Greetings! As we head through autumn, I have shared some of my ideas for promoting programs, setting up fields, and assessing effort in physical education. I hope you find something here useful. Don’t forget to vote and let your Congressional and Senate leaders know how important it is to maintain funding for the PEP Grant. Enjoy the rest of fall!

Ed Kupiec
Secondary Section Editor

ONE:
If your teaching situation is like mine, you may need to break down your field setup at the end of each and every day. Recreating the size of the field, and placing the cones and goals in the same place every morning is very time consuming. I'm sure you have much more important teaching responsibilities than spending 20 – 30 minutes every day setting up your teaching station. Try this to help speed up the process.

Get some spray paint from your maintenance department, and once you have your fields set up the way you want, mark the locations of all of your cones and the midpoints of your goals. The next morning when you go to recreate your fields, you just place the cones on the spots, no counting of steps required. With the spots already marked, you can even have your first period students set up the fields in minutes.

Every few days, you just need to re-paint your spots as they start to fade. On a related note, make sure you budget for pop-up goals and dome cones. These are much easier and lighter to set up and carry than traditional cones and pipe goals, also saving you time.

TWO:
When you set up your field, you may have waterlogged shoes because of the dew. This is easily remedied by remembering a spare pair of sneakers and socks. Most of your students may not be so responsible. In addition, the wet grass provides additional safety concerns with students slipping and falling. If feasible, I recommend an alternate location for your early morning classes until the dew evaporates: the tennis courts. If your nets and posts can be removed, your tennis courts can be used as a large playing surface. It may be difficult to set up multiple locations, but if you have your grass field marked with spray paint, your students can quickly change the fields from the tennis courts to the grass.

If you don't have an open house again until next year, save these ideas:

Looking for a way to put on a better open house to showcase what your students have learned? Why not put the students in charge? A middle school colleague of mine is looking to have students demonstrate their learning by performing for parents. He is looking to use the auditorium, and have a variety of students perform 15 minute sessions in areas such as gymnastics, Educational Karate Program (EKP), Tai-Chi, yoga, and possibly more. Teachers would be free to answer questions while the performances are going on.

Another idea that I am looking to try with my parents next year is to set up the gym with a variety of challenges that students would be expected to perform as part of my program. Parents would be encouraged to try and meet these challenges themselves. I hope this will make our program more meaningful to parents as they obtain a better understanding of contemporary physical education. I believe that both of these ideas are better alternatives to handouts, and making the same 15 minute speech over and over.

How To Objectively Assess Effort in Physical Education Using PSR

Do you struggle with assessing effort and behavior in physical education because you feel it is too subjective? I have a solution that I will be presenting at my state conference this month.

That solution is to use a personal and social responsibility rubric to objectively assess effort and behavior. I base my rubric on Don Hellison's model of responsibility. In brief, I look for my students to challenge self and others to high levels of performance. If they are doing this, they are giving forth their best effort. This focus on personal and social responsibility can be used with all activities, and also minimizes discipline problems.

You can also assess effort objectively by requiring students to achieve and maintain intensities in their target heart zone. Students do this by wearing heart monitors or other methods of checking heart rate.

Integrating with other subject areas is another great way to promote the value of your program. Here are a few ideas:

	Math - Keeping score in golf and statistics from team passing games (shots on goal, free throw %, etc…)
	Science - Students can learn information in science class, and then apply it in physical education. One topic could be acceleration. This is very similar to our biomechanics and exercise physiology classes in college.
	Social Studies - Teach students a game that is related to the culture or group being discussed in social studies. For example, when students study India, you could teach those students cricket. Or, when studying economics, students can study the Olympics or professional sports.
	English - Reading in the content area. Students can choose to read a novel based on sports such as Friday Night Lights, or make a habit of reading the newspaper or sports magazines.

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