I was at my 7th grade girls basketball practice this morning and we were working on our full court press and it made me think how in any type of physical activity, specifically sports, people need to understand the strategy of the game and why teams do what they do.
In this picture, I have a diagram of how I want my girls to set up their defense and how the other team might set up their offense. For some of you, this may seem very confusing. It takes demonstration, explanation, and a drawing for most people to understand. All of those components are where we can see literacy in physical education. In this specific diagram, one would have to understand that the "X's" are defense and the "O's" are offense. This is something that is taught at the beginning of any season or unit for that matter. There are plenty of strategies in all sports that coaches write out for their players. While these diagrams aren't words, they have meaning and if you want to have success in your game, you have to learn to read what the coach/teacher is showing you. My girls had to take the drawing board from me and work together to place themselves on the court. I could have placed them myself, but if they were able to figure out from the drawing where they should be, that was a good indicator they understood. Literacy is more than just reading words, it is communicating and working together.
If anyone has been watching the Olympics, we see a lot of times during breaks, diagrams of figure skating routines, curling tactics, or strategies for the luge or skeleton. For me, I don't understand all of it because I am not familiar with all of those sports. These diagrams on the screen along with the speaking create a sense of understanding. Literacy is going to be seen in physical education very differently than most disciplines. It is going to be through observations and physical doing along with helpful tools for students to understand games and how they can have the most success while playing.
I played sports for years and no coach ever showed me a diagram until my 8th grade basketball coach. Even then I didn't understand it. But I know that these diagram strategies are common in many sports. Would you really teach how to read a diagram at the beginning of each unit on a specific sport? Because that would be awesome. Maybe if my Phy Ed teachers had, I would have known where to go during a basketball game.
ReplyDeleteAlso, thank you for mentioning curling. It is my favorite Winter Olympic sport!
Michel's makes two points that really stand out as helpful in my quest towards defining literacy. First, literacy doesn't always have to do with reading words; Hence, literacy is an ability to pick out meaning not only from written words, but also from visualizations, symbols, diagrams, and signals. At the base of this notion of literacy is communication. In math, music,physical education, the sciences, and foreign languages, non-traditional symbols are used to communicate meaning between human beings.
ReplyDeleteIn order to develop this type of literacy, one must be introduced to these non-traditional forms of communication as a complete new language. As Michel notes, the Olympic coverage does a great job explaining the nuances of sports for all the non-literate viewers. In the classroom (or in the gym), we must assume no previous knowledge by our students when introducing a new form of communication, like the use of variables in math or the use of diagrams in basketball. And to truly teach literacy to our students, we must enable them to DO the subject. I know this sounds bizarre, but the best way to learn something new is to get active and practice doing it, like the seventh grade girls who needed to draw the x's and o's themselves on Michel's whiteboard. In order to learn math, my students need to be able to do math in many facets involving several types of communication. To best help our students become literate in our content areas, we must give them control to experiment, while providing them with the appropriate background knowledge.
I love the "text" that Michel highlights as important in her field of physical education. Like Amy, I never saw a diagram in P.E. class, but I did during high school basketball and I never really understood all those x's and arrows. Like Kendra, doing usually served me better--I could run the play on the court, then go back to that diagram and understand what it meant. How many other kinds of texts are like this--where doing, first, then reading, second, is an appropriate comprehension strategy? I see diagram reading as a very discipline-specific skill that anyone with good physical education should have. I've been thinking more about charts and graphs, too; what's the best way to teach kinds how to read those?
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to sports, I am practically illiterate. Some of the terms in Michel's blog post, such as "full court press", mean absolutely nothing to me. At first glance, using the background knowledge that I acquired in high school gym class, I could imagine that "full court press" means everyone on the basketball court stops to do bench presses. However, using the context of the story, I find a full court press is actually a play made in basketball. Using my literacy skills, I was able to find my own defenition for this new term.
ReplyDeleteThese are the types of literacy skills that I believe were are learning to teach our students.