Rachel Gurvitch

Being a Protege: An Autoethnographic View of Three Teacher Education Doctoral Programs.

Those in professional and academic fields generally perceive mentoring as a positive relationship that enhances the lives of protégés. Kram (1985) posits that such relationships between dyads in organisational life are an evolutionary, developmental process. The purpose of this article is to explore protégés’ perspectives on their mentoring relationships within doctoral programs. In order to lessen the insurmountable distance between writers and readers that is often associated with a traditional research study, we employ an autoethnographic approach to research writing. We share our journey after having studied the mentoring relationships within our own doctoral programs. Qualitative data collected over a two‐year period consist of journal entries, email correspondence, and phone conversations. This research offers insight into the mentor–protégé relationship and processes, and it provides implications for practice for protégés and mentors, as well as future research directions.

Animated Video Clips: Learning in the Current Generation

The teaching and learning processes have undergone a variety of changes and modifications in recent years. The overall academic goal is to produce engaged, lifelong learners who are capable of solving complex problems in diverse settings. These desired skills cannot be achieved via the traditional teaching and learning model that requires students to be passive recipients of knowledge. Therefore, teachers must acknowledge that as traditional teaching methods lose their relevancy in educational settings, they must be willing to make radical changes to the way they conceptualize the teaching and learning process. As a practical suggestion to address the challenges of constructing new learning applications, this article describes an innovative use of animated video clips to help achieve desired learning outcomes.

Aligning Learning Activities with Instructional Models

Model-based instruction has been increasingly used in physical education for the past two decades. Metzler (2011) identified eight instructional models that are commonly used in physical education today. Each model is designed to promote certain kinds of learning outcomes for students and to address different combinations of the national standards. Since each instructional model promotes a unique array of learning outcomes, there are differences in the kinds of learning activities that can be used across models in physical education. The purpose of this article is to describe how some typical learning activities in physical education can be aligned with each model and across different models.

Theory into Practice: Keeping the Purpose in Mind: The Implementation of Instructional Models in Physical Education Settings

January/February 2010 Is there “one best way to teach” physical education? Perhaps a better question would be can there be one best way to teach physical education? The current NASPE standards state that P-12 programs should promote six major student learning outcomes: 1) demonstrating competence in motor skills and movement; 2) understanding movement concepts, principles, strategies, and tactics; 3) having regular participation in physical activity; 4) achieving and maintaining a health-enhancing level of physical fitness; 5) exhibiting responsible personal and social behavior in physical activity settings; and 6) valuing physical activity for health, enjoyment, challenge, self-expression, and/or social interaction (NASPE, 2004). This variety of learning outcomes, and the need to promote development in all three major learning domains, makes it extremely unlikely that any single approach to teaching in physical education will promote student achievement for all of these standards. If a teacher instructs the same way all of the time, his/her students will achieve only one or a few of the standards — but there will be little or no achievement on the rest of the standards. This strongly implies that teachers must use more than one instructional approach across their content units and that students must be engaged in many different kinds of learning tasks within a school’s physical education curriculum. We now have a conceptualization of how to teach physical education that can help teachers meet students’ needs to achieve all of the major learning outcomes cited above – the ModelsBased Instruction (MBI) (Metzler, 2005). Models-Based Instruction is a comprehensive approach to teaching and learning. In MBI, a teacher becomes familiar with multiple ways (called models) to plan, implement and assess instruction, and then selects the model that can best promote specific kinds of student learning in each unit. By using several models within the same curriculum, a teacher (or a department) has a much better chance to promote the full range of student learning in the NASPE standards. An instructional model (IM) is a comprehensive and coherent plan for teaching. Each IM includes the following components: theoretical foundation, learning domain priorities, guides for teacher decisionmaking, unique types of student learning tasks, assessments, and Keeping the Purpose in Mind:

Video Editing: A Service-learning Assignment in Adapted Physical Education

For most physical education teacher education (PETE) programs, the constraints surrounding the undergraduate curriculum (e.g., number of credit hours, dual content certificates such as health and physical education, content knowledge) limit PETE programs to offering only one course in adapted physical education (APE) with the expectation that this training is sufficient to prepare highly qualified teachers to teach students with disabilities in general and adapted physical education. The inclusion of service learning (SL) methods in the APE curriculum is one approach to facilitating the successful preparation of preservice teachers to teach students with disabilities by increasing their opportunity to connect information learned in their program to the “real world.” Assessment strategies used in the APE course must tap into this naturalistic setting of the SL experience and ensure preservice students are prepared to assume the duties of a future professional. This article discusses how an APE course used a video-editing SL project to document student learning and performance in the Adapted Physical Education National Standards and prepare future general PETE students to teach students with disabilities.

Teacher Evaluation: Done to You or with You?

Educational reform in the past decade has placed a very strong emphasis on teacher accountability and student achievement. This change in focus has caused a thorough reexamination of how teacher quality and effectiveness are defined in the field, and has triggered a reform of the teacher evaluation process. As a result, generic, all-encompassing evaluation systems are being developed to evaluate teachers across all subject areas, including physical education. This one-size-fits-all approach meets the more obvious goal of evaluation, which is to review and appraise the competence level of teachers, but questions arise about whether the evaluation will improve teacher effectiveness. This generic approach overlooks the actual context in which teaching takes place and disregards the subject matter being taught. If the primary goal of teacher evaluation is to help teachers become more effective, the evaluation system must provide teachers with objective, content-specific feedback to inform practice and guide them to improve their teaching effectiveness. This article discusses concerns related to using some of the more generic evaluation systems currently being implemented in schools to evaluate physical education teachers. It concludes with suggestions about how physical education teacher education programs can provide observation tools to their teacher candidates to improve teacher effectiveness.

Shake It Out! Belly Dance in Physical Education

Belly dance is a folk dance with a history that can be traced back to the beginnings of civilization. It is a form of expression and movement that has been used for hundreds of years in religious ceremonies, birthing rituals, and social and familial gatherings in the Middle East. Students of belly dance can increase their muscular strength and endurance through the muscle isolations and contractions that are characteristic of this dance form. They can also learn rhythm and movement patterns, respect for self and others in dance and performance settings, and can discover a new form of self-expression and creativity. Therefore, belly dance could be a welcome addition to the physical education curriculum. The purpose of this article is to share the fundamentals of a beginner-level belly dance unit for inclusion in a recreation, dance or physical education setting.

Congratulations!: A Guide for the New Graduate Student

Abstract After 16 years of schooling, you may feel like an expert student—but graduate school is different!