How Can Health Enhancement/Physical Education Teachers
Help to Improve the Obesity Epidemic?
I am a Health Enhancement student at Montana State University. I am learning ways to help students understand health, and how everyday exercise can help them be healthy. I am learning the importance of making class active and fun for students so they will want to come to class and learn as stated by Prusak, Keven, Graser, Pennington, Zanadrea, Wilkinson, and Hager, “PE lessons should be designed to meet three goals, getting kids to become highly active, helping them achieve success, and ensuring that class will be a lot of fun.” The big thing in a HE class is making the lesson you are teaching have ways for students to feel like they have had success in the class. If your students can have fun while they are exercising this will help them feel like exercising can be fun even away from school. This way of teaching is a new concept and will help students be able to manage their own health and become healthier adults. Stated by Prusak, Keven, Graser, Pennington, Zanadrea, Wilkinson, and Hager, “It becomes even clearer that we must train teachers differently with a different end in mind. That end should be healthier kids, capable of managing their own lifestyle choices as children, and later as adults.” I found this article very interesting because they talk about how we need to teach new HE teachers, and this is what I am already learning.
Health Enhancement teachers at Montana State are learning ways to keep students moving for the full time they are in class. As a student at Montana State I have been in many Health Enhancement classes around Bozeman and I have seen multiple ways of teaching. Instead of the old way teachers have taught by having kids play dodge ball, or duck duck goose, teachers have students doing multiple stations in class. There are climbing walls, crawling stations, cargo nets, it is amazing to see what kids do now compared to what I did when I was a kid. If students have a chance to choose what they want to do in class, it makes class more fun and gives them ideas of things to do at home away from school.
The one thing that we as Health Enhancement teachers have problems with is that there has been a lack of support for HE, this makes it hard to have a say in what we can do to help make healthy children. As stated by Prusak, Keven, Graser, Pennington, Zanadrea, Wilkinson, and Hager, “We often lament that there is just not enough money, support, or respect for our field to make a significant impact on American lifestyle decisions.” I definitely agree with the statement they are making here.
HE teachers don’t have much respect, and that is somewhat our own fault because of the HE teachers that are out there just to be coaches, that just teach the old ways and sit on the sidelines and are not good role models.
Health Enhancement is being taught by general teachers who are not being taught themselves how to teach HE classes. Stated by Welch, and Wright “Yet, the generalist primary teachers enlisted to teach HE curriculum often have minimal formalized background and content knowledge of HE.” This cuts down on the opportunities for graduating HE teachers who went through the training to teach students the best way to keep moving through the day and be healthy. This is even happening in Bozeman middle schools where they use general K-8th grade teachers to teach HE. This is not helping the obesity epidemic when you have teachers who don’t know what it is to have the knowledge of HE curriculum. If we as HE teachers get the opportunities we need to get into schools and then we could help with the obesity epidemic.
Another thing that has happened is that HE was being cut in a lot of schools and this reduction would not help the obesity epidemic. As stated by Prusak, Keven, Graser, Pennington, Zanadrea, Wilkinson, and Hager, “A stark reduction in required HE time has been accompanied by a commensurate rise in child and youth obesity rates.” Now this new obesity epidemic is becoming more of a problem the reduction in HE is being looked at more and it might be changing. Again stated by Prusak, Keven, Graser, Pennington, Zanadrea, Wilkinson, and Hager, “Because of increases in obesity, HE is being looked upon with more favorable eyes than it has for decades.” This is a good thing for HE teachers knowing that we are learning ways to help students become healthy children and hopefully they take what they learn into adulthood.
In conclusion the way I see that Health Enhancement teachers can help the obesity epidemic in is to give children the tools they need to be active in school and away from school. If we as teachers can get student to learn fun and great ways to get exercise every day I believe this would help students become healthier and even healthier as adults. If the students could take what they learn from HE teachers and use it in everyday life then the obesity epidemic could start to slow down. This would be great if HE teachers could get the backing from the schools and community we work for. Health Enhancement teachers can only do so much and as I am learning we will do our best to help students be as healthy as they are willing to be. It is the goal of the HE community to make the world a healthy and fit place to live.
Work Cited
Steele, Marcee M. "Health and Fitness: An Issue for High School Teachers and Students." The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 84.2 (2011): 72-74. Print.
Prusak, Keven, Susan V. Graser, Todd Pennington, Maria Zanadrea, Carol Wilkinson, and Ron Hager. "A Critical Look at Physical Education and What Must Be Done to Address Obesity Issues." Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance 82.4 (2011): 39-46. Print.
Welch, Rosie, and Jan Wright. “Tracing Discourses of Health and the Body: Exploring Pre-service Primary Teachers' Constructions of ‘healthy’ Bodies.”." Asia-Pacific Journal of Teacher Education 39.3 (2011): 199-210. Print.
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