I first heard about the physical education program in Naperville, Illinois from a our podcast with John O'Sullivan.
This program is talked about in detail by Paul Zientarski who is a
PE Consultant, Educational Consultant, and Author. The results speak for themselves and reinfocre what most of us coaches have been advocating for years. More Physical Education in our schools.
12 Minutes to Make the Case for Physical Education
Being asked to do a Ted X Talk was amazing yet one of the hardest experiences I have ever attempted. Normally I am invited to give a 60-90 minute talk about the “Learning Readiness PE” program that I initiated at Naperville Central H.S. in Illinois. For those of you who don’t know, the longest Ted Talk is 18 minutes and they asked me to pare it down to 12. That in itself is a tough task. Initially I was going to spend much of my time explaining the neuro-science behind our program which I learned from Dr. John Ratey, the author of SPARK, when he visited our physical education program in 2003. Then add my involvement with Dr John Medina, author of Brain Rules, and Dr. Chuck Hillman, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. While these great men have taught me a lot about how fitness and exercise enhance learning and influence the brain, the Ted Talk staff thought I should spend more time talking about our program so that is what I did.
I believe if we are going to resurrect daily physical education in schools it will be because the science continually shows that students who have been active and are fit do significantly better academically than their peers who have sat all day. Administrators and school boards are not concerned to a great deal about the health of students. Their concern revolves around students’ test scores for which they are held accountable. We have to show the value we bring to the educational system in terms of improving academic performance. Physical education enhances learning if moderate to vigorous movement is maintained in class.
With that in mind, my administration asked me to create a Zero Hour PE class, described in SPARK, which morphed into “Learning Readiness PE” or LRPE for short. Over the years of collecting data we discovered that students who had physical education 1 or 2 hours before a class they struggled in, such as reading and math, they did significantly better than students in the same academic class that had physical education afterward. Data can be looked at on our website www.learningreadinesspe.com
Shown below is the 12-minute Ted X Talk that came out of painstaking work over months working with my Ted X Talk coaches. Knowing that I was representing thousands of physical education professionals around the country, I felt enormous pressure. I hope you agree that I represented our profession proudly.
Read the original article here
Source: http://community.shapeamerica.org/
Contact Info:
Paul Zientarski
PE Consultant/Educational Consultant/Author
2925 Portage St.
Naperville, IL 60564
Phone # 630-961-0525 cell # 630-220-4136
TWITTER @PaulZientarski