Physical Education Safety

When doing my research I have talked to a lot of different Physical Education teachers and also administrators about PE.  One of the most common things that comes up in the conversation is safety.  When I ask the question about classroom management in PE, they all have talked about safety in one form or the other.  When I asked my CT safety was his biggest factor.  If you don't have a safe classroom then it is tough to have good classroom management.  Every time I introduce a new activity the first thing we discuss before rules or anything else is safety.  When explaining the game of badminton I had to discuss the safety rules.  Some things that I had mentioned were don't swing the rackets at anything but the birdie.  It may seem silly to say this to the students but it must be done.  I would explain how the rackets aren't made for throwing or tossing.  I also had a story to try and scare them about a student getting their teeth knocked out from a racket.  The students laughed but I am sure that none of them would want that to happen to them.  Safety is also a big issue for the administrators.  They want to make sure that every student in the school is safe.  The school can get in a lot of trouble for students getting hurt in PE.  If a student gets hurt in PE the teacher can even sometimes be fired so it is a must for a PE teacher to have great classroom management.  I would be interested to see what parents may say about this issue.  I would like to know what parents think about safety in PE and if they worry about their children when they are in PE?

Physical Education Organization

In this weeks post I would like to look at another part of my classroom management.  I will be discussing organization.  I will mostly talk about how my classroom organization is going.  I feel that mostly my organization is going good.  I feel to run a successful PE class you must have great classroom management and organization.  For the most part I feel that I have done well in this department.  The students seem to react better when you know what you are doing instead of just flying by the seat of your pants.
The only thing that can mess up my organization is when the plan will not work for the day.  Sometimes I am working with other teachers who change their mind on the activity they want to do.  I am team teaching a class and one day the teacher decides we should split up the classes without talking to me before hand.  The reason she did this was because she didn't like some of the students in my class.  I made my lesson up as I went that day but I felt that the class still went well. 
Today was a struggle because of having a sub in the department kind of threw off what I had planned for the day so again I went as the class went along.  The class went great exfept towards the end when the students got bored and uninterested in PE.  When this happened I had two students who don't like each other get in a fight and the class just felt very unorganized to me.  The students were always wanting to fight in class but today it finally went off.  They were building up to this point. 
I will need to make sure that I can stay as organized as possible while teaching my classes.  I know this is common sense but sometimes hard to do when things change at the last minute.

Student Involvement

Each week that I am posting I have decided to look at a specific area that I am searching for under my theme of classroom management.  This week I have decided to look into Student Involvement in Physical Education.  The key words that I put into the data base this week were "Physical Education" and "Student Involvement."  After searching through the few and far between results that I found I have picked one Specific article.
The article that I will be discussing this week is about involvement in PE with the female gender.  This study looked into 32 different senior ladies who were taking a PE class.  These ladies were from 22 different school districts in the province of British Columbia, Canada.  The research team used interviews with teachers, student questionares, and course outlines to collect data.  There were many themes that emerged in the article which were; focus on lifetime activities, student involvement in course development, authentic assessment, gender as a course design feature, value added options, and finally a positive and respectful class environment.  The findings showed that most PE classes were developed with these things in mind.
When looking at the themes I can now use what I have found out from this article to maybe help some of my female students who don't participate find a way to have more fun.  I am using some of these techniques now but have found that most of females just don't want to be in PE period.  It can be frustrating at times to watch females just sitting in one spot during an entire game but I understand that I must stay positive and try to help them the best way that I can.  I will just have to try and do my best when it comes to keeping all of my students active in Physical Education.

Week One PE Research

The main topic that I have been researching this year is Classroom Management.  In the first term I researched CM in a classroom setting, this term I will be researching this in the PE classroom setting.  The three things that I will look at are Organization, Student Involvement, and Safety.  These three were the most important when looking at CM in the Physical Education setting.  I have done a little bit of research on the topic but have been more focused on my classes beginning at my school.
The one article that I found discussed the period length of classes on the west and east coast.  The article concluded that the periods that were longer were more beneficial for the students in the class.  The students had more time to dress down and also do activities in class.  I like the 90 minute periods because I like to run my classes like a practice.  An example would be in basketball I would do and individual skill then a team skill and conclude the class with games.  You must also warm up and also take role in the class.  If I were in a shorter time period it would be tough to get my students to complete everything in one day.