Like many school districts around the country, Upland Unified faced staffing cutbacks in Physical Education in the past few years. We now have four teachers to cover our ten elementary schools, which has helped, but it has also required that we get creative in figuring out how to help our classroom teachers implement some of the PE requirements. That’s where Teaching Channel Teams comes in.

Our Current Challenges

Here are just a few of the challenges we need to solve for next year using Teams:

• Upland provides 50 minutes per week of PE release time to first through sixth grade students. The other 50 minutes per week is expected to be provided by the classroom teacher.
• Very few classroom teachers actually meet their minutes, due to the time stress on the current schedule for the five main academic courses.
• The classroom teachers have no formal training in PE, and often times PE amounts to “rolling out the ball” on a Friday afternoon, when the students engage in free play while the teachers supervise.
• Each district is required to have a PE goal that they can show progress toward meeting.
• Upland has chosen a current goal of 70% of students passing five of the six fitness criteria tested by the State of California during a student’s 5th, 7th and 9th grade years.
• The one day a week of PE provided by the certificated PE instructors wasn’t going to meet the fitness training necessary to address the LCAP (Local Control Accountability Plan) concerns, or the Physical Education State Standards.

The new task for PE teachers is to help support first through sixth grade classroom teachers in the necessary physical education practices that are conducive to the challenges of the classroom timeframe, and also meet the standards.

How We’ll Be Using Teams

This summer, the elementary PE teachers will meet with teacher representatives from the ten elementary schools to co-create certified PE curriculum for classroom teachers. We’ll use Teams as the tool to deliver lesson plans, videos, and host weekly discussions of the practices the classroom teachers will incorporate into their PE lessons. We have two groups: “PE for Elementary Students” for grades 1-3, and “PE for Primary Grades” for 4-6.

The PE teachers are currently populating the “Resource” section of the two groups with videos of the step-up games we play, diagrams and instructional documents that explain the rules and game processes, and fitness instruction videos to teach correct form for a variety of exercises such as push-ups, curl-ups, jump rope, etc. We’ll also include instructional aids and videos for teachers to use on rainy or inclement weather days so their PE time is used well.

Our district is also committed to stocking each school with the equipment necessary for PE instruction.