Fitness: More Than Just Dodgeball

If anyone thinks that PE and fitness class is nothing more than round upon round of dodgeball, I encourage you to speak with Burney King or Stacy Sullivan or Britney Wolfe or any of our inspiring fitness instructors.  Working with these folks this school year on our fitness programming curriculum review cycle this year has been quite the education for a less-than-coordinated human like me. 

TBH, like most things, the most I know about this anything related to athletics has come from being a momma:

The joy and challenge that athletics has brought to my children at this school been one of the most unexpected momma gifts I’ve gotten from this school.  That’s another blog for another time, but athletics and coaches at our school are a crucial linchpin to many youths’ SA experience. 

Perhaps my ignorance on this subject stems from my- ahem- slightly limited personal experiences with organized sports and PE as a youth:

• PE with Mr. Hoffa in elementary school was generally experienced as a humiliation, the one class that baffled me with its unpredictability and left me, frankly vulnerable to attack. For example:
  • Our yearly line-dancing unit in which I had to (horror of horror) hold hands with a BOY.
  • The MILE RUN, which seemed like a never ending, ungodly marathon distance that no one should ever attempt. 
  • That one time my mom wrote me a note that my asthma was acting up so I should sit out class but her handwriting was so bad that he thought I forged the letter and I started crying and just recently finally forgave my mom for having such messy cursive.
  • Hanging in the air attempting to do pull ups. 
  • Me not understanding the rules of a game.
  • Those really fun rolly things that remained fun until someone ran over my fingers with theirs. 

• It should be known that I DID get third place in the “hoppity hop” field day race in third grade. I was decidedly chubby in the third grade, and my superiority (ok ok, mid-level greatness) came as a shock to everyone but most especially myself.  I just loved bouncing.

• I played on the middle school volleyball team, if by play you mean I sat on the bench the entirety of each and every game except for one single game in which Mrs. Granger reluctantly called me out and I successfully bumped the ball over the net and she was so astounded by my success that I actually could not have felt worse.  
• One year in middle school I played tennis doubles with my friend Kori, and we had such a fun time coming up with ironic smack talk about how great we were that we often forgot to do things like watch for the ball coming and, I don’t know, make contact with it.  
• Does marching band count? Sometimes there were push ups.  And there was sweat.  So much sweat.  Also we had these things called “march offs” in which we responded to increasingly quick commands on which way to move and I could hold my own on those things.  But it felt more like brain work than body work.

Yeah.  That’s about the sum total of it.

So it’s safe to say that I always have a lot to learn from my friends that live in the ARC, and I hoppity-hopped (see what I did there?) at the chance to spend a few days talking with folks at some leading schools in Charlotte about why fitness/PE in schools MATTERS. Shout out to Catherine Bishop, who drove around Burney King, Sarah Spann, Stacy Sullivan, and me all around that city. Also shout out to Charlotte Country Day, Providence Day, Trinity Episcopal, and Charlotte Latin, who gave us all of their secrets and fed us their amazing FLIK lunches (for real, they were amazing) and just generally shocked us with their generosity. For anyone that wants a clear rundown of all the things we learned from our colleagues in Charlotte, have at it. Here are some highlights we saw or learned about: 

• Many of the schools organize their PE classes by sports unit.  The idea is to give kids exposure to track, basketball, softball, dance, soccer, etc. by first playing a game, then breaking down the skills, and then revisiting the game again. (I learned from Burney I believe this is called whole-part-whole.)  In one school, the 3rd-5th graders actually use PE time for three week “sports seasons units” in which each kid has a different role on their team.  Don’t like playing? You could be the equipment manager? Kind of bossy? Why don’t you try the coaching role.  Fascinating.
• Nearly all of the schools incorporate choice into PE.  In elementary school this often looks like stations or options for warming up.  In middle school, this expands to include choosing an elective in 8th grade (yoga? Dance? Lifting?) or having each Wednesday in PE operate like a free choice Friday with each fitness instructor offering a different activity.  If a student just isn’t up to any of the activities, they can opt to walk around the track that day.  The goal= MOVE.
• Most places we saw pushed toward student ownership of their fitness goals, especially in middle school.  This looked different in different schools, but I really appreciated Trinity Episcopal’s approach to having students set goals and work to achieve them.  They also documented their workout minutes with some interesting templates.  If I could have just used gym class in middle school to simply work out, I would have LOVED it, and I would have gained valuable skills and habits to last me a lifetime. 
• Coaching and feedback was built into every aspect of PE  Sometimes this happened informally with multiple circle times between rounds of a competitive game.  Sometimes this happened more formally, such as when we saw third graders watching video of their team’s gymnastics routines and get specific feedback on a rubric with their PE instructor.
• There was the interplay of JOY, COLLABORATION, and COMPETITION all over the place! In elementary settings we saw obstacle course relays which ended in each team adding blocks to a high tower to mark their progress.  We saw creative and inventive games, knocking over bowling pins defended by team mates, strange alternative versions of dodgeball, etc.  The ropes course at Charlotte Latin was a thing to behold and was entirely designed with the premise that youth can achieve things better when they work together and problem solve with their peers. 

And of course, like every set of school visits, we also left affirmed that much of what we have in place is already best practice. I am so looking forward to digging into some of our shared aha moments from Charlotte and seeing what we want to change and what we want to keep exactly the same. The wise Burney King said it well: “this is about making the experience better for the kids.”  

My vote? Buy a class set of these.  I challenge all ya’ll to a race.