Assess Students with a Bike Rack

I want to present a pretty cool strategy for assessment in physical education and we call it a bike rack. To provide a little bit of background, most adult education trainers use what’s called a parking lot in their trainings and essentially a parking lot is a large sticky note or a whiteboard and anytime an attendee has questions or comments that don’t quite fit in with what currently being discussed, they go to the parking lot and jot down their notes and then the trainer can review those when needed.

In physical activity trainings, we just promote physical activity. So we call it a bike rack instead of a parking lot but this principle can be used during physical education and here’s just one example: This bike rack is called compliment corner. To set the stage, the outcome for the lesson is, “I can complement others during physical education”, which is consistent with the Shape Grade Level outcomes. At the end of the lesson you set aside a corner, a white board is used there or you have a big sign with post it notes, markers, pencils, things that students can write with. Whatever the lesson focus, the teacher provides a brief introduction to the importance of complimenting others during physical education. What it does to the attitude of the person giving the compliment, as well as the attitude of the person receiving the compliment, and any other information they’d like to share.

Then you just go on with your lesson as normal and anytime the teacher’s not talking, students are free to move to the compliment corner and write the compliment that they heard or compliment that they’ve received from someone else. Throughout the lesson the teacher can stop and remind them, go to the corner, give examples, talk about the importance of what compliments do again, and even you could even use like iPads or some way of recording device for this. I was just out at a school last week and we found that with second graders they struggle a little bit with specific comments. A lot of their post it notes said good job. Some of them got a little more specific, but as they got older it got a little bit easier. Third graders and up get compliments like we were working great together and this was during a cooperative lesson and that was a great idea to get us across the river. We kept the post it notes after class and we just fold them off to have them as data or if you’re using a whiteboard, you could simply take a picture of it and erase it. But I think this is kind of a good way to, to assess and establish a culture of celebrating others’ during physical education with something like this with this bike rack. So this is just one example. I think bike racks offer up an efficient strategy for collecting useful data. They can definitely impact instruction and hopefully impact students.

Be sure to go to the dynamicpeasap.com to see more bike rack assessments for a variety of standard based outcomes that are developed to help students meet lesson outcomes. We’d love to hear what you think and love to hear your thoughts on these assessments.

THRIVE.

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