A common purpose or mission for PE curricula currently across Canada is the concept of lifelong physical activity: students learning the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be physically active for life

Curriculum Models:
1. The Multi-Activity Model
Purpose: to enable our students to become physically active movers throughout their lifetime
– Learning of motor skills while maintaining interest through the exposure to a wide variety of sport and movement
Limitations: This model is mainly sports dominated

2. Teaching Games for Understanding
Purpose: to teach the skills in a context where the students are encouraged to focus on the skill’s idea and how that skill is useful
– The idea is to break down the game, starting with a simplistic version, and bringing attention to the important skills of the game and why those skills are useful.

3. Hellison’s Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR)
Purposes:
– Teaching life skills and social values within a physically active environment unites a holistic approach to student’s development and personal growth
– To teach students how to be both personally and socially responsible

4. The Sport Education Model
Purposes:
– To develop “competent, literate, and enthusiastic sportspersons”
– Students will become knowledgeable players who understand and value sports
Limitations: Educators might misapply the principles resulting in the implementation of yet another form of elitist sports where the athletes play and the non-athletes are left out

5. The Fitness for Life Model
Purpose: Improving students’ fitness levels and developing healthy behaviours
– Health for everyone with an emphasis on lifetime activity designed to meet personal needs
Limitations: Educators must have full knowledge of all labs, exercise regimes, healthy eating tips and goal setting tools

6. Competencies–An Emerging Model for PE?
– Action competence in health involves young people developing their abilities, their commitment, and their capacity to influence and control their own health

7. Mixing and Matching of Curriculum Models
– Taking the best parts of different models and incorporating them together

Contexts for Curriculum Implementation:
1. Health Promoting Schools Approach
– Whole-school approach that both encompasses PE and provides a context for healthy behaviours in the school’s greater community

2. Long Term Athlete Development Model (LTAD)
– Encompasses aspects of physical education such as fundamental movement skills, training, competing, and being active for life.

3. Physical Literacy
“Individuals who are physically literate move with competence and confidence in a wide variety of physical activities in multiple environments that benefit the healthy development of the whole person” (PHE Canada)