PETE HETE Conference 2018
Salt Lake City, Utah
I recently attended the PETE HETE conference in Salt Lake City, Utah. This experience was unforgettable to say the least. Shape America hosted this conference in order to provide professional development to teachers in the field and higher education professors across the world. I met people from Aruba, China, Sweeden, and all across the country and I was able to network for the University and myself.
Having the opportunity to collaborate with Dr. Lucas and Dr. Jones on these presentations was such a blast. As a group we all see education in different lights and it truly brought diversity to our presentations. The best thing about this group is that we brought the physical education and special education mindsets to our presentations. Preparing our presentations was very enjoyable as well. We worked on this presentation for months before presenting, but it was well worth the quality of presentation we gave.
We presented at 8am on Thursday and Saturday morning and we truly were not expecting that big of a turn out strictly because of the time we presented, but that fortunately was not the case. We had about 8 people at each presentation and that was exactly the size we wanted. Due to the smaller size of the group we were able to truly get through to the attendees. We knew that we wanted to get everyone up and moving as well as have the chance to participate in meaningful conversation and we accomplished both of those. We spoke with attendees after the presentation and they said it was their favorite presentation out of the whole conference because they actually got to participate instead of just sitting around.
Our first presentation was about methods of grading in the inclusive physical education classroom where we taught our attendees about a method that Dr. Lucas has used in the classroom for years. I particularly like this method because it includes a sliding scale grading system for students with special needs. Generally, in adaptive PE students with special needs are given subjective grades so by following IEP goals and using a sliding scale, our students are finally graded based on data, not opinion.
Our second presentation was about how to control all behavior in your inclusive physical education classroom, but it was really geared towards all classroom settings. For this presentation we relied a lot on the meta-analysis that John Hattie has conducted. Our five topics that we hit on were time on task, engagement, student/teacher relationships, individualized instruction, and individualized high expectations. These all have very high effect sizes so we really stress that these were backed by data and will work in their classrooms.
Overall, I am so grateful to have this experience and learn so much about teaching methods and explore a little bit of Salt Lake City. I am also grateful to represent Longwood in such a cool way. I was the only person there who did not have a Ph.d. so I was proud of my ability to speak clearly and get my point across. Lastly, I am grateful for the opportunity to share knowledge about SPED to people who did not have the most experienced background with IEP’s or goals, or inclusion in genera
l.