Chapter Reflections
Chapter 16 of our textbook for class, Teaching Elementary Physical Education: Strategies for the Classroom Teachers is called “Interdisciplinary Strategies for Physical Education”. I felt as though this particular chapter was very “to the point”, but that it was also packed with a lot of information that could be very useful in the classroom. This chapter was about just what the title suggests: ways that you could integrate physical education into everyday classroom activities and learning. I can definitely see myself using some of the stuff that I read about in this chapter in my future classroom. The first section of this chapter was all about the different levels of curriculum integration. I learned that there are three different levels of integration: connected, shared, and partnered. The least complicated of the three is “connected”, and would just involve me, as the teacher, making simple connections between two subject areas. I think that this would involve me looking at two subjects and then finding the common ground that they share so that I could reinforce knowledge from one subject in another. The second level would be “shared”, which would involve taking similar concepts in two or more subjects and reinforcing them in each of the subjects. You want to be able to reinforce something in one subject, and do the same thing for the other. The key word is “share”. I learned that the last level, “partnered”, is often the most difficult. It would be the most difficult because it involves a team of teachers discussing the same big ideas. I think that this would be difficult because each teacher in the team might have a different idea about what would be best and it might be difficult to keep what is most important at the center of the discussion. Integration can definitely be hard, but it is doable. The next section of the chapter talked about devising your own cross-disciplinary topics. The