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Professional Development Resources

Professional Organizations

AAHPERD - American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance

An alliance of six national associations, six district associations, and a research consortium that supports healthy lifestyles through high-quality programs:

ASHA American School Health Association

Multidisciplinary organization to protect and promote the health and well-being of children and youth through coordinated school health programs.

Find your state or regional version of these national organizations and get involved.

Performance-Based Assessment Strategies

Understanding by Design (ASCD, 2005) by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe is an introduction to backward design. On the web site of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, you can read excerpts from the book.

ToucanEd publishes a wide variety of resources from the CCSSO-SCASS Health Education Assessment Project for both members and non-members of the Project. These resources include Assessment Tools for School Health Education (2006), which provides a useful introduction to performance-based assessment using content- and skill-based rubrics tied to the National Health Education Standards.

The New PE

Take 10! is a K-5 curriculum that links math, science, language arts, and social studies curricula with ten-minute fitness breaks. The curriculum was developed by the International Life Sciences Institute Center for Health Promotion.

SPARK offers innovative PE programs that promote students’ physical activity from the elementary through high school levels. The SPARK program was originally developed with funds from the National Heart, Blood and Lung Institute (NHLBI); it has since become a national model.

CATCH is an elementary school program originally developed as part of an NHLBI clinical trial. It has been shown to increase physical activity in school PE programs.

Going Green

Healthy Schools Network is committed to ensuring that every child has access to a healthy learning environment that is clean and in good repair. The Network operates the Healthy Schools/Healthy Kids Clearinghouse that provides guidelines and materials to promote healthier school environmental practices. It also sponsors National Healthy Schools Day, this year on April 28, 2008.

The Green School Initiative, a project of Earthways Foundation, publishes The Little Green Schoolhouse: Thinking Big About Ecological Sustainability, Children’s Environmental Health, and K-12 Education in the USA.

Be Safe Healthy Schools provides a Back To School Environmental Checklist and reports on school siting laws and regulations.

The Collaborative for High Performance Schools developed guidelines for green school buildings that have since been adopted by several other states. It sponsors an annual Green Tools for Healthy Schools.

The Natural Resources Defense Fund offers the Green Squad, an interactive web site to guide students in conducting an environmental audit of their school. The site is also available in Spanish.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) offers ideas for community service projects for high school students at its High School Environmental Center. EPA also makes environmental education grants to schools.

Cyber Bullying

Stop Bullying Now!, a campaign from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, offers a wide range of resources to educators about how to effectively address bullying, including cyber bullying.

iKeepSafe.org provides leadership in Internet safety education. Its resources include a K-12 curriculum to help students avoid dangerous, inappropriate or unlawful online behavior and community outreach programs to parents, law enforcement, and community leaders.

bNETS@avvy from the National Education Association Health Information Network is a bi-monthly newsletter for parents and teachers that provides tools to help students between 9 and 14 to stay safer online.

Delete Cyberbullying is a public advertising campaign targeting teens to prevent cyber bullying from the National Crime Prevention Council.

The Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) has resources about cyber bullying available at its web page, New Technology and Youth Violence. It includes a link to the CDC-sponsored December 2007 Supplement of the Journal of Adolescent Health which features a collection of articles on the topic—"Youth Violence and Electronic Media: Similar Behaviors, Different Venues?"

Integrating Health into Instruction

Two good resources for learning more about the integration of health instruction into the curriculum include Health Instruction: Theory and Application (5th edition) by John Fodor, Gus Dalis, and Susan Giarratano-Russell (Williams & Wilkins, 1995), Protocol—School Improvement Research Series: Research You Can Use. Close-Up #16 Integrated Curriculum. (May 1994, NWREL). Retrieved from: http://www.nwrel.org/scpd/sirs/8/c016.html, by Kathy Lake, and Interdisciplinary Curriculum: Design & Implementation, edited by Heidi Hayes Jacobs (ASCD, 1989).

Differentiated Instruction

Carol Ann Tomlinson is a professor at the Curry School of Education, University of Virginia and a former Virginia Teacher of the Year. She has written several books on differentiated instruction, available from the Association for Curriculum Development and Supervision. Titles include:

How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed Ability Classrooms (2004)
The Differentiated Classroom: Responding to the Needs of All Learners (2004)
Integrating Differentiated Instruction and Understanding by Design: Connecting Content and Kids (2006)
Fulfilling the Promise of the Differentiated Classroom: Strategies and Tools for Responsive Teaching (2003)

Backward Mapping

Understanding by Design (2005) by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe from Prentice-Hall provides practical tools and strategies for successful backward mapping in developing your lesson plans.

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