PPE 310 Signature Assignment 1

PPE 310 Signature Assignment
Michael-Paul Cotter
PPE 310
Signature Assignment
4/11/2016
Dr. Miller
Arizona State University
Physical education or P.E. is typically thought of the hour once or twice

a week when elementary students go and play games. A common belief is
that they are taught a basic understanding of games like basketball,
dodgeball and even indoor hockey. Another common misconception is that it
is more of break for teachers to have time to plan lesson without their
students and it is a break for students from the rigors of being in a classroom
all day. The truth is physical education is all of these things along with
teaching about human health, nutrition, importance of exercise, dangers of
drugs, and using movement to improve students learning experience. In
addition to this it is applying what teachers know about health to improve
student behaviors in and out of the classroom. All of these topics and
methods are used in conjunction to build students depth of knowledge about
health and exercise not only in the P.E. classes, but across the curriculum in
all subject areas. The ultimate goal is to have well educated students grow
into well educated adults and make smart decisions about their health and
life.
The reason that teaching Health education has expanded into so many
areas of health and school is because of the growing need to educate
students about this at a young age. In our fast paced world that allows
information to shared in a split second at all corners of the world, time has
become an increasingly valuable commodity. As people continue to get
busier they find less time to eat healthy, to exercise and care for their
physical or mental health. With adults struggling to be healthy, children are
not being taught about the importance of a healthy diet and exercise. Adults
and children both are continuing to live of a diet from fast food chains, high
calorie coffee drinks, frozen foods packed with saturated fat and a days
worth of sodium packed into a single meal. This type of eating habit have
lead to national epidemic that is childhood obesity.
Lack of exercise physical movement is also on a rapid decline that
makes health problems and obesity rise. It has been shown that if students
do not get exercise and physical activity at school, they will not get it at
home when video games and watching television is available at their
fingertips. Even before Netflix, internet streaming of tv, and live online
gameplay watched nearly three and a half hours of tv on a daily basis
according to a 2003 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation. With the instant
access of tv and video games today that number has surely increased
dramatically, which is negatively impacts students overall health and weight.
Another study (Anderson et al., 1998) showed that children who watched 4
or more hours of television per day had significantly great body mass index
(BMI) compared to children watching fewer than 2 hours per day. (Pangrazi,
2009)
The combination of unhealthy diets and a decrease in physical activity

is the main factors contributing to ever growing number of children with
childhood obesity. According to a study by Guo and Chumlea, as a child with
childhood obesity ages so does their chance of being obese into adulthood.
If a child is obese at the age of four, they have approximately 20% chance of
being obese by the time they reach adulthood. This number drastically
increases if the child is obese during their adolescence years which is the
time around when they begin puberty to when them become adults. These
children have an astonishing 80% chance of being obese as an adult.
(Pangrazi, 2009) These alarming numbers are a major concern and the
reason that it is important to teach health to students starting at a young
age, and across curriculum. This education cannot be sporadic and stop in
upper grades, but must continue on during a children's, entire grade school
careers and into their high school education .
Currently our young child have limited access to physical movement

and health literacy in our school systems. Todays youth attend school for an
average of 7-8 hours a day with the majority of the time being expected to
sit in their chair for instruction. With budgets being cut P.E. programs are
being defunded allowing even less opportunities for students movement.
This in addition to national headlines about the U.S. falling being other
countries academically has created an emphasis on testing and increasing
our youths scores. Although this is undoubtedly important it comes at the
cost of putting students off their feet and into their chairs for larger portions
of the day. Although how we teach physical education is in need of change,
there still are positives. Many schools still offer P.E. more than once a week
and hold school activities like jump for hearts, a fundraising program to raise
money while students jump rope. Even though many schools have funding
shortages they still find ways to host a variety of both boys and girls sports.
These sports have a major impact on the health of their students because
gets students to be active and healthy after school for practice or games.
This is important because this cuts into the time they have to sit and watch
tv or play video games instead of being active and may keep them below the
2 hour mark that the average child has a lower body mass index than those
above that mark.
Even though there is a limited about of time and resources students
have at school, there are many other ways teachers can encourage smart
decisions from our students/children starting at a young age. One form of
consequence that is common at a young age is the loss of recess time due to
poor behavior or not meeting the expectations required of them at school.
This practice should be eliminated as it taking away from their brief time
spent getting their heart rates up and interacting with other students in a
way that is more social than in the classroom. There are other forms of
consequences that can be administered that do not take away social
interaction and physical exercise.
Healthy eating choices are also an easy choice to encourage students
to make smart eating decisions. School breakfast and lunches can offer low
fat milk or 100% juice drinks and lunches should off sugar free drinks such as
fat free white milk or even water. Schools like to use anchor charts and send
encouraging messages through posters. Posters that encourage choosing
drinks other than soda or high sugar drinks like Kool-aid, but regular milk,
water or juice should be used. It has been shown that eating a vegetarian
meal once or twice a week can help lower a persons chances for heart
disease, so schools can easily offer vegetarian options a few times a week.
Literature Analysis
Getting proper amounts of exercise will help students learn new

material, build on their prior knowledge and help them have a deeper
understanding of everything thing they learn about. It does this because
exercise changes the brain in ways that protect memory and thinking
skills. (Godman, 2014) It does this by increasing the health and productivity
of the hippocampus, in the temporal lobe of the brain. The hippocampus is
the part of the brain that sorts with and in charge of your emotion and
memory specifically short term memory. As it ages diseases like Alzheimers
disease can affect this area of the brain and mental illnesses are also
associated with the hippocampus. When the hippocampus of people with
mental illness are examined it is common to find that they have gone unders
degradation or have loss its mass or size. Although exercise may not be able
to prevent all mental illnesses or diseases, it can lower the chances by
keeping the hippocampus healthy. Hedi Godman from Harvard School of
Medicine has written about exactly how it does this.
Anyone that has exercised knows that while you work out, your heart
pumps faster and harder and you sweat to keep cool. This sweat is
produced by sweat glands found across the body. Godman explains that
research done by the University of British Columbia has found that aerobic
exercise, exercise that makes people get out of breathe or commonly
referred to as cardio, will help the hippocampus grow. People with this
increase in size has been shown to increase those peoples ability to learn
and increase their verbal memory. In a very summed up form verbal
memory is ones ability to understand and remember language. Reading,
writing, listening and speaking all different forms of using verbal memory
and are keys components of classroom instruction. Since there is a direct
relation between exercise, verbal memory and school that it is clear why
Godmans article is an important article and supports the idea that physical
education and activity in schools are important. (Godman, 2014)
Nichols, B has also done extensive research on the impact exercise has
on learning. He has worked with the Center for Disease Control and SHAPE
America to develop ways to incorporate exercise into classrooms and the
benefits of this. He looked into the external factors that affect childrens
opportunities to exercise and create new ways to get students active in mild
and strenuous activities. His findings show that as children exercise they
develop more strength in their muscles and bones. This may help them as
grow into adults have properly functioning body systems. He also found that
within these systems that type 2 diabetes can also be prevented by having
young children and adolescents be physically active. Not only will this help
them be healthy physically but just as important he found that continued
involvement in physical activity (PA) of children has been shown to improve
academic success and enhance psychological health. (Nichols,1986)
Since the goal of school and educators is to have students learn, it is clear
from Nichols article that it is important to incorporate P.E. into classroom
instruction.
Russell Pate has written a peer reviewed article about time and funding
and time allotment for physical education in the United States educational
systems. He does not focus on the obesity problem or childhood obesity
problem in the U.S. but instead focuses on the positive impacts health
education has on students in school and in life. He questions how parents in
todays world and a new push to be active, eat healthy organic and non-gmo
food can blatantly fail when it comes to supporting P.E. in their children's
schools. He states that many of the arguments against promoting,teaching
and incorporating P.E. more often are those of old outdated ideas and
viewpoints. He states that the truth is at present we know about the health
and fitness effects of exercise and almost nothing about the physical
education. (Pate, 1995) His main point of this argument is that many
people view P.E. as just children playing games for one period a week of
school. As if it was just a time of the week for students to have fun but not
learn anything new or of importance and certainly not compared to what is
considered academic material in regular classrooms. By teaching an actual
physical education, with an emphasis on education it will help students learn

how to develop and maintain an active lifestyle; something that is important
for their physical health. Beyond that an education will help them learn how
to think critically about life choices pertaining to their health. Getting
students to think critically about their health will help them develop the
ability to think critically about academic materials. Ultimately it can be
summed up as school based physical education is a significant component
of a childs overall physical activity experience and may represent societys
best opportunity to provide students with appropriate physical activity
experiences. (Pate, 1995) As society continues to learn that physical
movement and health creates students with better attention spans and the
ability to improve their memory, health education must be viewed and
treated as an equally important subject in school as the academic courses.
(Pate, 1995)
With the limited amount of time it is important for physical education
teachers to use a wide variety of teaching methods and strategies. In Lori
Ciccomascolos book The Dimensions of Physical Education, the amount of
instruction used is investigated in detail. As stated previously, many view
P.E. a non-academic subject so it is important to educate the public about
how P.E. class can be run like regular classroom. Sarah Benes contributed a
study investigating P.E. classes in public schools and report that physical
activities not related to an educational study being in the class varied from 415% of the alloted in a health class. She explains that this means 85-96% of
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the time students spend in P.E. class they are being taught through direct
instruction, student presentations, discussion or a physical skill that related
directly to the topic being studied. This closely resembles the activities
practiced in a regular education class. This is important for the public to
understand that students are getting quality academic instruction about real
life topics in their health classes and to disprove P.E. is just fun and games.
Synthesis of Information
In combining the studies, references and ideas it is clear that physical

activity not only creates healthy young people, but it also improves their
behavior in the classroom. The CDC has done studies to determine how
effective physical activity is in the classroom, and if there are any negative
effects. Even though the study was focused on finding positive and
negative effects on increased physical education time it school, they were
unable to report a single negative effect or drawback to increasing the time
students spend participating in P.E. The exact opposite results were
concluded, in that 11 of 14 studies found a minimum of one positive
association between teaching healthy literacy in the classroom. This helps
support Nicholas idea that as physical activity is increase so are the
academic results in the classroom. These results also support Godmans
explanation that increase exercise an increase in physical exercise promotes
growth in the hippocampus which improves memory. (Godman, 2014) If a
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student's memory is improved it is obvious that they will have greater skill
and remembering and recalling information presented to them in other
classes. The CDC results support her idea state that the overall results from
their studies found that having an increase in P.E. had positive results in
other subjects more than 50% of the time and the rest of the results were
not significant.
If 50% improvement results were found in any other subject
area where the remainder of the class stayed the same, schools and parents
would be rushing to implement those methods and ideas. (Center,2010)
If students are having difficulty maintaining focus and attention it can

be related to them not being able to remember or recall what they have
been taught or having a difficult time learning it the first time it was
presented. The more methods we can use to help students maintain their
focus the greater the chance they will be able to understand the info and file
it into their long term memory in a way they understand. Another problem
especially for young people is being introduced to academic language before
they have the vocabulary to fully understand what all the words means.
Even educated adults will have a difficult time reading and
comprehension an article if they do not have the proper vocabulary. Due to
this educators need to be aware of what vocabulary students have and how
it can be expanded. A proven way to achieve this is to use what Godman has
stated is promoting health and growth in students hippocampus. The way
this relates to physical education is that, the more physical education
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students get the greater possibility their verbal memory will expand. If
educators can get students verbal memory to expand, their understanding of
the material will be easier to absorb, reflect upon and develop into a deeper
understanding. This process is like a machine where every gear affects the
others; physical activity helps for better verbal memory, which helps
attention, which allows for better understanding of material and behaviors in
class and they do not get distracted. The CDC has done studies on the
attention span and behaviors of students who experienced more time
participating in physical activities. Of theses studies all eight studies found
one or more positive associations between recess and indicators of cognitive
skills, attitudes, and academic behavior; none of the studies found negative
associations. (Center, 2010) It is important to continue to expand the
allotted time students have physical activity, because as we increase it,
there will also be an increase in behaviors and students ability to
comprehension.
Practical Implications
There have been many studies done by prestigious universities, independent

researchers and the government and they all state that physical education
is important for a healthy future generation. A healthy generation of
students allows creates opportunities for a generation of students that
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achieve more and have a greater depth of knowledge. In order to do this

teachers must find ways to expand the way their students get exercise.
Throughout core subject lessons there are endless opportunities to
help students move. When young students get up to spell their spelling
words, teachers should have them do physical movements as they do these
movements such as doing jumping jacks or push ups. There should be an
entire wall of methods for movement and teachers can let students pick
which movements they want to do, to give them choices and keep them
engaged. This same idea can be incorporated into math lessons, by doing
movements that reflect the answer of word problems. If the answer is 15,
the students should stand up and run in place for 15 seconds, which is not a
lot of time in the moment, but as it is incorporated across curriculum it will
add up into 10-20 daily. Incorporating it into lessons in this method also
allows the movement to add the quality of the lesson and allowing to
continue at a proper pace without losing vital time for any subject. Instead
of adding another 15-minute recess that would come at the expense of
removing consecutive 15 from another subject, this allows the same about of
dedicated time to each subject but gives students that extra time to be
active.
Many schools only offer P.E. one day a week, but schools should look
for ways to offer it to all their students at least 2 days a week. Due to the
amount of teachers or funding this may not be as simple as adding an extra
day of P.E. but there are creative ways to give this extra time to their
14
students. One way this can be done is to combine multiple classes into one
P.E. class the extra one day a week. This can be done by every Friday, entire
grade levels go to P.E. as one class and can have field days activities to
incorporate the extra students. This not only gives students more exposure
to physical activities but it also allows them to be social with students
outside their own class. Learning social skills and how to interact with others
is a very important skill to learn so this style of class would be beneficial for
all students to expand those skills.
Too often the removal of time spent at recess is used as a negative
consequence for poor behavior in the classroom. Since it has been shown
that exercise improves behavior it does not make sense to take away recess
for inappropriate behavior when recess may help correct the behavior. There
are many other consequences that can be used in place of the removal of
recess time. If a teacher really wants to remove some of a students free
time, they can make the student each their lunch in the reset room or
behavioral room. This still give the student a serious consequence but still
allows them to be physical active and eat their lunch. Especially in lower
grades schools do a lot of fun things, like pizza or popcorn parties or field
trips. Simple things like not allowing students to sit with their friends during
these activities will have greater impact on the students realizing there is
consequences for their actions without sacrificing their health at the same
time.
15
Since students spend less than half their time at school it is important
to encourage students to be active at home. Teachers can have contest for
the students to complete individually to have the most minutes being active
outside of school for the week or month. The entire class can complete
together to earn a class goal of minutes completed for the month and they
can win a prize at the end of that month if they complete it. Even without the
promise of an external reward teacher can encourage students to be active
at home by assigning them activities as homework. These activities can be
very basic such as, go for a walk with a parent or sibling, play a game
outside or ride your bike or scooter. In high grades this could even be done
once a week to give the students a brain break from homework that one
night. All of these activities are simple and easy to implement that all work in
unison to create a physical fit, healthy smart student population.
Marketing
In life as in business it is important for students, parents and teachers
to know about the plans and goals of these activities and how they can be
achieved. Student and teacher created poster can be displayed in the
classroom, in the cafeteria, P.E. room and in the hallways. This can
encourage healthy eating tips, physical activities to do at school, and the
positive results that have be shown after implementing these ideas. In
todays technology based world, social media is one of the best marketing
tools, so each class and grade level can make Facebook pages to show
16
everything they are working on and achieving. This allows parents to see the
results and ways they can be involved. Other classes can look to see what
their fellow students are doing and share ideas. These Facebook pages can
also be used to set up school wide exercise days. These days should be
similar to field days. The activities and results of the field days can be shared
with the district office, parents and local communities.
Conclusion
As I was teaching by myself in the classroom with my mentor subbing
in another room I was not able to implement all of my ideas and activities, I
still have seen very positive results. There are 6 students in my class that
have behavioral issues and another 5 that do not have those issues but are
a distraction on a daily basis These distractions include crying in class,
shouting out, hiding under desks, bangin on desk to distract others and
many other behaviors. On an average day due to the high number of
behavioral students in my class there was an average of 15 incidents per
day. After implementing these ideas, behaviors have shown a dramatic
decrease. Students were getting use to the idea of missing recess and they
began not to care because they could still see their friends. After having 2
students miss lunch and eat in the recess room, there has not be an incident
before lunch that required this action. The classes reading and grammar
unit is one hour forty five minutes, which is difficult for the students to sit still
and stay engaged. After introducing moving and spelling and acting out the
17
story, the amount of students not participating or being a distraction to the

rest of the class has dropped my less than half before it was implemented.
One day during this time, every student completed their reading packet,
something that had not happened prior to implementing movement. The
amount of crying is a glaring improvement. On average there were 4
incidents a week of a student crying loudly and being disruptive to the rest of
the class. During the previous week there was only one day were a student
cried and he was able to calm himself down and return to work.
With such positive results it is clear that this needs to be implemented
across all schools and boundaries. This all starts with teachers sharing ideas
and methods with other teachers. This can be done using websites like
teacher pay teacher, Facebook or Pinterest. Beyond teachers interacting, it
needs to be shared with principles so they can share it with out principles
and with the school board. It only takes a few people and an open positive
mind to get physical education incorporated across schools and across
curriculum. The students are the future of the world, they deserve for their
teachers to give them a healthy life with a depth of knowledge. Health
education is a major key in achieving that goal.
References:
18
Center For Disease Control. (2010, April 1). The association between
school-based physical activity, including physical education, and academic
performance. Retrieved from
http://www.cdc.gov/healthyschools/health_and_academics/pdf/pape_executiv
e_summary.pdf
Ciccomascolo, L. E., & Sullivan, E. C. (2011). Examining skills based
education in select secondary schools. In The dimensions of physical
education (pp. 123-179).
Nichols, B. (1986). Moving and learning: The elementary school physical
education experience.
St. Louis: Times Mirror/Mosby College Pub.
Pangrazi, R. P., Beighle, A., & Pangrazi, D. (2009). Promoting physical activity
& health in the classroom (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Benjamin Cummings.
Godman, H. (2014, April 9). Regular exercise changes the brain to improve
memory,
thinking skills - Harvard Health Blog - Harvard Health Publications.
Retrieved from
http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/regular-exercise-changes-brainimprove-memory-thi
Nking-skills-201404097110
Pate, R. R. (1995). Health and Fitness Through Physical Education.
Medicine & Science
in Sports & Exercise, 27(3), 62-69. Retrieved from
http://journals.humankinetics.com/AcuCustom/Sitename/Docume
nts/DocumentIt
em/TAP_24_NewPossibilitiesNewParadigms_08.pdf

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