My Winter Term Teaching Reflection

For the last ten weeks I have been student teaching in four periods of physical education in a high school. When I first started the MAT program I really felt that I was more of a health teacher but I that I would enjoy teaching a class period or two of P.E. Now that I have experienced what it is like to be a P.E. teacher I love it. I am rather anxious about what I am going to do with myself in a health classroom.
At the term change, which was two weeks into my winter placement, I started my solo teaching. I was assigned three straight periods of Introduction to Physical Education, which is just a fancy way of saying freshmen P.E. I started the term off as their lead teacher with my cooperating teacher as more of an assistant than a teacher. I introduced the P.E. class expectations, I told them about the new cardiovascular fitness emphasis, and I answered their questions. I was the TEACHER! We started off in a badminton unit which I used as my worksample. It was a little rocky but I learned so much about my students and how to keep them participating.
It is some much more obvious in a P.E. classroom when students are not actively engaged compared to a regular classroom. In a regular classroom the students sit at their desks and are hopefully attentive, but at least they are quiet enough for the teacher to talk. In a P.E. class if the students aren’t actively engaged then nothing is happening. You see students sitting around or climbing on the walls, either way anyone that enters the classroom can tell that students are not learning. I found that my students were particularly into competition and choosing who their opponents were. If I tried to make anything a cooperative game then the students just didn’t care to try or if I chose their opponents/teammates they were less likely to try and more likely to argue. So I provided opportunities for my students to compete and to choose their teammates and opponents.
During my winter placement I was also responsible for disciplining students according to the non-dress policy, contacting parents, going to IEP meetings, posting progress report grades, and notifying counselors about issues with particular students. Since I have quite a few students that don’t particularly care for P.E. and thus would not dress down for P.E., I had to contact a few parents. Often at the beginning of the conversations with parents, especially when they contacted me first, the parents would have a rather harsh attitude towards me. Once I listened to what the parents had to say and started to offer a compromise I found most parents agreeing with me and how I run my classroom. Every conversation I had with a parent ended successfully and left me feeling more confident when I entered the classroom.
One of the most fulfilling experiences I had was when I had to choose two students of the month. I decided to choose a girl from that my class that is not athletic but had been trying really hard in my class. She is also considered a high risk student and comes from a rather difficult home life. I really liked her attitude in class and how she encouraged other students to participate in class. After I chose her for student of the month I let her know while we were running together during a cardio day. She seemed happy about the nomination but not overly excited. I later found out from my cooperating teacher that she was overjoyed at being chosen for student of the month and couldn’t stop talking about it to her next period teacher. The reason my cooperating teacher found out was because the other teacher stopped her in Staples to let her know how happy this student was and how impressed he was with me. From then on my student continued to put in excellent effort in class. It made me feel so good to not only make a student feel good about herself but to give her a reason to continue participating in class.
On my last day of class I gave my students a choice day. We were at the end of a basketball unit so one of the options was to play basketball shooting games in the gym. The other option was to play scatterball in the mat room. Scatterball is a version of dodgeball that only has one ball and no teams. I played. The students loved it. I heard more than once that it was the “most fun I have ever had in a P.E. class.” Most of my students had been begging me to play dodgeball from the first day of class. Letting my students play scatterball was a great way to end my time with them.
Now that my time is over in P.E., I am rather sad. I have so thoroughly enjoyed myself. I will miss my students and hope that they will come see me in my new room. I now know that if I got a job as a physical education teacher not only could I do and be successful but I would receive a great deal of fulfillment. I could show up everyday to school happy, excited, and ready to teach.