LIFETIME FITNESS

Dimond High School

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska—When students take soccer from PE teacher Dale Kephart at Anchorage's Dimond High School, they don't have the usual all-or-nothing experience of playing in a game or, alternatively, sitting on the sidelines for the whole class period. Instead Kephart, who has been teaching one form of fitness or another for 33 years, keeps all the kids busy all the time. They start with warm-ups then move into a series of exercises—five minutes each of push-ups or crunches, dribbling, playing two-on-two, and mini-games where everyone is active—before the cool-down period.

"It's just not enough anymore to throw the ball out there and have them play," says Kephart. "You get some cardiorespiratory exercise from that, but the other components of fitness aren't addressed. We really try to build for a lifetime of fitness here, in all our activities."

Kephart is a nationally recognized pioneer of this approach, and has been actively involved in promoting it since the early 1990s throughout Alaska in her work on the Anchorage School District Curriculum committee.

Currently in that state, the most explicit introduction kids get to this approach is a Lifetime Personal Fitness Course, one of three semester-long PE courses required for graduation. Kephart identifies six components for all-around fitness: (1) cardio-respiratory fitness, or aerobics; (2) body composition; (3) muscular endurance (from repeated motions); (4) muscular strength (from weight lifting); (5) flexibility; and (6) stress management, taught by progressive muscle relaxation techniques and visualization.

"We also teach about nutrition, substance abuse, posture, and miscellaneous subjects like the effect of hot and cold weather on exercise, because here in Alaska that makes a big difference," Kephart says. "And we talk about how exercise helps prevent cardiovascular disease. We weave these concepts throughout so that classes actually teach wellness."

But, she's quick to add, the focus is still on activity. Despite all the concepts Kephart covers, she doesn't like her students sitting still in class for more than five minutes. "Sometimes I have them grab their notebooks and work for up to five minutes on a worksheet," Kephart says. "If they are doing circuits of activities around the gym, they pause before each one to work together figuring out questions on the sheet about that area. Or," she continues, "sometimes I deliver the concepts during cool-down periods. At the end of the week, I ask them to work in groups to remember the points covered. Every second week, I test them."

In developing curriculum for the district and her high school, Kephart and her colleagues relied on guidance from the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE), a member of the Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance. NASPE recognizes individual teachers for excellence in the field. In 1998, Kephart won the Alaska NASPE award for High School Physical Education Teacher of the Year, followed by the Northwest district award, and finally the national award.

The video Kephart submitted to the award committee features her Lifetime Personal Fitness class. In it, she has students begin with a warm-up of some basic dance steps, followed by a stretch. Then students divide into groups and move through a series of stations focusing on the difference between moderately intensive activity (such as aerobic dance) and high-intensity activity (such as jumping). At each station, students do a different activity: aerobic steps, hamstring curls, jump rope, modern dance movements, jumping over small plastic hurdles, and a shuttle run in which a basketball is passed back and forth. "They learned how their heart rate varied during different kinds of activity," says Kephart. "I finished with cool-down exercises, during which I reviewed the concepts."

Kephart also stresses that she teaches leadership and critical thinking by having students teach each other what they have learned, and devise exercises to illustrate concepts for the entire class. Usually these are done cooperatively.

"I've always taught PE with fitness in mind," says Kephart, "but now we have more information about how to do that, and we understand why it's important. Our goal is to have all kids be as active as possible and to understand why that matters."

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