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Students Develop Lifelong Skills in New PE

Skateboarding, yoga, Pilates, videogames... this is phys ed? Whatever happened to dodgeball, uniforms, group showers, and being picked last for the team-all the aspects of physical education that most adults today remember with dismay?

Welcome to the "New PE." In response to rising concerns about childhood obesity and physical inactivity, the physical education classroom of today focuses less on competitive team sports, in which only a few students excel, and instead emphasizes a wide array of physical activities that keep all students engaged so that they can learn to enjoy recreational activities that will keep them active throughout their lives.

More Choices

At Westview High School in Poway, California, for example, students rotate through four types of activities each week, rather than spend six weeks on a single sport, the model in traditional PE classes. In this school, students learn yoga, choreography, Pilates, and synchronized swimming, in addition to traditional sports. One day a week, the class focuses on topics such as nutrition, fitness, and exercise safety. Students also compete in a mini-triathlon, swimming six laps in the 25-yard pool, running 1.5 miles, and biking three miles.

Some schools are converting multi-purpose rooms into fitness centers with treadmills, weight machines, and heart monitors. At Madison Junior High in Naperville, Illinois, students spend their PE period in the "Madison Health Club," where they can climb a rock wall, run on treadmills, and use a series of computer-enabled fitness test stations.

A fitness profile is developed for each student in the fall that includes measures of flexibility, blood pressure, body composition, upper body strength, and cardiovascular health. Students are retested in the spring so that they can track how much they've improved during the year. Parents are able to access their children's fitness test results from the school's web site, using a personal identification number.

But even in schools without expensive facilities, PE teachers are introducing a wide range of activities to keep kids moving and having fun. New PE activities may include skateboarding, rock climbing, swing dancing, self-defense, inline skating, bowling, cross-country skiing, Frisbee golf, and even circus skills, such as juggling and stilt-walking.

Old Sports, New Strategies

Even when PE teachers teach traditional sports, teaching methods have changed so that all kids keep moving during the entire PE class, rather than standing around waiting to take their turn. For example, the SPARK (Sports, Play, and Active Recreation for Kids) K-6 PE program suggests playing softball using teams of only five players. When a player hits the ball, those in the field must throw the ball to every player on their team before the batter reaches home, so that everyone stays active.

The SPARK program has been adopted in the Memphis public schools in Tennessee. A study conducted there found that students in this program were significantly more active than students in schools with a more traditional PE program.

Videogames

Dance Dance Revolution is a popular arcade video game that many students enjoy. As a fast-paced song plays, arrows pointing in one of four directions-forward, back, left, right-appear on the screen in various combinations which the players must follow on a square plastic mat on which they stand. A study conducted by the Mayo Clinic found that children playing Dance Dance Revolution expended significantly more energy than they did watching television or playing traditional video games. The game is so popular with students and is such a potential obesity-busting tool that West Virginia and Hawaii are seeking to implement it in every school in their states.

The New PE

And those showers and being picked last? They, too, are a thing of the past in the new PE. Many schools no long require showers in the wake of concerns about privacy and lawsuits. And students are now usually picked for teams randomly, e.g., by odd- or even-numbered birth date.

Despite the benefits of the new PE, some experts estimate that it is implemented in less than one-half of all PE programs. Even worse, less than one in three students attended a daily PE class at all in 2003. And only one in three states requires physical education for elementary and middle school students, according to a report conducted by the National Association of Sport and Physical Education and the American Heart Association.

The American Heart Association recommends 150 minutes of physical activity per week as a minimum standard for elementary students and 225 minutes for middle school students. It also recommends that PE be a requirement for high school graduation. Although many schools resist adding PE to a crowded curriculum at a time when test scores are paramount, studies show that PE actually contributes to academic success. Recent studies conducted by an organization called PE4Life, for example, found increased achievement in mathematics and literacy among students who participated in a PE program, as well as fewer disciplinary problems.