In the "New PE," Every Kid Can Succeed, Not Just The Jocks

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Story by Suzie Boss

SEATTLE, Washington—PE never used to look like this. At Meany Middle School in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, morning gym class gets underway with a blur of 80 bodies in motion, a whir of skate wheels across the wooden floor, and the throb of a golden oldies soundtrack.

On the north side of the city at Roosevelt High, two dozen teens start the day kick-boxing to a funkier rhythm, doing their best to keep pace with a high-energy instructor named Teri Galloway. When she calls "time," students pause to check their electronic heart-rate monitors and catch their breath. In an adjoining room, classmates line up to scale a plywood wall that's been implanted with plastic "rocks" to use as handholds. Getting across the horizontal span without dropping to the padded floor takes not only upper-arm strength, but also good thinking.

At Sanislo Elementary in south Seattle, youngsters run a warm-up loop around the schoolyard then pour into the gym, eager to ride unicycles, turn handsprings, and juggle sets of balls, pins, and even tennis racquets with the agility of circus performers.

Anyone old enough to remember when gym class involved choosing up teams for dodge ball will be amazed by the transformation.

And that's great news, according to Bud Turner, coordinator of K-12 physical education for Seattle Public Schools. At 54, Turner has spent three decades selling his community on the benefits of what he calls "success-oriented PE." It's an approach that's gathering momentum nationwide by teaching kids to work for their personal best rather than besting the opposing team, to elevate wellness above winning. "It's all about kids saying, 'Aha! I can do it!'" says Turner. "And then it becomes a personal thing, to see how far they can go." The gym offers an ideal venue for teaching cooperation, creativity, and critical thinking, he adds, right along with physical skills.

From his involvement on national advisory committees and years of leadership and writing in the field, Turner knows that his school district "is far ahead of much of the rest of the country" in reforming its physical education curriculum. "PE gets the attention it deserves," he says, in a district that has adopted content frameworks for physical education and employs a teaching staff of about 150 PE specialists. And Seattle kids are all the better for it: Test scores consistently show them to be some of the fittest young people in the nation. Last year, the district had 6,000 students earning the Presidential Physical Fitness Award by scoring at or above the 85th percentile on each of five fitness challenges. Two schools in the district are national demonstration sites for the President's Challenge, and others receive a steady stream of visitors.

While Seattle may be the largest district in the region to embrace the new PE trend, other districts and individual teachers are pedaling fast in the same direction. Classes in mountain biking, downhill skiing, and other thrill-packed adventure sports, along with more relaxing pursuits such as yoga and tai chi, are such a departure from gym classes of old that even Sports Illustrated has paused from covering pro sports to weigh in on their merits.

If these courses sound like the program listings from a private health club or outdoorsy resort, it's no accident. The idea is to make physical activity so appealing that it becomes a habit—especially for the 75 percent of high school students who are currently not enrolled in any PE classes, according to the U.S. Surgeon General. At a time when American youth are less fit and more fat than ever before, educators make no apologies for using fun to motivate kids to get up and get moving—not just for gym class, but for a lifetime.

NOBODY SITS OUT

Sue Turner, a Washington State PE Teacher of the Year, can remember what it was like to be a new teacher nearly 30 years ago. She based her curriculum on competitive team sports like basketball and softball, just as she'd been taught. But she couldn't help noticing that the gifted athletes—maybe 10 or 15 percent of her students—would dominate the action while the majority of kids seldom touched the ball. When class ended, half the students would swagger out as winners and the other half dragged out as losers. "Kids came out of gym class screaming at each other about who had won that day. I knew they needed something different," she explains, "where they could compete against themselves instead of against each other. They needed alternatives."

That's when she started introducing individual activities like tumbling. Right away, the mood changed. Instead of jeering about gym-class victories or who got picked last for teams, students would cheer each other on as they learned to perform cartwheels or handsprings. Before long, Turner was adding unicycles and juggling. (Her husband, Bud Turner, convinced the district to invest in alternative PE equipment; the district now owns a fleet of 3,500 unicycles.)

Teaching at a school that enrolls many children from low-income families, Sue Turner knows that most of her students would never have been able to afford private gymnastics lessons. Yet over the years, hundreds of Sanislo students have performed with SCATS, a skilled, school-based acrobatic troupe that grew out of her PE classes. Their goal isn't perfection, but participation. "We could practice round-offs over and over until they were all doing them perfectly," she says, "but that isn't what we're about. These kids love to fly," she says, pointing across the gym to a girl who turns a series of handsprings so fast, her body seems to blur. "And they love to show off," she adds with a laugh, pointing to a small boy zipping past on a big unicycle. "I want to get them to experience the thrill of that, so that they'll learn to move for the rest of their lives."

Barbara McEwan, another award-winning Seattle PE specialist, shudders to remember games like Soak 'Em that were par for the course when she started teaching 28 years ago. "The object was basically for kids to beat each other up with balls," she says. Today, she's more inclined to plan activities that require cooperation and problem solving. "These games won't work if everybody tries to be the leader. They have to figure out ways to work together," she explains. McEwan has to talk loud to be heard over the din of a gym full of first-graders engaged in what looks like a mini-carnival. In teams of four or five, kids try to toss tennis balls into a tall cylinder, keep a giant ball in the air, or drop a ring onto a cone. Each activity requires teamwork along with physical skills.

Designing activities so that all kids can participate—and feel successful—is a hallmark of the new PE. That means no relay races where a dozen students stand and watch for every kid who runs. It means assigning open-ended tasks that allow kids to progress as far as they can individually. It means modifying traditional team sports so teams are much smaller and everyone gets more opportunities to practice skills. "You wouldn't teach a group of kids to read by having one book and passing it down a line of 10 kids," Bud Turner says, "but too often, that's how we try to teach sports skills." Instead, he promotes activities that teach all students "to learn to move and move to learn."

Success-oriented PE also means broadening the curriculum to appeal to all kinds of kids—the ones sporting tattoos and green hair as well as those with crew-cuts and washboard abs. "Some kids would never participate in team sports, but they thrive in individual activities," says Turner. Others love the competitive arena. "We need to offer something for all of them." Recently, for instance, a group of girls signed up for a Roosevelt High aerobics class because they wanted help managing their weight. By the end of the term, beams instructor Teri Galloway, "They were probably my fittest students." Not only had their cardiovascular fitness and endurance improved, but they had learned to warm up and cool down to prevent injuries—all habits that promote a healthier lifestyle.

Although the new gym activities can look pretty loose and freewheeling, there's a philosophy underlying the fun. "We provide a safe environment where kids can learn, no matter what their abilities, skills, or attitudes," explains PE specialist and diversity expert Mona Mendoza of Meany Middle School. "Our kids give respect and get respect." Her school teaches predominately low-income, minority youth, "and they know we have high expectation for them," Mendoza says. "We won't allow them not to be successful."

Lasting personal success—not a fleeting team victory—is the big goal. In a recent interview in USA Today, Virginia Tech health and PE professor George Graham stressed the power of positive experiences to get kids hooked on fitness. "If you can design a program where kids are successful 80 percent of the time," he said, "you have a good program."

TRY ONE NEW THING

If Seattle's experience is typical, it takes time, energy, and creative fundraising to expand PE offerings beyond the old-fashioned basics. To stretch its budget, Seattle has built partnerships with a host of community sponsors, from the U.S. Tennis Association to golfers on the pro circuit to the Seattle Sonics basketball team. High school weight rooms—stocked with used, donated equipment—are functional but not fancy. Instead of leaving boxes of equipment to gather dust in school storage rooms, the district operates a PE lending library. Class sets of everything from heart-rate monitors to bicycles and helmets to yo-yos rotate from school to school, getting more use from more students. And the $4,000 rock walls that are springing up in school gyms all over town are built with wood donated by a local lumber company and other materials paid for through "buy-a-rock" fund-raising campaigns.

Equipment alone doesn't make for an innovative PE program, of course. Just as important is a willingness by teachers to work with kids in new ways. In Seattle, the average age of PE specialists is about 50, Turner estimates. Many teachers grew up on a diet of traditional team sports, and some traditions die hard. "A lot of them are used to teaching baseball, basketball, and maybe a little volleyball for variety," Turner says. The best PE classes in the district, he says, didn't get that way because of fancy facilities or big budgets. "Staff is the key. The most important ingredient is good teaching."

In his crusade to remake the PE mold, Turner visits at least half a dozen schools a day (driving a car with "PE4KIDS" license plates). He makes a point to bring along something new. One day it's pedometers to remind teachers to increase their own activity levels so they aren't teaching from the bleachers; another day it's posters to brighten gym walls and spread the pro-PE message. Turner will conduct a one-on-one workshop any time a teacher requests instruction in teaching a specific activity. Once a year, he puts on a West's Best PE conference that attracts several hundred attendees and presenters from all over the country. "It's packed with ideas that teachers can try on the spot and incorporate into our classes tomorrow," says McEwan. Turner even produces videos to keep fresh ideas circulating—one of the reasons teachers call him "a man of a million ideas."

"Every year, I try to add one new thing to what I'm teaching," says Darrell Montzingo, PE specialist at Roosevelt High. In his 21 years of teaching gym classes, he's introduced everything from archery to racquet sports to rowing to golf. Montzingo appreciates sports that can be enjoyed by all students, whatever their physical abilities. And that's right in line with district policy promoting PE activities that motivate students to succeed, "regardless of gender, size, age, and current level of ability or interest."

Once teachers get comfortable with nontraditional gym activities, they often discover that their own job satisfaction goes up. "It's so much more fun to teach this way," says Jerry Ronk, PE specialist at Meany Middle School for 19 years. "And it's rewarding to give kids a chance to better themselves. We encourage them to keep retesting, trying for better personal scores, right up to the end of the term. We want them to succeed. These activities build their confidence." Once his students master a fast turn on roller skates, learn a basic three-ball cascade in juggling, or build up the arm strength to hold a handstand, he says, "they feel like they can learn anything. And we see that attitude carry over to their academic classrooms, too. Their teachers come back to us and say, what did you do to get these kids so excited about learning?"

Teaching Above the Shoulders

Without a doubt, the new PE requires more thinking—by students and teachers alike. "We don't just teach up to here," says Montzingo, gesturing to his shoulders. "We take it all the way up to here," he says, and taps his forehead.

Districts that can't afford PE specialists may still be treating gym classes as "glorified recess," admits Turner. Only seven states require PE specialists at the elementary level, according to a survey by the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. "There's so much pressure on classroom teachers now to make sure their kids meet high academic standards," laments Turner. "Most of them don't have time to plan a new PE curriculum, too."

With a little creativity, however, even a traditional class like weight training can be retooled to fit the new PE model. Instead of just hoisting barbells, students can learn the names of the muscles, reinforcing what they've studied in biology. They can learn which exercises are most likely to produce gains in strength or flexibility, and which ones will improve cardiovascular fitness. They can use math skills or computer programming to track changes in their body mass index (BMI) or calculate their target heart rate. They can learn to develop their own training program, tailored to their individual fitness goals. The girl who's interested in overall toning will find weight training just as valuable as the guy who wants to build his biceps.

Well-planned, purposeful PE offers opportunities to integrate not only academic lessons, but cultural and social ones, as well. Rock climbing walls, for instance, provide an ideal backdrop for teaching the body and the mind. At first, students are motivated by the sheer physical challenge: Can they get all the way across without touching the ground? The instructor can make the task more challenging by asking students to use only certain rocks, or connecting pairs of students with a "lifeline" and having them stage a rescue of another student. Seattle has developed a rock-wall curriculum that includes physical activity, problem solving, creativity, and cooperation.

Do students appreciate the variety and depth of today's PE? Probably not yet, admits Montzingo. "Not until they're adults and look back will they know just how much variety they were offered here," he suspects. By then, with any luck, they will consider fitness not just a goal from those gym classes they took as kids, but something to embrace in their daily lives. "Will I keep doing this?" asks a wiry 12-year-old who learned to ride a unicycle when she was a first-grader and has been getting better ever since. "You bet!"

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