Friday, April 15, 2011
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?
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I could see how safety would be the biggest issue, but I can honestly say I have never worried about my child being safe in PE class. My oldest is only in second grade, but still, I guess I just take for granted that you PE teachers know what you are doing and will keep them safe!
ReplyDeleteI find in Science class I have to spell out instructions not only for the activity but for behavior expectations, because even at 8th grade my class seems not to be able to read and understand instructions on their own, let alone remember class behavior expectations. So it did not seem silly to me at all that you had to remind your students not to swing the racket at anything but the birdie.
Do you think you could create a chart and mark down if any students weren't being safe during class? Is that something you could do? Tracking how many students heard your warnings and either blatantly disregarded them or just weren't listening at all...would that be helpful for you? Then you could bluntly tell them that last class, even though you went through detailed instructions and behavior expectations, 35% of you did what I asked you not to do anyway.
Just a thought.