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Pe d·a·go·gy.

The method and practice of teaching Physical Education using empirical research and theoretical concepts.

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We have a range of teaching resources to help support your delivery of high-quality Physical Education lessons.

At the PE Project our aim is to provide friendly and accessible PE pedagogy and resources which will have an immediate impact on your lessons and students. Whatever your goal, we hope that you'll find lots of valuable information based on solid learning theories and empirical research that are helpful in your journey towards excellence!

Lesson Objectives

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Defining clear learning objectives at the start of each lesson helps set pupils up for success.

Assessment is essential and integral to effective teaching and learning in PE as it provides information on students’ strengths, weaknesses, and educational requirements, which informs future planning and teaching

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Lessons need to be accessible for all students and their diverse needs. Learn how to effectively differentiate your PE lessons.

Learn how to improve students motivation in PE lessons with these empirically researched strategies.

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Being able to deliver Physical Education lessons in a variety of ways is an essential skill as a PE teacher.

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Asking effective questions is a skill that can be developed throughout your teaching career. If this is a skill that you wish to develop, check out our article.

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Planning a PE curriculum for the new academic year? Check out our article to help you make a plan.

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As Phys. Ed. teachers we have a great opportunity to promote, teach, and provide opportunities for students to become better people.

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Need help preparing for your PE teacher interview? Check out this article to help prepare you for interview success.

Learning Theories

Discover how some of the most prominent theories of learning relate to teaching Physical Education.

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The PE Project has put together a resource with plenty of options to choose from when looking for ideas for implementing locomotor, manipulative, and balance movements in a lesson. The lesson ideas are simple, which makes them easy to implement, yet effective in terms of addressing critical developmental skills that keep students engaged. (The Fundamental Movement Pack)

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Nicki Newman Case, PEC Facebook Post " I wanted to thank PE Central for sending me an email that said I won $50 for a published kid quote. I am going to let the kid who wrote the Valentine help me pick out what he wants from the S&S catalog to use in our gym. I am also going to buy him the "I got Published" t-shirt. THANK YOU! I presented the winner of the Kids Quote of the Week with his T-shirt this morning at assembly! He LOVED it! "

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9 Activity Ideas for STEM in Physical Education

• Lauren Chiangpradit
• November 16, 2023
• Reviewed by Sean Barton
• Reviewed by Haley MacLean

Table of Contents

The Synergy of Movement and Learning

Physical education stem activities for elementary school, stem activities for middle school pe students, advanced stem challenges for high school learners, tech, tools, and resources for stem in physical education.

Integrating STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) into Physical Education (PE) classes offers an innovative approach to education. In an era where sports statistics, science, and technology increasingly influence athletics, PE classes are uniquely positioned to blend physical activity with STEM learning and 21st century skills. This article explores how PE educators and facilitators can use STEM learning in their coursework. It also provides a range of curriculum activity ideas to get students at different education and skill levels engaged.

Research indicates that physical activity can significantly bolster cognitive abilities. When students participate in movement-based learning, they benefit physically and experience enhanced concentration, memory, and creativity. This cognitive boost is crucial for comprehending and applying STEM concepts, which often demand high levels of problem-solving and critical thinking. Active learning, where students engage in physical activities while learning STEM concepts, results in more profound understanding and retention of information. Integrating physical and mental challenges not only makes learning more enjoyable, but is more effective, as students apply theoretical concepts in practical settings, leading to better comprehension and recall.

Integrating STEM into elementary physical education presents a fantastic opportunity to lay the foundation for lifelong learning and curiosity in young students. Through these innovative activities, elementary school children can explore and understand key STEM concepts while engaging in fun and physical play. Each activity is designed to be not only educational but highly interactive and suitable for their developmental stage. Here are some engaging activities that blend physical education with STEM learning for elementary students:

• Jump and Measure: Students perform a variety of jumps – like the long jump and high jump – and measure their distances or heights. This activity introduces basic concepts of measurement and physics, encouraging students to understand how force and motion play a role in their physical activities.
• Geometry with Body Movements: In this activity, children use their bodies to create geometric shapes, either individually or in groups. It’s an engaging way for students to learn about basic geometry, spatial awareness, and symmetry. Teachers can challenge students to form complex shapes, enhancing their understanding and teamwork skills.
• STEM Soccer : In a lesson devoted to measuring throw-ins, students collect data in centimeters and convert their data to meters dividing by 100. Students then evaluate measurement systems to decide the best measurement size. This disguised learning,  interactive lesson is a great way for physical education teachers to add STEM into their PE classes.
• Weather and Exercise: Students observe and record weather patterns over a week and discuss how different weather conditions affect physical activities. This integrates meteorology into PE, allowing students to see the real-world application of science in their everyday activities.
• Heart Rate Exploration: After engaging in various exercises, students measure their heart rates to learn about the cardiovascular system and the science behind exercise. This activity not only educates them about their bodies, but about the importance of physical fitness in maintaining health.
• Playground Physics: Utilizing playground equipment, this activity allows students to explore concepts like gravity, force, and motion. They can experience firsthand how these physical laws impact their play and movements, turning the playground into a living laboratory.

As students enter middle school, their capacity for more complex and abstract thinking grows significantly. This developmental stage is an ideal time to introduce more intricate STEM concepts through physical education, enhancing their learning experience with practical applications. The following STEM activities are tailored for middle school students, offering a blend of intellectual challenge and physical engagement. These activities are designed to pique students’ curiosity in STEM fields through the familiar and enjoyable medium of sports and physical exercises. By participating in these activities, students not only deepen their understanding of STEM concepts, but learn valuable lessons in teamwork, problem-solving, and the practical application of classroom knowledge to real-world scenarios. Here’s a look at some stimulating and educational STEM activities for middle school PE:

• Sports Statistics Analysis: Students gather and analyze sports statistics from games or physical activities. This teaches them about data collection, interpretation, and the importance of statistics in understanding and improving athletic performance.
• STEM Football: During a lesson in STEM Football, students collect and graph data of a controlled experiment by using a line graph. Students then explain the relationship between kinetic energy and mass by writing a claim evidence supported by evidence-based reasoning from class data. This lesson highlights the strong classroom connection between physical education and STEM learning, and how it can help create tangible examples for students.
• Energy and Movement: This activity focuses on the concept of kinetic and potential energy in the context of sports. Students explore how energy is transferred and transformed during different physical activities, such as running, jumping, or throwing a ball.
• Biomechanics of Sports: Here, students delve into the study of human movement and mechanics in various sports. They learn about the science behind athletic performance, injury prevention , and how athletes optimize their movements for maximum efficiency and safety.
• Mathletics Relay: A relay race where each leg involves solving a math problem before passing the baton. This combines physical fitness with mathematical skills, emphasizing quick thinking and teamwork.
• Technology in Sports Training: Students explore how technology is increasingly used in sports training and performance analysis. They might look at wearable tech, video analysis software, or other tools that help athletes improve their skills and coaches to make informed decisions.

High school students, with their advanced cognitive skills and heightened interests, are well-positioned to tackle complex STEM challenges through physical education. This section of the curriculum is designed to offer high school learners in-depth, hands-on experiences that combine higher-level STEM concepts with physical activities and sports. These advanced activities are not just about physical exertion; they require students to engage in critical thinking, problem-solving, and creative innovation. They provide an opportunity for students to see the real-world applications of the STEM knowledge they acquire in their classrooms, bridging the gap between theoretical learning and practical implementation. By participating in these activities, high school students can gain a deeper understanding of various STEM fields, such as physics, engineering, biotechnology, and environmental science, observing how these disciplines intersect with sports and physical fitness. Here are some challenging and intellectually stimulating STEM activities designed for high school learners:

• Physics of Sports Equipment Design: Students research and discuss the physics principles involved in the design of sports equipment. This can include topics like material science, aerodynamics, and ergonomics, providing insights into how equipment is optimized for performance and safety.
• Engineering a Miniature Golf Course: Students design and construct a miniature golf course, applying concepts of geometry, physics, and design. This project not only involves creativity, but a practical application of STEM principles by creating functional and enjoyable mini-golf holes.
• Sports Analytics Project: Students undertake a project to analyze a sports game using statistical methods and tools. This activity introduces them to data science in sports, teaching them how to interpret and use data to understand game strategies and player performance.
• Biotechnology in Athletics: This topic explores how biotechnology is used in sports, from equipment design to performance enhancement techniques. Students might study material innovations, genetic research in athletics, or the ethical implications of biotechnology in sports.
• Environmental Science in Outdoor Sports: Students analyze how environmental factors impact outdoor sports activities. They can study topics like climate change, pollution, and natural terrain, understanding the interplay between sports and the environment.
• Virtual Reality Sports Training: Students explore how VR technology is being used for skill development, strategy training, and injury rehabilitation in various sports by discussing the emerging role of virtual reality in sports.

Bringing STEM into PE classes effectively requires the right resources, including technology tools, educational kits, and comprehensive guides. Resources like the STEM Sports® kits provide ready-to-use activities that seamlessly blend physical education with STEM learning. These kits offer an invaluable resource for teachers looking to enrich their curriculum and engage K-8 students through a cross-curricular learning approach. For additional resources, tools, and innovative ideas, please visit STEM Sports® .

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Implementing PBL in PE Classes

Physical education performances and playing the whole game.

Many schools have been looking to implement project-based learning, or PBL, for improved student learning. In this instructional approach, students are first presented with a real-world problem or issue with the goal of crafting a solution or response. During the process of developing their response through questioning, research, ideation, and solution building, students develop a host of other essential life skills such as collaboration, leadership and project management.

PBL is a powerful approach to content learning, but does that mean physical education should jump on board as well? Here are a few things to consider.

Project vs. Performance

The vocabulary of project-based learning often gets in the way of using this approach in a variety of settings, especially physical education. PE is about activity and building movement skills with your body and brain, not sitting at a desk working on a project. An easy solution is to insert the word performance every time you encounter the word project . A similar terminology switch can be helpful in music and the arts too.

The language of performance-based assessments is a place to start. What can you ask students to do to demonstrate proficiency? This could be a performance or a product and oftentimes the lines are blurred. For example, acting for a video is a performance, making a speech to local business owners is a performance, even writing a letter to persuade local government officials is a performance.

PBL in the PE Classroom

According to the SHAPEAmerica standards, the goal of physical education is to "develop physically literate individuals who have the knowledge, skills and confidence to enjoy a lifetime of healthful physical activity."

While this goal certainly does not state one needs to meet standards with a project or PBL, it also does not state play basketball. But basketball is a part of many PE programs because it is a way to help students meet this goal, and more specifically:

• [demonstrate] competency in a variety of motor skills and movement patterns.
• [apply] knowledge of concepts, principles, strategies and tactics related to movement and performance.

PBL offers similar opportunities.

UN Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Well-being

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were approved by all member nations in 2015. The 17 SDGs are designed to promote peace and prosperity for all people now and in the future. The third goal, Good Health and Well-Being is perfectly suited to the goals of the Physical Education Curriculum.

Specifically, SDG Goal 3 encourages the world to develop solutions that "ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages." The wording of this goal opens up a range of possibilities for "products" that meet the goals of physical education as well.

For example, students in PE classes could:

• Develop fitness courses and signage for their school or community.
• Work with their food service department to design a healthy school lunch menu .
• Raise awareness and promote mental health.
• Use 3D printers to construct prosthetic hands for those who can't afford them.
• Develop PSAs to promote health and safety .
• Partner with a local sports team to apply their strategies to improving fitness community-wide.

Find Connections to Other Subjects

You might also connect fitness, health, and safety topics to learning in other subjects. For example, physics teachers at Dripping Springs High School in Texas asked students to help improve the free throw percentages of players on their basketball team. Students dissected a specific player's free throw shooting to determine if the issue might be trajectory or force, mapping out the parabola and making physics-based suggestions for improvement.

While this was a physics classroom, PE students can certainly benefit from using properties of physics to improve their own sports performance. Similarly, athletes benefit from knowledge of structure, function, body systems, and nutrition.

Students in history class at South Doyle High School in Tennessee noticed a lack of sidewalks in their community, impacting both safety and possibilities for active lifestyles. After a visit by a city engineer, students quickly learned about budgets and the criteria for constructing new sidewalks.

While PE needs to include physical activity and movement, tackling health requires skills that may not normally shine during a typical PE class. This allows many kids to participate in physical education classes in ways they wouldn't otherwise normally, forming better connections between students and valuing a range of skills for athletic and non-athletic students.

Use Big Ideas to Guide Instructional Design

Any great PBL addresses a big idea and involves an interesting question or challenge to drive student motivation and engagement. Start by considering big ideas and essential questions in physical education, like:

• How can you take care of yourself?
• What does it mean to be healthy?
• What motivates a person to be healthy?

Use the big ideas to drive instructional goals and help you develop more specific questions to drive student work. For example, the essential question of "What does it mean to be physically fit?" can be made into more specific and actionable driving questions like:

• How can I personally increase and maintain proper fitness?
• Can I design a game to make fitness or skill practice more fun?
• How can I motivate someone else to increase and maintain proper fitness?

Even better, kick off a unit by asking that question to students and let them come up with more specific applications and questions to drive their work, boosting motivation, engagement, ownership and responsibility.

PE Educators as PBL Leaders

Connecting PBL to the content area of physical education may not be obvious, but it is easy to connect the pedagogy of the PE teachers. I might even argue that many sites implement PBL in order to make core learning a lot more like the experience students have in PE!

PE teachers are uniquely qualified to support a PBL approach. Why? Consider David Perkins's statement, "You don't learn to play baseball by a year of batting practice." In his book, Making Learning Whole , Perkins describes the often " elementis " nature of academics, where students are taught individual pieces (rules, theories, and procedures) with the promise that they will learn them later in high school or college.

Physical education doesn't ask students to wait, students learn to play sports, not just develop specific sports skills. While students may practice skills, they are quickly applied and learned more deeply through playing the whole game and in doing so:

• make the game worth playing,
• provide obvious reasons to work on the hard parts,
• play out of town (use it in different contexts),
• help reveal the hidden game, and
• learn from the team (social, interactive, and interdependent).

Grant Wiggins words it similarly:

"In athletics this is very clear: the game is the curriculum; the game is the teacher. And each game is different (even as helpful patterns emerge). Knowledge about the game is secondary, an offshoot of learning to play the game well. As I learn to play, knowledge — about rules, strategy, and technique — accrues, but it is not the point."

This doesn't mean "gamify" the classroom, but being clear that the goal of classroom learning isn't knowledge about a subject, but using that knowledge in order to actively think like a mathematician, inquire like a scientist, or work as a historian.

Instead of asking PE teachers to implement PBL, consider asking them to coach and model a more performance-based approach to learning for the ELA, math, science, and social studies teachers working to take a PBL approach to learning.

In Conclusion

Before you ask physical education classes to implement PBL, consider the goals of PBL and the nature of physical education. By asking PE teachers to implement classroom projects, we can actually encourage them to move away from the student-centered, powerful nature of PBL by moving to an " aboutis " form of learning where students end up telling us about a sport without "taking part in the processes that created that knowledge."

PBL does, however, provide powerful opportunities for students to become physically literate, understanding the benefits of involvement in physical activity and understanding how it contributes to overall health.

by Melinda Kolk

Melinda Kolk ( @melindak ) is the Editor of Creative Educator and the author of Teaching with Clay Animation . She has been helping educators implement project-based learning and creative technologies like clay animation into classroom teaching and learning for the past 15 years.

Project-based Learning Professional Development

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• Project-Based Learning and Physical Education: An interview with Jordan Manley [Interactive]

[0:02] Aaron: Project-based learning, it seems to be all the buzz and education, but what is it really and how does it fit with physical education?

[0:35] Jordan: I am with Jordan Manley from the Steam Academy in Lexington Kentucky today, and I want to just introduce Jordan and talk a little bit about his PE Program, Jordan tell us a little bit about yourself.

[0:46] Well, I’m a Lexington Kentucky native, 29 years old, been married for five years and I have a 19-month-old daughter at home. I love you know just being active, learning new things. Recently I learned how to ski and I work as the health and physical education teacher at a project-based learning school called Steam Academy.

How to use project-based learning in physical education

[1:06] Aaron: So you mentioned project-based learning, can you describe how that fits into your PE philosophy and how it fits into the overall school environment?

[1:14] Jordan: We are a project-based learning school which means we have a focus on inquiry-designed learning. This model takes students away from the comprehension of concepts and has them dive deeper into the development of the skills so that they can comprehend any concept. We do this through lots of projects, there’s a lot of student choice involved. We might present one question and end up with 10 different answers to that question, depending on the class, whether it’s math, science, english, social studies or even the PE classroom.

[1:56] So the way that this fits in with my PE classroom is we have to ask ourselves what are the major concepts that we want our students to be able to understand? What are the major skills that we want our students to be able to understand to be able to do? We frame those within the context of an inquiry. Through that inquiry across a week or two weeks, students will complete some formative assignments here and there doing some research outside of class on their devices that are our school allows them to use, and then they present to us a product through a performance assessment.

[2:34] Within this performance assessment, I can assess whether or not a student has comprehended the concepts, but also if they’ve been able to apply these soft skills or success skills that so many schools talk about developing: leadership, communication, collaboration. So we allow that model to direct our working in PE so that students can get deeper learning rather than just the physical activity that happens in the class.

Project-based learning example

[3:06] Aaron: This is fascinating. So, can you give us an example of how this might play out in real-time and physical education class?

[3:13] Jordan: Sure, so one thing that I’ve done is I’ve given my students the task of game creation. This is something that we do as physical educators. Not only do we beg, borrow, and steal from other people on the internet, but we also force ourselves to iterate new ideas and create new activities in our classroom. So I give that task to my students, as well as a way of them demonstrating their learning and applying the content of the class. This can be used in modified sports games. I’ve done it before, where they have to create a fitness game and before they have to create their fitness game, I give them several examples of what a fitness game looks like. They have open access to all of the equipment in my closets, but the reason I like this is because not only are they applying the content knowledge of the PE classroom to the project that they are creating, it also forces them to work together in collaboration. They have to develop communication and leadership skills so these things happen naturally in anyway, but this is a way more direct way of teaching them that they have to work together if they want to produce something good.

[4:25] Aaron: Wow, thank you for sharing this Jordan and as you listen, we hope this generates some ideas that you can use project-based learning in your physical education classrooms. THRIVE

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Physical Education for the 21st Century

Project-Based Learning

An alternate approach that adds critical depth to PE.

Project-Based Learning is a pedagogical approach that emphasizes projects, as the name suggests. It allows students to experience what the real-world engages in - projects. Our world is driven by projects, such as engineering bridges, designing video games, staging music festivals, and the list goes on. Project-Based Learning allows students to learn fundamental skills, may they be academic, knowledge-based, or social-emotional skills through a project. 

I primarily use the Gold Standard PBL model designed by PBLworks . This model details 7 design elements to ensure a high-quality PBL experience. Below is a brief explanation of what the model entails.

If you would like to learn more about Project-Based Learning and how to apply it to PE, check this booklet out. 

how does project-based learning work in pe?

Check out this booklet and explore another way to make PE even more awesome. Join us and we will send "The PBL Tryouts" along with several more ideas to harness the massive potential that lies with PBL in PE.