Allowing Students to Choose Physical Education Activities: The New Advantageous Way to Teach

Imagine, it’s 11 a.m. and you’re in high school. You just finished your second class of the day and are heading to the gym. During this three-minute walk to the gym, you stop and talk to your friends, say hi to a former teacher, and try to find a good excuse to stop playing softball today. You hate softball and are even more upset that your teacher forces you to play this game. You come to class with a bad excuse and you are forced to change classes. You walk into the locker room, change for class, and walk into the gym in dismay that one more day in physical education is spent doing something you don’t enjoy.

This is a thought that runs through the minds of many average teenagers every day. Many students do not like what they are learning in physical education and refuse to participate in something that does not interest them. Many teachers are content to allow students to sit outside or just stand by during class and this affects their grade. Is this doing a good thing? Are you really doing the work of a teacher? Absolutely not, the job of a teacher, specifically a physical education teacher, is to teach students different healthy and active things that they can do as part of their lifelong fitness. Of course they are there for you to get your “required fitness time,” but are you really doing something about your fitness as you sit back and watch the middle of the class play a game that you don’t like? Are teachers helping combat rising obesity rates by allowing students to opt out and their grades suffer?

The solution to combat the plague of students not in physical education is to adopt the Elective Physical Education style. Elective PE is exactly what it sounds like, elective. Students can choose which activity they want to participate in for that specific unit. Teachers get together and set up a number of different activities that students can choose to participate in during that time period. Then, on the first day of each unit, all activities are explained and students choose which activity they will participate in. Now, instead of students feeling compelled to participate in something they don’t enjoy, they can choose what they want to do and what they will actively participate in.

There is a concern about how to ensure that each student covers a wide variety of activities and ensure that they are adequately exposed to different skills, sporting events, and physical conditioning techniques. Each unit should have a specific theme, such as team sports, individual sports, lifelong fitness, cardiovascular fitness, leisure activities, and much more. Establishing multiple options within each unit for teachers to maximize time spent on homework. Students will participate more in the lesson and teachers will spend less time trying to get everyone involved.

Greater emphasis should be placed on allowing the student to find something they like and involve them. This is especially important when talking about lifelong physical activities because this is where our teaching will affect the student the most. If all students can attend a class they enjoy participating in and gain a new love for a lifelong physical activity, then as PE teachers we have done our job to help keep our population healthy and active.

Heads of social figures, like First Lady Michelle Obama, have taken it upon themselves to help fight obesity in the United States. The first lady held a fitness day in which hundreds of students joined her to participate in a physical activity to help fight obesity. It is by using elective physical education that this can really have an impact in the fight against obesity. We want all students to learn how to stay healthy and how activity can help burn calories and keep them in a healthy physical shape. For a specific unit, each activity can focus on monitoring heart rate, calculating calories burned per class, and measuring other health factors that are important for our fitness. Many students think that the only way to burn calories is to walk or run around the block. They need to be shown that while playing tennis they burn that many calories, or while participating in expressive dance, their heart rate reaches eighty percent of their maximum heart rate. It is very important to show students that participating in a variety of activities can be beneficial to their health. Allowing students to choose the activity is even more important because they will then become interested in this subject area and hopefully continue to participate in your activity outside of the gym at their high school.

Now imagine it is 3 in the afternoon, you are messing with your mom because on the way home from school and she asks you how your day was. You tell him about the A you got on your math test and the project you have pending in history, then you tell him how much fun you had in physical education. You tell him that it is because you have to choose the activity that you are going to do throughout the week and, by doing so, you have learned how beneficial this activity is for your health. You tell him you can’t wait to walk to class tomorrow at 11 a.m. M. And go back to where you left off today.