phys ed, there are often a lot of negative connotations
around it being a joke, or a class that doesn’t matter. However, what most people
don’t realise is that the goal of physical education (to create people who are lifelong
movers, or “active for life”) is a very important part to creating individuals
who are healthy and successful outside of school. This is something that should
be permeating throughout all of the rest of school classes: healthy individuals
who are active can actually better learn through other courses. This comes back to integrating classes
together; I don’t think an integrated curriculum just means that you have to
teacher three subjects in one assignment per say, but if we can even bring them
back to relate to each other, so students can transfer learning from class to
class, each subject becomes more relatable for students.
Speaking of relatable, when people see physical education as
an insignificant “easy” credit, they are missing the importance of the course.
And I think this is where we need to change the way we approach the curriculum
to bring it into people’s everyday lives. As we discussed in the genius hour,
the “typical” education class benefits really only one type of individual: the
one who is “good” at sports. These students tend to thrive in the typical
curriculum/set up of a phys ed classroom, whereas those who aren’t as good at the
“classic” sports get frustrated and stop taking it. This is completely against
the objective of creating lifelong movers, because when they drop out of
physical education, students often tend to get frustrated about movement and
general. This is because in the 21st century this old school gym
class is no longer meaningful to many students, which means it is no longer
effective. So, bringing classrooms into the 21st century isn’t just
about technology, especially since this isn’t necessarily an asset that can
always be used. It also isn’t just about integrating the subjects. There are so
many different ways that this can be accomplished, all with the goals of making
physical education applicable. You could create a more global focused
curriculum through bringing in different games from around the world (like
sepak takraw, or bocce ball: see the article I used for my wiki contribution on
different global games to bring into the classroom, Gross, M. K., & Burchanan, A.M. (2011). Integrating
Global Games in the Elementary Physical Education Curriculum. Strategies,
25(1), 8-12., http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/08924562.2011.10592126).
You could give daily strategies or activities that are easy to incorporate into
students busy lifestyles. Instead of teaching different formal games, you could
use the TGFU (teaching games for understanding) model to make the course more
relevant to students who simply don’t care about knowing how to perfectly play
basketball, soccer, volleyball etc.
http://www.iphys-ed.com/inquiry-in-pe/category/tgfu
There
are so many different ways to make the class more relevant and bring phys ed
into the 21st century I’m sure these ideas hardly even touch on the
opportunities that are out there. Anything that can make classes more important
in the everyday lives of students (by bringing the course material into the 21st
century) can only be more beneficial to the students.
An article I found discusses the importance of making
physical activity more important, as it affects so many other parts of academic
life: even increasing test scores. However, far beyond the importance of test
scores is something that has come up again and again in my blogs, and that is
one of the main challenges facing phys ed: how grade obsessed we have become.
Now I’m not saying that I have the solution to this problem, I really do not
know how to combat it. But if we find a way to make phys ed relevant beyond
that of simple grades, maybe we will see more students remaining active
throughout their everyday lives, and continuing on with physical education
classes.
With these improvements, brining physical education into the
21st century, we can hopefully create students who are ACTIVE FOR
LIFE.
As a final thought in this final blog post, I would like to
leave you all with a message that could hopefully make physical activity more
relevant in your lives today, despite any issues with your previous experiences
through physical education. Physical education isn’t just about running circles
in a gym, or going to work out, or even playing a sport. I mean hey, if that is
what you enjoy go for it! But for those of you who don’t, don’t get
discouraged. Being active is about so much more than these typical ideas. If
you like music, dance around your house! Only have 20 minutes a day? Do an ab
workout while watching TV. Take a class on a new game you've heard about, or
something that interests you that maybe you saw in the Olympics. Physical
activity doesn’t have to be difficult, or boring. Find something in your life
that interests you, and find a way to incorporate physical activity into your
daily life, so you can become ACTIVE FOR LIFE.
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