Student Voices in a Middle School Physical Education Partnership

Background/Purpose:

This impetus for this project originated when two faculty participated in a 10-hour workshop to discuss possibilities for re-structuring the undergraduate program to advance clinical experiences, improve PE programs, and foster stronger partnerships. The National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) is challenging colleges of education to move toward more clinical experiences affiliated with teacher preparation courses.  The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of a middle school physical education partnership through student perspectives and experiences.    

Method:

This action research study involves one middle school physical education teacher, one class of 7^th grade students, and two university PETE faculty. Each team member (middle school physical educator, two PETE faculty) collaborated over the last two years to establish a partnership in middle school physical education. The two PETE faculty led daily lessons for the first semester, and then assisted the middle school PE teacher during the second semester. Primary research questions guiding this study include:

1. How do middle school students view physical education in a school-university partnership? 
2. How has involvement in a partnership influenced your (students’) views of physical education? 

Data were collected video recorded lessons, student focus-group interviews, researcher journals, and document analysis of instructional materials and electronic correspondence. For this poster, the focus will be on the data gathered from the student focus group interviews. Data were analysed using the line by line coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) and constant comparison (Patton, 2002). 

Analysis/Results:

Each theme represents student perspectives shared in focus group interviews, and detected through review of related documents during the first year of this project’s implementation. Themes emerged as “Different and New”, “Consistent, Realistic Systems”, and “A Place of Learning”. 

Conclusions:

Results indicate that middle school students preferred extra attention, effort, and influence provided by PETE faculty as contributors in their school physical education instruction. The project aims to ensure PETE clinical students are more involved and provide similar efforts and attention modeled by PETE faculty. The planning and implementation of a PDS Model in physical education involves multiple stakeholders and an ideal balance among school-university personnel (e.g. K-12 administrators, teachers, staff, students, university administrators, faculty, and students). The findings inform teacher educators on the effective practices associated with implementing a planned partnership. Additional recommendations include  partnership expansion in PE in the district, and providing more opportunities for student input in the organization of learning activities and curricular decisions.