You Oughta Know

As a physical education and/or health education teacher, there are couple bits of wisdom that may prove useful to know and consider when creating a curriculum and assessment plan. First and foremost, when designing an assessment plan, the physical educator should consider using mostly formative assessments with a few summative assessments. Additionally, the instructor should give heavy consideration to using a select few choices of feedback types, especially interpretation by rule, explanation, and displaying results graphically. These three types of feedback have been extremely successful in improving percentile improvement in students. Furthermore, it would be beneficial for the teacher to analyze how his or her respective groups of students view their ability to experience success in the classroom - whether it be that the students are driven to be success through a value of success or a value of avoiding failure, or that students attribute their success to ability, luck, effort, or task difficulty.

When developing a curriculum, it may be of use to remember to not force too many topics into your content for the year or the semester or quarter. As suggested by Marzano, teachers ought to consider covering just 15 topics or less throughout the year. To address the issue of a lack of unidimensionality in assessment grades, physical education and health teachers should to concoct a system by which students are given one grade for an assessment emphasizing one dimension, rather than one grade for an assessment emphasizing multiple dimensions.

Finally, physical education and health education teachers should try their best to form alliances with administrators, principles, and state and national educational organizations to try to break down the barriers facing their curriculum and instruction. With the use of constructive discussions and meetings regarding the reformation of standards, goals, and objectives within state documents, educators may be able to more easily write lesson, assessment, and unit plans to meet the state's needs.