Keeping the Whole Child Healthy and Safe. Marge Scherer

Чтение книги онлайн.

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      Originally published in the December 2009/January 2010 issue of Educational Leadership, 67(4), pp. 44–47.

      A Place for Healthy Risk-Taking

      by Laura Warner

       At Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, Wellness classes combine challenge and choice to help adolescent students grow.

      Eating sushi. Talking with your parents about drugs or alcohol. Playing basketball. After each of these prompts, the students in my Wellness class rearrange themselves in a series of concentric circles that indicate their comfort level with the action described. I use this activity, called challenge circles, in the first week of school to set the stage for the coming year.

      First, I create three concentric circles using ropes or cones on the floor. The inner circle is comfort, the middle is stretch or risk, and the outer circle is panic. Then I ask students to stand in the circle that represents their comfort level when asked to do a range of activities. We start off with relatively innocuous activities (eating pizza) and then ramp it up (talking with your parents about sex; telling a close friend you disagree with him or her). Finally, I connect it back to Wellness class and to physical activity using such prompts as running the mile for fitness testing or getting sweaty in class.

      At the end of this activity, students have seen the wide range of comfort levels within our class. One student might feel completely at ease taking free throws but be sent right into the panic zone by something like swimming in the ocean. Playing soccer, with those hard balls flying through the air, is scary for many students, but it can be a place of true comfort for an athlete. Challenge circles are a great reminder for middle school students that what is true for them may not be true for their classmates.

      Early adolescents are often described as developmentally egocentric, meaning that they struggle to differentiate between their own thoughts and the perspectives of others and often feel as though they are on stage, being constantly watched and judged by their peers. So seeing this visual demonstration of the differences in how their classmates perceive risk and comfort can be especially powerful. To debrief the circles activity, I ask questions like, Were we ever all standing in the same circle at the same time? What were some of the similarities or differences in our group? In which circle do you think the most learning occurs?

      At Their Own Pace

      Risk and challenge are an integral part of Wellness classes at the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School in Devens, Massachusetts, where all 7th–10th graders attend these classes four days a week. We ask students to push themselves—to try new things that challenge their sense of comfort, but without the threat of actual harm. Our Wellness program includes an integrated curriculum combining aspects of health classes with physical education, games, and fitness. We offer a mixture of conventional games such as floor hockey and soccer and more unusual activities such as rock climbing, yoga, walks, and large-group tag.

      The three full-time Wellness teachers frame activities so that students understand their range of options for participation and entry. When teaching middle school students to play football, for instance, I often remind them that they don't have to be able to throw a perfect spiral to be successful. I encourage them to see the fun and strategy in making up new plays or working with their team to trick the offense or defense.

      For sports like this, I often split my classes in half, letting one group of kids play competitively while taking a smaller group of students aside to provide more explicit instruction and a less threatening introduction to the game. This helps students enter into the curriculum at their own place. When they are comfortable and exhibit some mastery, we can push them to go just a little further.

      You don't need a ropes course to explore risk-taking or challenge. Any physical activity can involve risk—from trying yoga, to using an exercise ball for the first time, to pushing yourself to play all-out in a game of Frisbee even when you're worried about looking stupid in front of your friends. Our students complete "the dreaded mile run" twice a year to assess their cardiovascular fitness, and this event comes at a time in their lives when they are acutely aware of their own bodies and sensitive to how others perceive them. For teenagers (and some adults), running when they think that others might be watching can be a trying proposition, and we need to acknowledge the social and emotional chances our students are taking.

      As a public charter school, we enroll approximately 75 new students each year through a lottery system. As these students enter Parker from more than 40 different schools and towns, I've heard them say things like, "I'm not good at gym," or "I'm just not athletic." I've always felt that my mission was to dispel those assumptions. For me, physical activity classes have become less a place for students to learn to throw a softball well, and more a place for them to learn to throw aside some assumptions about themselves and practice taking risks.

      Challenge by Choice

      At Parker, we use the Adventure Curriculum for Physical Education series developed by Project Adventure (www.pa.org) as the foundation of much of our program (Panicucci, 2007; Panicucci, Constable, Hunt, Kohut, & Rheingold, 2002–2003). That organization's Challenge by Choice philosophy recognizes that any activity or goal poses a different level of challenge for each person and that authentic personal change comes from within. Challenge by Choice

      creates an environment where participants are asked to search for opportunities to stretch and grow during the experience. [Students learn] how to set goals that are in neither the comfort nor the panic zone, but in that slightly uncomfortable stretch zone where the greatest opportunities for growth and learning lie. (Project Adventure, n.d.)

      Incorporating СКАЧАТЬ