Back in the Gym, Teachers Try New Tricks To Engage Students
In Chris Lee’s gym, each student has a spot on the floor, designated by a hash mark and a number. The spots are six feet apart. To ensure kindergartners won’t disrupt social distancing, Lee says, he constantly shouts, “Make the number disappear with your bottom. I don’t want to see the number!”
COVID-19 safety guidelines are constantly evolving — and so is the work of physical education teachers. This fall, as schools reopened across New York state, teachers have brought the lessons they learned during remote teaching back to the gym, including new technologies and new approaches to wellness.
In most of the state, masks and social distancing are required during physical education classes. In New York City, masks are required indoors and outdoors, but students are allowed to take “mask breaks” while six feet apart.
Group activities that are vigorous or require physical touch or proximity among players are not allowed. “They can’t play actual competitive games with one another in certain sports that are deemed higher risk sports, like basketball and volleyball,” said Lauren Caiaccia, a high school physical education teacher in Queens.
Instead, to maintain distance, Caiaccia’s students practice fitness and sports skills that don’t require contact with other students. So with basketball and volleyball, for example, each student holds their own ball.
Caiaccia is now considering alternative games that can be controlled for social distancing, such as spikeball, a game that requires a trampoline-like net and a ball, and cornhole, is a lawn game that requires a platform with a hole and bags of corn kernels.
Maintaining social distance is particularly difficult when teaching younger students. Lee has had to experiment with different approaches. “I have over 80 kindergarten kids, 6-year-olds, spread out all throughout the gym. Kids want their mommy, kids break their masks, kids don’t want to be there,” said Lee. “It’s difficult to visualize [six feet] in your head. And it’s difficult to hold them accountable for standing on an imaginary spot.”
That’s when he decided the students needed to be able to see their spots on the ground. He tried floor tape, but the kids would remove it. He found a dry erase marker for the floor. “It was $34 on Amazon. Nice, neat, and it doesn’t come off,” said Lee. “Now we have rows, columns, and accountability. Thank God for this.”
Although Lee’s students are more likely to stay in their spots now, they still struggle with hearing him. “Because they’re so spaced out and everyone has masks on, it’s very difficult,” Lee said. “So now we’re teaching by saying very few words and demonstrating. We have to do everything — as opposed to explaining, demonstrating and then letting them do it.”
His gym is air-conditioned and has six air purifiers running constantly. “It’s very difficult to teach. You’re in a very large space, it’s not just long and wide, it’s also very high.” And his school is near JFK Airport. “We have soundproof windows that don’t open, so there’s a very bad echo in the gym. The louder you speak, the longer there’s an echo. It was difficult to hear even without a mask.”
Lee says the loudness gives students an excuse to not pay attention. “They feel it gives them a cloak of invisibility. And they make weird animal noises because they think they can’t be identified. But if I say ‘I need to know who did it or no one is getting out,’ then that person is rated out in five seconds.”
Caiaccia has also struggled with the masks. “It’s draining. You lose the expression on your face,” she said. “You have to keep your distance and it’s very hard to develop teacher-student rapport, that rapport that you develop when people get to absorb your energy.”
Charlie Rizzuto, a high school physical education teacher in Oyster Bay, Long Island, is aware of students’ anxiety about being back and exposing themselves to COVID-19. “I’m very aware of the students that might still not be totally comfortable. And when they see people with their masks down, it may heighten their anxiety a little bit,” he said.
For Lee, another challenge has been having to clean the equipment, such as jump ropes and pool noodles, after every use. “Sanitizing the equipment is very tedious,” he said.
But following safety protocols in the school building is progress, compared to the adjustments they had to make starting in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit New York.
“Initially, to be fully honest, I was like, ‘I teach physical education. What do you expect me to do online?’ I had absolutely no idea,” said Lee.
Over time, he started using online tools such as EdPuzzle, which allows teachers to embed questions into YouTube videos. Lee says the students think of the tool as a videogame. “It’s interactive. They watch a video rather than just having to answer a paper and pencil question.” For example, students would watch a video of a movement being performed and then had to identify if the movement was aerobic or anaerobic.
Lee embraced the new technologies, but also acknowledged the challenges of remote instruction. “K-5 students will do pretty much anything on the screen. If I say, ‘Make up the letter C with your body,’ they will do it,” Lee said. “But middle-schoolers, only 10% of them will actually perform on screen with their cameras on. I would give a 30-minute lesson with quizzes and puzzles, and then they were allowed to exercise on their own.”
Caiaccia had a similar experience. “You’re looking at a screen with only maybe four or five cameras on, in a class of 50.”
Instead of assigning physical activity, teachers tried to help students understand health and wellness. Caiaccia’s approach was to give students the skills they needed to incorporate wellness into their own routines. She taught anxiety and stress release, nutrition, swimming and water safety, and yoga. “We introduced wellness from a holistic standpoint,” Caiaccia said. To measure student engagement, she used journaling assignments.
In Long Island, Rizzuto’s approach was to not think of movement as an assignment. “We didn’t want movement to feel like homework. Movement was always promoted and encouraged. But movement was never mandatory for them.”
Caiaccia and Rizzuto were aware that they needed to create lessons regardless of students’ living situations. “We didn’t want to make assumptions. We didn’t want to create a situation that wasn’t equitable for the students that were at home by asking them to do things that maybe they weren’t capable of doing,” said Rizzuto.
Research has shown that remote teaching exacerbated economic inequalities in education. Some children have backyards or access to public parks, while others are holed up in apartments with little space to study and exercise.
Teachers who had to move from their traditional curriculum and focus on a wellness-based model have brought this approach back to their school gyms.
Caiaccia is proud of the curriculum she created. “It’s nice to be back in the building and to try to get the students engaged and appreciative of the opportunity to learn about their health and wellness, regardless of the restrictions.”
