What are we prepared to be held accountable for and to whom?
That was a question posed by Dr. Hal Lawson to the PETE community yesterday, and it has kept reverberating through my overloaded brain into today. What DOES PETE want to be held accountable for…and who are we accountable to? Much of this, to me, connects from the AIESEP conversation (find it here and the follow up discussion here) that talked about the Joe Wicks phenomena in the UK.
Our field does have to do with PA (although it seems like sometimes saying you’re a PA researcher gets critiqued), but do we actually want to be held accountable for the dissemination of PA to youth? Do we want to be accountable for health outcomes as a lot of the movement, especially in the USA was in the early 2000’s, when the field of PE was pushed toward a public health model? Do we want to be held accountable for the quality of our education online? Or are we saying that this is just a blip, and we’ll get back to business “as usual” in a few months?
But I digress…Let’s get to the summary of the second PETE Collaborative. If you missed the first one you can listen here. You can also find all the documents related and shared by clicking on the button at the bottom of the page here.
This conversation was broken into two parts. The first part was about online instruction in PETE and was facilitated by Jen Krause, Michael Hemphill, and Helena Baert. And the second part was more focused on the “big picture” of how this pandemic can impact PETE and higher education in general. This section was facilitated by K. Andrew. R. Richards, Hal Lawson, and Jen Walton-Fisette. You can listen to the audio of this conversation here.
While I was listening in on the conversation the chat on the zoom call was filling up with tons of great content, questions, and ideas. I’ve edited the chat and that can be found in a separate post on the blog next to this one. I tried to break up the chat into sections as best I could.
Part 1: Online teaching in PETE during a pandemic
This was a really engaging conversation that ranged in topics in the chat and by Drs. Baert, Hemphill and Krause. In the chat it became apparent that ‘virtual office hours’ were not a hit! It seems that many of us are sitting in empty zoom rooms with little student engagement when the meetings are voluntary. As we spoke last time in the first collaborative the comparison of synchronous and asynchronous classes came up. The asynchronous format was advocated by both Dr. Michael Hemphill and Dr. Baert as we really don’t know what structures students have in place at home and some of them could be working in a home where there is no quiet space to study, and thus a synchronous format could be hard to pull off effectively. This also brings to light the issue of equity and access that students face no matter which institution they attend.
That said, a comment on the chat stuck out to me… From mmitchel : “Is this a variation on the “Will this be on the final exam?” question? Specifically, why do I need to come to lectures or advising if can answer the questions myself? Another variation on what is the value-add that we faculty bring to the equation?” I am just going to leave that to the reader to ponder.
Michael brought up an interesting point that he has observed about student ability in the tech realm. Often, we assume students are very tech savvy as they are highly engaged in social media, podcasts, watching YouTube videos etc. However, they may be unskilled in basic things like converting a word document into a PDF, or skills on excel. We should provide resources to these skills and should not assume that students know them. We as PETE faculty may need to get some PD through summer reading as suggested by Michael in reading the book Minds Online by Michell Miller. I will be reading this for sure anyone interested in a book club podcast?
Staying on topic about how PETE on-line education is affected by the pandemic, the chat moved to how instructors are modifying field experiences. Here are some ideas: Having students do interviews with teachers, do some e-planning with them, develop unit and lesson plans, watch videos on Atlas or GoReact (although both may be limited w/potential budget cuts) or other websites described in the blog about the first meeting. Some districts are allowing PSTs access to google classroom or class Facebook pages, where other districts don’t allow access at all. Some are making PPTs and sharing with their cooperating teachers, and others are just grading student assessments. As we can see the range is WIDE!
I encourage you to check out the chat around 14:28, when we get into a discussion about how we may come back to school in the fall and all of the repercussions that could result from that. These include (but are not limited to): PST placements being limited to one classroom, no multi-class visits, no switching schools or levels, re-doing EdTPA at a later date and getting a temporary license, starting on-line in the fall with 8-week courses and then transitioning to in-person in the late fall, or simply being shut out of schools entirely for field based classes. We may really need to re-think how we collaborate across universities to share resources. Elizabeth Sharp from Colorado Mesa shared a project her students are working on that helps build a video library.
Part 2: The consequences of COVID on PETE and higher education
Once we switched to the second part of the discussion the comments changed from our individual classes to the big picture ideas. Hal Lawson spoke on his big picture questions that led to great comments from Jen Walton-Fisette on a range of topics. Jen brought up the fact that with limited resources to work on skill development, we could be focusing on the affective domain much more. The conversation, recorded on the podcast, is well worth a listen if you missed it, or like me were distracted by the chat and trying to think how this affects your own program. There are great examples of amazing research ideas, thought experiments, and truly great advice for all of us to reflect on.
The end of the collaborative meeting was just as engaging as the beginning. There is so much I am leaving out on this summary. Here are some of the top questions we had come up:
· Do you predict that society in general will start valuing Health and Physical Education a little or maybe a lot more after this pandemic is over?
· What are we prepared to be held accountable for and to whom?
· Where do we want to be at the end of this pandemic, and what do we want to look like as a PETE community/profession?
· Naturally, some institutions, following this and for multiple reasons, will value online teacher education as opposed to face to face teacher ed. How are we going to combat this?
· Will the pandemic help us to move beyond the Model Wars? Sport Ed, vs. TPSR, vs. TGFU, vs. CSPAP, vs. on and on and on? *this leads to great discussion in the chat around 14:55.
· I just wonder if we have an opportunity here to advocate with even more proof that we are needed in general education AND as part of the WSCC and CSPAP models?
· If I want to say my students have been physically educated, where might I look for that “evidence”?
That’s a lot to think about. But I think I will end with a quote from Dr. Phillip Ward from the chat: “These types of webinars should extend way beyond when COVID-19 passes.”
100% agree Phil! I think the difference with what we are doing here is that we’re not doing a webinar as we usually do it. That is, when one scholar comes on and gives a lecture to faculty. We don’t want to be lectured to. I think the reason we had 131 PETE faculty on this second PETE Collaborative is because everyone’s opinions were heard who wanted to express them. Whether it was through the chat or through comments. We spread the speaking time with a diverse group of scholars from early career to senior scholars in the field and… you know…we all got along pretty well. So, I agree with you Phil, we should keep these going well beyond this pandemic!
-Risto