KAHPERD 2015

Congratulations to my home state’s health and PE professional association for record numbers at their annual conference! The Kentucky Association for Health, PE, Recreation and Dance kicked off with a PGES (Professional Growth Effectiveness System) workshop facilitated by Jamie Sparks and me. Over 75 participants attended the workshop to learn more about teaching enduring skills and assessment within health and PE classrooms. We began the workshop by facilitating an adapted version of Jay McTighe’s Clapping Hands Activity to demonstrate the importance of clear instructions and criteria when teaching and assessing students. It also makes the case for giving effective feedback to inform mastery of knowledge or a skill. We then went on to discuss the roadmap of teaching, learning and assessment to increase the audience’s knowledge around this work. We ended the workshop by showing and discussing the Saturday Night Live Clip called Make You Think featuring Seinfeld as a fairly ineffective teacher in a high school history classroom.

After the pre-conference workshop on Sunday, a kyhealthnow school health recognition event was held to honor and recognize school and district level educators championing for healthier school environments. Health care partners and other organizations that provide funding, technical assistance, support and programming were also in attendance, including the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Action for Healthy Kids, Fuel Up to Play 60, SUDIA, Let’s Move Active Schools and GoNoOdle. I enjoyed celebrating our Kentucky champions, with about 135 people in attendance!

The rest of the conference was full of innovative strategies for the 4 disciplines. I facilitated two more pretty packed workshops- one on getting to really know the National Health Education Standards and one on Facilitating Difficult Questions in the Classroom Protocol. People were moving, active, learning, analyzing. I could see people thinking and potentially shifting the way they teach. As always, I enjoyed meeting new people and networking. I’m looking forward to next year’s November conference, with a theme already set in place, Show Me the Money. Next year’s conference will focus on advocacy, our work in relation to the return on investment that occurs as a result of addressing the mental, social, physical and emotional health of students. The content will also include telling your story and the importance of sharing the good work we all do to help healthy kids learn better!