My hopes are to share my resource and make it accessible for all elementary teachers to use. I hope that a ripple effect will take place and that all educators teaching physical education will find this resource useful for their teaching practice and that it will help them provide a higher quality learning experience for their students in elementary school.
Beyond my primary role as a full-time secondary physical education teacher, my desire is to help connect elementary and secondary schools in the same district catchment area. I would like to take on this role to help foster a culture of collaboration that becomes organic in implementation and that it can be done in a practical and effective way. From my findings during the extended practicum, I will continue to build on the living resource Toolbox to ensure it grows and improves in order to better serve the needs of all the stakeholders involved.
Limitations
One of the biggest limitations I foresee facing lie in the personal beliefs and motivations of the individual teachers. If an elementary school teacher is not interested or simply does not care about collaboration with secondary PE specialists and does not believe in the value it may bring, the process cannot take place. Teachers need to genuinely believe in this type of collaboration and buy into it while having a student centered approach in order to foster successful programs in the classrooms.
Another limitation that may pose to be a barrier is the added scheduling and logistic organization between the two schools involved. While seemingly minor, if coordinating schedules does not practically work out the collaboration between the elementary teacher and the PE specialist secondary teacher will be lukewarm and the process can be ineffective.
Geographically, some school district’s elementary and secondary schools are a great distance apart. For example, in districts like Richmond, catchment elementary schools are in closer proximity to their in-boundary secondary school while districts such as Fort Nelson the catchment schools can be hours drive apart. This is where the online resource can be especially useful.
“The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”
-SOCRATES
Future Projects
A mini-project that I would eventually like to facilitate is further collaboration between PE leadership classes in secondary schools and elementary PE classes. It would be amazing to see a secondary PE Leadership teacher help guide their students in creating a lesson that they will deliver to an elementary PE class. This can be done as part of a PE Leadership project or assignment. This adds another layer to help build a better collaborative relationship between high school PE teachers and elementary school teachers.
CC image courtesy of: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d9/Thacher_Montessori_gym.jpg
Limitations
