Student Teacher's Reflect: Connecting Research to Practice - Diana Bukvic

Diana Bukvic is a student in the Health and Physical Education, Concurrent Teacher Education Program at the University of Toronto. Diana was asked to reflect on a research article that guides or influences her practice. She was kind enough to share her work with us:

Reflection: Connecting Research to Practice
By Diana Bukvic

Teaching students the importance of health and physical education as a lifelong process is the most significant task that I would like to accomplish as a Health and Physical Education teacher. Thus, I am choosing to reflect on Ted Temertzoglou’s article, Physical Literacy: Teach Them to Fish, Feed Them for Life, because I feel this article best represents my goal as a teacher.

This article reminds me that if we as teachers can successfully teach a student to be physically literate, that is to understand how to lead a healthy, active life, as a society we may be able to reduce the number of individuals with diabetes, coronary heart disease, and other detrimental effects of obesity. We need to teach children to be proactive and use physical education as preventative medicine. The ideas that this article provides in terms of student engagement, parent engagement, assessment and helping students become active for life helps to guide me and my own thoughts about the importance and purpose of physical education and health.

I love the way this article discusses ways to keep both the students and parents engaged in the course and in living a healthy, active life. I truly believe that children live as their parents do. This means that parents who are active will most likely pass on those values to their children and have them engaged in extracurricular activities. On the contrary, parents who had a horrible experience in their own physical education class and who never really picked up an active lifestyle will most likely unintentionally pass those values on to their children. 

This is why I think it is so important to have parents involved in their children’s education, especially physical education. By sending home letters about the course, what aspects of fitness will be evaluated and how the evaluations will occur really tells both and students and parents what will be expected in the class. Demonstrating that teachers are there to support and help their students as opposed to make them fail because they are not physically fit is important to accomplish early on in the course. 

This is why I love the idea of sending home a letter and telling the parents where all of the information their child will be learning can be found. By encouraging the parents to read with their children and learn together, I believe, students become motivated to succeed and parents learn how to lead healthy, active lifestyles. Parents are role models for their children, and I feel that if children see their parents making healthy choices, they too will follow and improve their quality of life.

As a teacher, engaging the parents and making them involved in their children’s health is very important to me. What is also important to me is making sure that my students are fully engaged and learning about the benefits of health and activity. The article suggests providingstudents with many choices, such as the choice of assessment. What I loved learning from thisarticle is that when you’re assessing a component of fitness, for example, cardiorespiratory, itshouldn’t matter what activity or method the student chooses. 

Why should the whole class have to run a 12-minute run to demonstrate their cardiorespiratory fitness if a group of students feel more comfortable and confident with the beep test or step test? The students should have choice, because when the student can choose, I think they feel empowered, which affects their level of enthusiasm, motivation to succeed, and overall results. I especially loved the suggestion of having the parents come in and determine their fitness level as well. I think the more the parents are involved in a child’s education, the better the child will do in any course.

All in all, this article reflects my goals as a physical education and health teacher. Theideas and suggestions mentioned in the article have both helped to guide my practice and create a better vision for teaching health and physical education. I believe that helping students become physically literate is much easier when you involve the parents and provide the students with the opportunity to choose how they want to lead healthy, active lives. When you ask a child to make a lifelong commitment to health and active living, you can’t expect them to do it on their own.

However, when there is a community of role models standing behind them to support and encourage them, suddenly the expectation doesn’t seem so out of reach.

Reference:
Temertzoglou, Ted. Physical Literacy: Teach Them to Fish, Feed Them for Life. Physicaland Health Education. Spring, 2010.