Former PE teacher shapes fitness in Kansas schools

By Julie Rausch

Making physical education — better known as the required, and often times much dreaded, gym class — hip among high school and middle school students, particularly those who are not athletes, is the goal of two PE programs.

WSU’s Endowment Association administers approximately $1 million received in grants from the Kansas Health Foundation to fund the Physical Dimensions and Physical Focus projects directed by Bobbie Harris. Harris’ projects are housed in the College of Education’s department of kinesiology and sport studies.

Physical Dimensions, directed toward high school students, piloted in five Kansas high schools in 1994 and now is in 140 Kansas schools. A new curriculum for middle school students called Physical Focus is being tried this year at seven Kansas schools including Coleman Middle School in Wichita.

Learning about health, safety and responsibility in physical education classes are primary goals. One strategy — which has made the program so successful among high school physical education teachers and students — is gaining knowledge by having fun in class, says Harris. Other goals of the program include a curriculum which is non-competitive and teamwork-oriented with non-traditional activities. Some of these activities include lacrosse, fencing, hackey sac, biking, canoeing, roller blading and jump band, which involves jumping or dancing between long, stretched elastic bands.

From a fitness standpoint, one of the program’s goals is to keep students moving for between 12-20 minutes at one time to benefit cardiovascular health.

“We have taken physical activity and put it together with health concepts,” says Harris.

Recognizing that middle school is a critical time for students, Physical Focus teaches responsibility through physical activity.

“We focus on what affects them now, taking self-responsibility and applying that to personal and social behavior as well as choices and decision-making,” Harris says.

Within the physical activity goals of both programs, Harris says, the curriculum focuses on simply being physically active and making good choices.

“We are teaching that students don’t have to be athletes, and they don’t have to do vigorous, hard workouts,” says Harris. “We just want them to be physically active three or four times a week. If they do this, we believe that the quality of their lives will be better. We know that inactive, overweight youths tend to become inactive, overweight adults.”

Harris, a former high school physical education teacher for 20 years, is one of several PE coordinators who helped write a model for the high school and middle school physical education curricula.

The professional consensus for years had been that high school physical education programs in Kansas were not preparing students to live a physically active, healthy life. It was also recognized that the average high school student hated taking gym, says Harris.

In fact, daily enrollment in high school PE classes across the United States dropped from 42 percent of students in 1991 to 25 percent in 1995, according to Marlene Tappe, a Purdue University professor and author of a book on promoting lifelong physical activity for young people.

The initial challenge in 1991 by the Kansas Health Foundation, which offered to support a different fitness curriculum in Kansas, was for Harris and other physical education coordinators to do a national search and find a program that would fit Kansas. The group didn’t find a suitable program, so instead they wrote one.

Although Harris, a College of Education alumna, works from an office housed at WSU, she’s often not there. Most of her time is spent traveling the state trying to convince additional Kansas schools to implement the fitness programs.

Physical Dimension and Physical Focus currently are free to Kansas schools that decide to implement the program. Grant money from the Kansas Health Foundation provides training and implementation of physical activities and health and wellness curriculum for Kansas schools. The foundation pays for teacher training and allows schools like Coleman to have a computer, watch-style heart monitors, and activity equipment.

Harris says schools in other states have inquired about the programs; they have to purchase the curriculum materials and training.

The Physical Dimension curriculum was featured in the Wall Street Journal last fall and in Better Homes and Gardens in 1997.

“New PE is for all those poor souls who were picked last on a team and hated every single minute waiting to be chosen,” says Harris.

The idea behind Physical Dimensions and Physical Focus is the same as its motto, that educating students in physical education classes should be “for health, for fitness, for life.”

 

A group of high school physical education
teachers learn some dance steps as part of
their training to implement a new PE program
affiliated with WSU’s College of Education.