PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION ANNUAL CONFERENCE 2012

PRESENTER: So I'm happy to introduce to you our presenter for this morning, Marty Block. Thank you and welcome. Marty has a PhD. He's been at the University of Virginia since 1992 and teaches in

the area of adapted physical education. The short -- the abbreviation is APE, so he does that in adapted physical education and motor development. He is also the director of the master's

program of Adapted Phys Ed and is the primary supervisor for master's students during their practicum and the Abermarle -- MARTY BLOCK: Albemarle. PRESENTER: Albemarle County public

schools. Dr. Block's consulting work has included Special Olympics. He was just telling me earlier that he's traveled across the state and consulted and participated with Special Olympics

here in Pennsylvania, helping them create and implement the motor activities training program, a special sports program for children and adults with severe disabilities. His primary area of

research is the philosophy of including students with disabilities in general physical education, as well as practical aspects of helping general physical educators include students with

disabilities in general physical education. He's the author of A Teacher's Guide to Including Students with Disabilities in General Physical Education, now in its third edition, and is the

co-author of three books on the subject -- on various subtopics related to adaptive physical education. So Marty, thank you for coming, welcome, and I'm turning it over to you. MARTY BLOCK:

Good, thank you, thanks. Thanks everybody. Before I start, I want to get a little idea who's here. How many people here are parents? Couple parents, good. How many people here -- oh, I'm a parent

too. How many people here are administrators? Oh, a lot of administrators. Special education teachers and physical education teachers? Oh, we got a couple, good, okay, good. All right, so

I'll try to gauge and gear this to that -- to the audience we have here. So I have two parts that I want to present today. My area, again, is how to include children with disabilities

in general physical education. I'm a strong supporter of including children into regular physical education whenever possible. We do have lots of children in our county who are included. We do

have some who we have to pull out for various reasons, but I really think lots and lots of kids can be included and lots more. So the first part I want to present is kind of the how to do

inclusion, and the second part is a lot about attitudes and how do you change attitudes. Now my belief is that you can include almost anybody into general physical education if the physical

education teacher has a positive attitude and if the students without disabilities are prepared and they have a positive attitude. My concern is that that doesn't happen very much. No one

prepares the physical education teacher. Nobody prepares the students without disabilities. So were going to spend the last part talking about how we can remediate that and actually prepare

physical educators better and prepare the children to be more accepting. Okay, so to begin with, I'm going to give you the answer to make this work. All right, you can include anybody if

you do this. So if you're going to go back as an administrator and talk to your physical educators, or you're a special ed teacher and you're going to talk to your physical educators, or you all

who are physical educators, this is the answer to all the problems for inclusion, all right? The slanty rope principle. So imagine that I take a rope and I put it on the floor and I slowly

keep it on the floor and gradually slant it up here till it goes up to and then I tape it to the wall. And I tell my class of 30 children in physical education, find a place on the rope

where you think you can stand and jump over the rope. All right, so there's a girl on the volleyball team who goes, oh, I can jump way down over here, so she's at the really high level. And

then there's some boy over here who's saying, I'm not a very good -- I'm not very good at athletics, I'll go down here. Then there's a little boy with autism, he comes over here and sees a

place he can jump. So a little boy in a wheelchair, he goes to the end and he sees it's flat, he can roll his wheelchair over. Then there's some kid who's got a full scholarship to Penn

State in track and field, he's over at the far end. He's going to jump over the highest part. And everybody else finds a space and the teacher says, okay, boys and girls, show me if you can

jump over the rope. And everybody jumps, from the child in a wheelchair, the child with autism, the very skilled athlete, the ones in between. What has that slanty rope done? It's

accommodated everybody in that class. Okay, two things I think have to happen in physical education. One, we need to modify and accommodate our activity so everybody has a chance to be

successful. All right, was everybody successful in that activity? Yeah, everybody, from the child in a wheelchair to the really skilled kid. Number two is when we make modifications, we have to

be careful that we want to make sure we challenge everybody. Okay, if we make things too simple for the whole class to accommodate a child in a wheelchair or a child with a visual

impairment, those kids who are really skilled are going to go, aw, she's in my class again. I don't like PE anymore because we have to do things to accommodate her. So want to be careful and

make sure everybody is still challenged, so that's going to be kind of what we're going to try to talk about, how we can do that today. But you go back to your physical educators and say, I

heard about this thing called a slanty rope, and it's this idea here. And now every activity you do, if you think of that principle and say, can I -- am I following the theory or this model

of the slanty rope principle? So I'll give you another example. I'm at the high school, I'm doing volleyball, all right, and I have a variety of abilities in my class. So I have one regulation

court with a regulation volleyball. I have another court, but in this court we relax the rules a little bit. Then I have a third court where we lower the net, we use a beach ball. There's

some kids who aren't as skilled in volleyball as others. They enjoy playing with a beach ball, and that might be a good place for the children with disabilities, at least some of the

children. All right, so again, that's the slanty rope. Easier court, middle court, high-level court. All right, so again, that's the idea here. So if you believe in this idea of a slanty rope and

you apply it to everything you do as a physical educator, I think you can include almost anybody. Okay, the second thing is, and I really like this quote and I don't know where it came from,

so I kind of take it as my own now, but you can't treat everybody the same. A lot of physical educators will say, I have to teach all the kids how to do the mile run or the beeper test where

you run back and forth to a time. And we all have to do it, they all have to pass at this level. And if they don't pass at this level, the principal's going to get mad at me, so we all have

to do it the same way. Well, that's not treating everybody fairly. Okay, I think to treat everybody fairly, you have to accommodate them at their particular levels. All right, and so again,

that's -- you can't treat everybody equally. Everybody's going to be real diverse and you have to kind of honor that. So those are two real, I think, take-home messages you can share with

your physical education teachers. Now since most of your aren't in physical education, let me tell you about what physical education looks like. I'm assuming Pennsylvania's the same as

Virginia and other places I've gone. So you as a physical education teacher or your physical education teacher may have one class of 20 or 25 boys and girls. It's very likely that, because

of budget cuts and because of increasing sizes, that physical education teacher may have two classes in the gym at the same time. So not only 20 children, but 40 children. And I've been to

schools where they have three classes and four classes. Texas is famous for having 150 kids in a physical education class. I did a workshop in Houston a long time ago and one of the

ladies raised her hand and said, I have three boys with autism in a class of a 150. Can you help me figure out how to accommodate them? I said, how do you teach 150 kids? Forget the kids with

autism. How do you do that? You know, so physical educators are faced with large numbers, often larger than what is in the regular classroom. At the elementary level, it's pretty --

you're going to have the same diversity you're going to have in the classroom. When you get to middle and high school, and high school in particular, at least at our high schools in

Virginia, we have different levels. We have kids who are in standard classes and kids who are in advanced and kids in honors and kids in AP classes, so we have a different range of

abilities. And so children who are really strong academically go to one level. Kids who aren't strong academically go to a different level. Kids who are great in math go one place, not very

good. So we differentiate academically. Okay, now when they come down to the gymnasium for physical education, we don't do that. When you take your mandatory ninth and tenth grade physical

education in Pennsylvania, everybody's got to go down to the gym together. So the point I'm trying to make here is that the physical education teacher has kids who are athletes and love

sports. He or she has kids who might be recreation type people, they like to work out, but they're not really good in a lot of sports. And you have some kids who played soccer when they were

five, got kicked in the shin and said, I'm never playing soccer again. And they're all in the same class. All right, so they're dealing with a real large, diverse group already, so it's a

real challenge for physical educators. So let's talk about some things here. We are thinking of making modifications, and the modifications are to accommodate the skill needs of a child with

a disability, okay. And again, a lot of the modifications that I'm going to talk about, when you go back and talk to your physical educators, they shouldn't be that, I don't think, that

difficult to do. It's a matter of thinking through it and thinking about that slanty rope. Have I really accommodated everybody? So simple modifications to accommodate that child with a

disability. Here are some things we might want to think about here. So one is there's a mismatch between the skill level of a child and the lesson content. All right, so I'm teaching

basketball and we're doing dribbling a basketball. All right, and I have cones set up and the kids are going to dribble in and out of the cones. This is a very typical, nice activity. Well,

I have a child who has Down's syndrome, and that child can't dribble the ball very well, and to go in and out of the cones is really impossible for that child. So I need to come up with a

modification for that child so he can be successful because right now he sees the cones, he realizes he can't dribble very well, he's not going to be successful, he's not going to even try.

Okay, it's going to be too difficult for him, so we need to deal with this idea of a mismatch of skill level and content. The second thing is we want to promote success. One of my colleagues

at the University of Virginia, Luke Kelly, has this saying success breeds success, failure breeds failure. Real simple concept. Success breeds success, failure breeds failure. That boy with

Down's syndrome, if I can create an activity where he's dribbling and he's perceiving that he's being successful and he's being successful, he is going to try some more. Okay, if he

perceives he's failing, he's not going to try. And then he's going to continue to fail and he's going to say, you know, I'm not even going to try for any activities. So the more successful

activities we can give these kids, the more likely they're going to continue and want to participate in physical education. When they come down to the gym and they realize they're not going

to be successful, they're not going to like physical education. Okay, now stepping away from disability, my other area is motor development. And one of the things I talk about is differences

between boys and girls, particularly at the middle and high school. Now we have co-ed physical education, all right, and the point I'm trying to make here is this idea of failure and not liking

physical activity. There's been some research, middle school girls, they interview girls, do you like physical education? And the -- I'll give you a hint, the title of the article is I Hate

Physical Education. And the girls are saying that when we're in a co-ed class, the boys are very aggressive. The boys knock me down. The boys take all the balls and don't let me have my

turns and I don't like that. Okay, the boys are just bigger, stronger, faster at that age. Okay, so they don't like physical education. Well, I think that's because the teacher doesn't

accommodate those differences, all right. And when the girls say they don't like physical education, they're not going to want to go out and do recreation volleyball or pick up softball or

do different things, so just they're not comfortable doing that stuff and they're going to not do it. And I think it's the same thing with kids with disabilities. There's ton of research that

shows adults with disabilities have a lot of leisure time and are very overweight as a group, very physically inactive as a group, and again, I think part of that is because we didn't

prepare them for a life after school of recreation and being physically active. Okay, so that's the point here. Make them successful, modify the activity so it's appropriate so they enjoy

being physically active and they want to continue being physically active. And then finally, we want to make sure the environment is safe and meaningful for all students. Safe and meaningful.

Your physical educators are going to say, I can't include this child because it's not safe. And I agree. You have to make sure the activity is safe for the child, so when you're thinking of

accommodations, what can I do to make the activity safe? Some things you can do might require the child to be off to the side a little bit. Okay, so for example, well, let's say we have a

child who's in a electric wheelchair, power wheelchair. Okay, we're playing soccer inside the -- in the gym because it's raining outside and it's a small space and you're scared that, as the

PE teacher, I'm scared someone's going to run into this child. And they're going to get hurt hitting his wheelchair or either going to knock the child over. A fair concern. But we want the child

to participate, okay, so what can we do to make sure he's participating safely and in a meaningful way? Meaningful means that there's an integral part of the game that he's participating in.

If he's flipping the score, I don't think that's meaningful, okay. If he is off to the side cheering, going, yay, you guys are doing a great job, I don't think that's a meaningful way to be

involved. So how can I make him safe but have a meaningful role? So in soccer, the ball goes out of bounds a lot. All right, so what do you do? I'm going to have this player on the out of

bounds and he's going to use his power wheelchair and go up and down the sidelines, and I might assign a peer with him to make sure things are safe in case the balls come flying really hard at

him. When the ball goes out of bounds, he's the person who automatically throws the ball back in every time. We put it on his power wheelchair, he goes really fast, hits the brakes, the ball

rolls off his lap, and the ball's back in play. So he just kind of roams the sidelines, back and forth, okay, whenever the ball goes out of bounds, he's the guy who throws it back in. Simple

modification. Is it a meaningful role? Someone's got to throw the ball back in, all right. Is he safe? Yes, because he's off to the side a little bit. Now how does this really look in real

life? What I've seen happen, again, imagine this, one of my big areas of interest is social inclusion. You can physically put a child with a disability in a regular PE class, but they could

be socially isolated. I want those kids to be really part of the group. So now this kid isn't on the red team or the blue team, he's a neutral player, and he's going to throw the ball back into

play. So now you have kids on the red team and the blue team, what are they yelling? Let's say the kid's name is Billy. Billy, pass it to me! Billy, I'm over here! Billy, over here! Throw it

to me! So now all of a sudden, he's more socially part of the group because he has a really important role, but he's safely included here. So a meaningful role for the student. When I was --

I did my master's at Ohio State, and one of my professors there, Paul Jansman, told us this story and asked the students, what do you think about this? So there's a boy in a wheelchair who is

included in a softball unit, and he said the teacher said he was going to be second base. What do you guys think of that? They're asking the student, is that a good position? So we're

thinking second base. Yeah, second base, you don't have to run as far. Most kids hit it to the left side of the field to shortstop and third base, so he's not going to get as many touches.

You don't have to throw it as far because he's kind of close to first base, so yeah, second base is a good position for him. That's a good decision he made. And the teacher said, no, you

don't understand. The teacher said he was going to be second base. The kids would run around and put their hand on his shoulder, and he was second base. And the question is that a

meaningful role for a child? I know, it's ridiculous, isn't it? But that's what it -- now I'm not sure if that's a true story, but this is a true story. My wife's a special ed teacher, been

teaching for over 30 years. Amazing that she -- she works with the most severe kids, still loves teaching. Every day comes home with stories about how much she loves teaching. Doesn't like

the administrators, by the way, but loves teaching. So we were in Illinois for a couple years. I was teaching university. She was working in an inclusive classroom, and one of our student

teachers came out and was working in physical education. And so it was kindergarteners and they were doing a kind of a -- what do you call that? Musical chairs. All right, so the kids were

going to go around and when the music stopped, you sat down. And my wife had a couple kids in wheelchairs and my student -- our student said, we're going to make Sarah a chair. The kids will walk

around and when the music stops, they'll sit on Sarah's lap. Isn't that a great idea? And my wife's like, I'm not going to make this girl a chair. That's not a meaningful role in this game.

So I'm not sure how they modified it, but this teacher, who really was a good teacher and her heart was in the right place, I really want to include this girl, but you know, that wasn't the

right thing. So again, when you go back and talk to your physical educators, is the role they created a meaningful role? They don't have to be the star player, but they have to have some

type of role that's meaningful in the game. Okay, so we'll talk about some more of those examples as we go along here. Now again, along with those things, this is how I judge whether or

not a modification's appropriate. So does it allow the child to be safe and successful? We've talked about safety. We've talked about success. And then the meaningful part, okay. So those

are all key things. So when we judged was this a good modification, does it meet all those different criteria? Okay, so having a child off to the side keeping score, while he's safe, okay,

he's successful, but I don't think that's a meaningful role for the child. Okay, so you have some things to think about here. Does the activity make it safe for children without

disabilities? All right, so now imagine I'm doing a volleyball activity, and we're at the point where we're playing games of volleyball at the high school, and I have a boy who's blind in my

class. All right, so I'm going to have this boy who's blind, let's say, in the -- I'm trying to think, where's a good position? Maybe in the back row. All right, so he's going to be in the back

row and so -- and I'm going to tell the kids, remember, John's blind back here and if it comes to him, we'll have a peer who catches the ball for him, and that's how he'll play. But just

don't move back real far because I don't want you to run into him. So you're telling the kids in a game of volleyball, remember, there's a boy back here who's blind. Don't run into him.

Okay, now imagine the game. The kids, oh, here comes the ball! Boom. All right, they -- in the heat of a game, they don't understand that. So when I make a modification, giving this child a peer,

that might not be enough. I need to think how can I really make sure it's safe for the students without disabilities? So those are some other things we have to think about. Does it ruin

the game for everybody else? Okay, so again, one of my concerns is that the kids are going to leave physical education not with a type of attitude we want. Research -- well, not a lot whole lot

of research, but more anecdotal things and philosophical things, people say we should include children because there's going to be these opportunities for social interaction, true

friendships, all the literature you read about inclusion. So now I include a child with a disability in physical education. Let's go back to a child who's blind again. All right, and I tell

my class, you know, we have Jim, who's in our class. And you know, Jim is -- has a visual impairment. And to make it fair, we're going to be playing soccer for the next three weeks in our unit

because that's where we are in the curriculum. But we're going to all be blindfolded for the next three weeks because we want to make it fair for Jim. Okay, so how do you think the

kids are going to -- we're playing soccer, yeah! We're going to be blindfolded for three weeks? God, thanks Jim. You know, I'm sure in the locker room, they'll go, god, I hate this kid, you

know. So that's not the right attitude. Now would it be fun for the kids to say, hey, for 15 minutes let's all be blindfolded and see what it's like to be like Jim? That would be kind of pretty

cool. But to do a three- week unit? No. So we have to be careful not to ruin the game for everyone. There hasn't been a whole lot of research on this. There was one really cool study they

did in Canada. A guy named Greg Reid, professor at McGill University, took middle school age kids, upper elementary, middle, 11, 12-year-olds, and he had them play a modified game of

volleyball. So they played a regulation game and then kind of a modified game. And the kids were very honest, so afterwards when he interviewed them and they said, yeah, you know, we like

the regular game. The modified game was okay, but it really wasn't a lot like volleyball, and we kind of miss playing real volleyball. So you just have to be aware that when you make

modifications, some of the kids may say, you know, that's really changing it too much for me and I'm a little concerned about that. Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: An example, you mentioned

volleyball, and my daughter has Down's syndrome. And when she was in high school, they played volleyball and the ball hit her one time in the face, and she didn't like it. She didn't want to

play. So I went down to Wal-Mart and bought a Nerf -- it's a heavy Nerf volleyball. And I brought it and gave it to the gym teacher to try out and it was such a success because not only did

Olivia want to play now because it has the same look and feel. You can do the same thing with it, but when it would hit her, it wouldn't hurt. All the kids wanted to be on that team playing

with that ball versus the other two teams playing with the regular ball because they didn't want to get hurt. So again, that's a case where it answers all your questions. MARTY BLOCK:

Exactly, yeah. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And it wasn't that big of a modification. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah. So again, so his -- just to repeat this, the example was a regulation volleyball was hurt --

his daughter got a Nerf type softer volleyball, and that allowed her to be successful in playing. Now the big take-home message what you said was there are lots of other kids who wanted to

be on that court too. All right and again -- AUDIENCE MEMBER: They got hit by the ball and got hurt too. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, exactly. You know, and how many people's favorite subject was

physical education growing up? Yeah, some people were. The phys ed teacher, yeah, of course. Yeah, I mean, you know, and it's -- there are a lot of kids who go to physical education dreading

when they take that step into the gym. Oh, let me survive for 45 minutes. It just -- it's not a great environment for them. So when the physical education teacher says, we're playing

volleyball, and I have the NCAA rulebook and we're going to play by the exact rules of the NCAA for the next six weeks, there are kids going, oh, I hate PE. Now when the PE teacher says,

oh, I remember that slanty rope thing that weird guy said. Okay, let's see, so I have a regulation court for the kids who are good at volleyball, I have a modified court, and then I got a

court with a special soft ball. You choose which court you want to go. Like I said, there are kids running to that special court because a lot of kids aren't good in physical education. So yeah,

that's a great example, great example there. Okay. And, well, this last one is, does it cause an undue burden on the regular PE teacher? I am keenly aware of the challenges of having 40,

50, 60 kids in a class, accommodating everybody. So if I'm going to tell the PE teacher, I need you to go to Lowe's or Home Depot and build this huge contraption and go on the Internet and

find 25 lesson plans and do all these things, they're not going to do that. All right, but if it's something like I'm going to give you a soft ball and just have a special net, that's not that

hard. Can you have a special place off to the side for some of the kids to be? That's possible too. So I think there's things that can be done. All right, so let's talk about some

modifications. I took this right from special ed several years ago and just applied it to physical education. So the most typical situation is something called multi-level curricular

selection. This means that all the kids, the activities we've chosen are appropriate. We're all doing basketball and we've decided that that's appropriate for the children with disabilities

in our class. It's just that they're at different levels. Okay, so this young -- this man's daughter, volleyball we said was appropriate, but not at the same level as everybody else. We have

to have different levels. Okay, a different ball, different challenges, things like that. Okay, so that's one we can look at. Here's a simple solution for that. We have a target on the

wall, we have tennis balls for kids to throw, the teacher -- that's a very typical thing. Take your tennis ball, stand over here in this little spot, and see if you can throw and hit the

target. So kids are throwing. Some kids who are good at baseball do really well with that activity. Okay, other kids, not so well. So what can I do to accommodate different abilities in this

multi-level curricular? I think throwing is a good activity, but I need to have multiple levels. So I have different spots on the floor. Find a spot where you think you can be successful. I

have different targets on the wall. I have different size balls. Again, is that a burden for a PE teacher? Yeah, I got to put a couple more targets on the wall, couple more spots down, maybe

have a couple different balls, but now find a ball that fits your hand, find a spot that you think you can be successful, find a target that you think you can hit, and throw and hit that

target. If you hit that target, then see if you can step back. Challenge yourself, find a smaller target, find a ball that's even harder to throw. So again, that's the type of stuff we can do. So

multi-level curricular selection is the simplest, but the thing we're faced with the most. Everybody's doing the same thing, but at different levels. Curricular overlapping is when we

have a child who comes to the gym who has unique IEP goals for physical education. All right, and here we have the physical education class doing something else that doesn't match, at least

at first glance, what the class is doing. IEP goals, something over here. And so what we want to do is can we overlap these two curricular areas so that the child still can be included, but

working on something appropriate? Now one of my concerns, as an adaptive physical educator, is we write IEP goals. The parents have approved the IEP goals and we've kind of spent some time

deciding what is it we really want to teach this young woman or this young man in physical education? All right, and then the child's included and we never look at those IEP goals. We're

just going to have that child do all the things the other kids do in regular PE with modifications. Well, that's kind of neat, but at the end of the year, at least what I tell my students

is, and correct me, you're a parent, if I'm wrong. The parent says, you told me you were going to teach my daughter how to ride a bicycle. I'm excited. How'd she do? Did she do really well?

And you go, well, you know, we decided that she really liked our first unit on basketball and then she liked that unit and we never really got to bike riding. Now as a parent, I'd say, but we all

agreed that you were going to teach my daughter how to ride a bike or play golf or play tennis or do something. You know, so again, that's the idea where it says I don't want to always pull

this child out to work on these unique goals, but I want to work on these unique goals. All right, so I'll give you an example of how this looks. We had a little girl in one of our middle

schools. She was working on the underhand roll, stepping and rolling so she can learn how to bowl. One of her kind of goals, big goals, is to go to a bowling alley and bowl by herself. All

right, so she had physically was able to do it, but just cognitively had trouble understanding how to do that, so that was her goal. The high school class was in a lacrosse unit -- or this

middle school class, lacrosse, so the kids were holding lacrosse sticks, throwing balls back and forth, doing things like that. So here we got our bowling, lacrosse. So, fortunately, the

adapted physical education teacher who was assigned to that school and the physical educator sat down together and said, how can we overlap these two curricular areas? And it turned out to

be a pretty simple solution. This girl would pick up a lacrosse ball, she would practice her step and roll. Now one of the hard things with this is that she didn't bend down very much, so she

just kind of throw it. And if you go to a bowling alley, the bowling alley people don't like that. Want you to bend down and roll the ball. So we had to get her to bend down and roll. And so

we got her to roll. Now what do you think the kids were doing? There was a little girl with a lacrosse stick who would be there to practice scooping it up, cradle it, run around a cone, and

drop it right back in front of Lynn's feet, and she'd go back and be ready again. Lynn would pick up the ball, do the underhand roll, scoop it, run around. So again, we overlapped two different

curricular areas. We have a boy in one of our schools. He's been in our -- I've known him since he's been in preschool, but now he's an eighth grader. But Evan, he has a -- he uses a

gait trainer. He has severe cerebral palsy. I'm sorry, he has a power wheelchair, he's got cerebral palsy, and the gait trainer is it's this thing, imagine, with four kind of standers with

wheels and this like almost like a swing seat. And you strap him in there and he kind of is suspended there, so his feet are dangling down and his feet touch the floor and he can move his feet.

And he actually -- it's kind of a gait trainer, so it's helping him learn how to walk. So he's -- sorry, yeah, so he's been doing this type of walking thing. So when he comes to -- and in

school, he's in a power wheelchair. In PE, he's in a little gait trainer. All right, so curricular overlapping, Evan's learning how to walk. Okay, that's what he's been working on. Can he

learn how to eventually walk using a little -- a walker as opposed to a power wheelchair? We want to keep his legs strong. We want to help him maintain good posture. So those are all goals

for Evan. Now he is in middle school where they're playing volleyball, basketball, soccer, all these different sports. So whenever you go to PE and you see Evan, you see the kids running

laps. Evan's -- excuse me, in his little gait trainer. When the kids are playing soccer, Evan's on the sidelines, going back and forth. Okay, he's the guy who's the automatic throw in kid. Okay,

and he just -- they put the ball by his gait trainer, he runs real fast, and the ball gets put back into play. All right, I was there about a month ago and they were doing roller-skating. I

was like, roller-skating? How's Evan going to do that? Well, they put roller-blades on Evan, they put a helmet on Evan, the teacher kind of held him by the waist, he was holding onto some

type of barrel, and they were just pushing him along. And he was -- the biggest smile you could imagine. Okay, so Evan is working on his goals, but he's within the regular PE setting. So

again, that's important. That's curricular overlapping. And the last one here is when you're saying, you know what, I can't figure out how to meaningfully and safely and successfully include

a child into the regular activity. Okay, we're doing whatever activity. We're teaching the kids to juggle knives and I can't figure out how to modify those activities to include this young

man's daughter with Down's syndrome. So I can't figure out how to do that, okay, but I don't want to pull this child out into the hallway by herself. I would still like her to have

opportunities to interact with peers without disabilities, but doing things that are appropriate for her. Okay, so I call this pulling out from within or an alternative activity, so she's

off to the side or another child's off to the side working on something unique for them, but we bring in peers to interact with them. To me, that's still inclusion. So again, remember my

scenario of what a typical physical education class is. You got 25, 35, 40 kids. and a lot of times, the gym space, you don't have enough equipment to accommodate everybody, so some kids

have to sit out. All right, so what do those kids do when they're sitting out? Well, they're talking and having fun and stuff. I have two daughters, both very athletic, but they didn't

particularly like physical education. So I pick them up from school, the first thing I asked is, what'd you do in physical education? Who cares about math and science. What was phys ed like

today? So my older daughter, one time from middle school, goes, oh, Dad, it was great. I said, really? You never like phys ed, what'd you do today? Well, we're playing basketball and we

have like 30 kids in the class and there was only room for one -- there's two sets of baskets, so five versus five, that's ten kids. Five versus five, that's ten kids. So there's another 20

kids sitting on the bleachers. I got to talk to my friends for like 20 minutes, you know. So those 20 kids, could we pull out five kids and have the boy with muscular dystrophy who we can't

figure out how to include in that basketball game because of safety issues, have him off to the side working on pushing a ball down a ramp for bowling, and peers setting up pins and peers

taking turns bowling and peers putting the ball on the ramp for him and peers talking to him? Okay, so that's that alternative activity off to the side, but the child is still within that

inclusive setting. So there's some things we can think about here. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And you said something too, if we could develop and work on his social skill in the regular gym class, so

you're also able to work on other goals that he has, not just gym goals or stuff like that or physical education goals. MARTY BLOCK: Exactly, so this man said we're working on social goals as

well as those physical education goals. Exactly, and that's real -- that's a real important thing. And that's a real important point. Again, going back to my colleague, Luke Kelly, it really

aggravates him when a special ed teacher says, I want to include this child in physical education and I don't care if she learns how to throw or catch or run or jump, I just want her in

there for social reasons. And his big thing is, well, there's lots of places you can do social skill training. Why does it have to be in the gym? Now I like the idea of working on physical

education skills and the social and physical education can be a real social setting for these kids, so I agree. It's a plan -- chance to work on multiple things. AUDIENCE MEMBER: And you

can work on like counting, like the kid who has math goals of counting from one to 20 or one to 50. Well, you can count every time the ball goes in the hoop. Okay, count it. MARTY BLOCK:

That's right. It's -- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Work on counting goals in the regular -- MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, and there's been lots of talk about overlapping math and reading and different things in

the physical education setting, so I like the idea of counting. You can say we have things you have to read at this station that tells you what to do. Lots of overlapping of the regular

curriculum. That's a great idea, okay. All right, so let's look at some multi-level curricular selection ideas here. We'll go through each of these in more detail. So the first one is called

extending skill stations. So if you go down to the gym, oftentimes PE teachers will use stations to teach things. So I'm teaching basketball to my middle school or upper-elementary kids, so

I'm going to have a station for dribbling, I'll have a station for shooting, there'll be a station for passing. Okay, volleyball, I can have different types of skills, but the kids are broken up

into smaller groups and go to these stations. Very popular teaching method. I think it's a wonderful teaching method. Okay, the PE teacher goes around and can supervise lots of different

kids. So we do this at skill stations, but oftentimes the PE teacher has one challenge for that station. So when you go to this station, you dribble in and out of the cones. When you go to

this station, you shoot a basketball from the free throw line. When you go to this station, I have some Poly Spots, you do a chest pass back and forth with your partner. All right, now

that's one challenge at each station. Remember my slanty rope. Okay, does that accommodate everybody? I don't think so. So we have this idea of can we extend skill stations to accommodate

all the different levels? So again, now the teacher has to say, when you go to the dribbling station, you can dribble in and out of cones. Okay, if that's too hard for you, here's another

option. You can just walk as you dribble. Jogging might be too fast. Walk and try go in and out of cones. Is that too hard? You can just go straight and don't worry about going in and out

of cones. Is that too hard for you? Bounce the ball with two hands and see if you can catch it, and if you can do that, do it and take a step. If that's too hard for you, in your wheelchair,

sit there and tap the ball. Use your hand and tap the ball. That's dribbling for you. All right, so again, I have lots of different levels rather than just one challenge here. Okay, now I

can go up the scale too. Is dribbling in and out of cones too easy? Use your opposite hand. Okay, go as fast as you can. Okay, see if you can do it with two balls, bouncing with two balls. I

don't think I can do that. It's two balls, so it's a real challenge. So the point I'm trying to make here is we want to make sure everybody who comes to that station is challenged at their

level and has a chance to be successful. So let's look at here's one for basketball. I think that's the last one, yeah. So we have at the -- let's go to the middle here. So walking forward

and dribbling a soccer ball. Jogging forward, dribble between cones. So that's kind of the ones that are typical when you go to a physical education class. So now we add some more

challenges, going really fast or dribble while being guarded. But then we go the other direction, we're extending downward, stationary dribble, just stand in place, slap the ball three times

in a row, drop the ball. Hold the ball in your lap tray. So imagine you're in a physical education class and you have a child with a severe multiple disability. Okay, and she is just

holding onto this ball, trying to relax her muscles, reach her hands out, stretch her arms out, and just hold onto the ball and maybe lift it off her lap tray and then drop it back down. And at

that same station is a kid who's going to be going to Villanova to play basketball who's dribbling out of the cones, between his legs, spinning around, and they're at the same station, okay.

And I've accommodated all the different levels there. Okay, so I think that's the type of thing I like to see PE teachers do. You can have multiple things. You can make this even

longer, you can make it shorter, but the key is you're telling your PE teachers just have multiple challenges to accommodate all the different levels. Again, is this a burden on the physical

education teacher? I don't think it's that hard to add a couple more challenges. So again, it's a relatively simple thing to do, but a great way to accommodate different levels here,

okay. Task and equipment modifications. Now I list these this way: so limited strength, speed, endurance, and balance. So a lot of times, someone will tell us -- or one of my students will

come to me and say, I have a new child who's in my class who has Down's syndrome, who has autism, who's in a wheelchair, who has cerebral palsy. And I say, great, tell me something else

because I don't know how to -- anything about this child in terms of physical education. Okay, so if you tell me the child is in a wheelchair, okay, I want to know does they have limited

strength, limited speed? Because speed, strength, balance, and endurance is what physical education teachers need to know, okay, about how to accommodate a child. So if I have a child who's

in a wheelchair and the PE teacher goes, oh my gosh, we're playing basketball, there's no way this kid can do it. And this kid comes in, he's doing wheelies, and he's playing on a wheelchair

basketball team in town, and he's, you know, the best basketball player there. Oh, well, I didn't know that. I just thought he was in a wheelchair. So they need to know what types of

specific limitations are. So now I'm doing basketball and you tell me there's a child in my class who has autism, and I still don't know anything about basketball and this child. Now you

tell me, well, I don't think he's got the strength to make a ten-foot basket. Oh, okay, now that's some information I can use, so I'm going to get an eight-foot basket and then a six-foot

basket. I'm going to get a lighter ball for him to shoot with or I'm going to have him stand closer. Okay, so strength is some information that I could use. So the physical education

teacher is good at knowing what activities require strength. Serving a volleyball over the net from a certain distance, that requires strength. Shooting a basketball a certain distance,

throwing a ball a certain distance. Those are all strength things. Pushups, sit-ups, those all require strength. This child has limited upper body strength, I've got to accommodate them. So

I have all the kids doing pushups to being the class. Everybody drop and give me 20. I had a bunch of kids who say, you know, coach, I can't do 20 pushups. You crazy? So you say, if you can

do 20, do 20, really challenge yourself. If you can only do 10, do 10. If you can only do one real pushup, do one real pushup. If you can only do one, that's great, but then do nine more

modified on your knees, okay. The boy with autism who really can't do any pushups, we have him go over to the wall and just do a wall pushup. So he stands here and does that. Okay, so that

doesn't require as much strength, but now the child at least is being accommodated at his level here. So again, these types of things help me understand how to make modifications. All

right, speed. What activities in physical education require speed? Can you think of something? Pardon me? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Track. MARTY BLOCK: Track and field requires speed. Okay, what

other activities do you do that require speed in physical education? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Baseball. MARTY BLOCK: Baseball. Okay, I got to run to first base really fast, that's a good idea.

Okay, let's go with that one here. So then baseball. So a true story, another -- when I was in Illinois, one of my students there, a master's student, was working with a little girl

and the family, and it was getting ready to be summertime. And the girl's parents, she was about 11 or 12, and the parents said, I'd like our daughter to play softball. Her older sister plays

softball and softball's really popular and we want her to play softball. And in Illinois, it was only fast pitch softball, so they're throwing the ball really fast. This girl had an

intellectual disability. She was really slow compared to her peers, and part of it was because she was confused what to do. She couldn't hit a pitch ball. She couldn't really field a ball

unless it was rolled right to her. She could only throw the ball about five or ten feet. So I had all these types of things that she couldn't do, limitations in strength, speed, running to first

base. But the parents said, we really want her to be included, you know. She knows some of the girls. It'd be really fun for her to do over the summer. So my student said, you know,

I'm going to do this for my thesis. We're going to include her and we're going to measure how successful she was in these modifications. But that's exactly what we did. We took things like

speed and said, where do you need speed in softball? I got to run from home to first base. And she was so slow and so slow getting out of the box because she was confused that she would always

get out. So we said, how long does it take a typical person to run from home to first, a typical girl in that league, and whatever it took, four seconds, five seconds, and we said, how far

can she go in four or five seconds? So we measured how far that was, and that's where first base was for her. So that made it fair. We didn't treat her like everybody else. We treated her

individually. And so we accommodated that speed thing there. She couldn't hit a pitch ball. She would never get on base. Okay, so what we did with her was we put a ball on a tee, just like

this young man that's hitting a ball off a tee. Okay, so again, did we ruin the game for everybody else? When it was her turn to bat, we came out with a cone, put it down there, she hit it, took

the cone away. After that, the game was like a regular game. All right, so those are types of modifications we made. Now an interesting fact here about softball with girls 11 to 12 when

they're playing fast pitch softball: the pitchers can't pitch. So this girl, we measured on base percentage. If you ever read the book Billy -- Billy Bean -- what's that book called? The

movie that just -- Moneyball, Moneyball. Yeah, they talked about on base percentages. So walking is good. If you can walk, you get on base. Well, all these girls walked because these

pitchers were throwing the ball off the backstop and into the stands. They couldn't -- and this windup stuff, oh, sorry! You know, just crazy. So this girl never had a chance to walk because

she always hit the ball off of a tee. So her batting on base percentage wasn't as good as the other kids. But you know, it was no big deal. She played, she had fun. So speed was an issue

here. The other speed activity that we often do in physical education is let's play a game of tag. All right, everybody likes to play tag. Let's play a game of tag. All right, so now we're

playing a game and we have a little boy who moves really slowly. And he's always tagged and he's always out. All right, so what can we do to accommodate that? We know speed is an issue. We

know speed's required in that game. All right, well, one thing we know that we teach as part of best practices in physical education is you don't play elimination games. So in the old days,

when you and I were going to school, and I got tagged, you sat out till everybody else got tagged and then you got back In the game. Well, who gets tagged first? The least skilled kids who need

to practice running more than everybody else. But they're the ones who sit out to the side. So we don't -- hopefully don't do that anymore. So now we say, if you get tagged, do a jumping

jack and jump right back in the game. If you get tagged, stand with your legs out, someone's going to run in between your legs and they'll unfree you and you can be back in the game. So we

can do that, so that reduces that problem. We had a boy with muscular dystrophy. Speed was an issue. We had a safe area for him. He was at the point where he was still able to walk, but he

was walking very slowly. All right, so we had a couple of Poly Spots and then he would look to see where the tagger was and he'd kind of see are they far away. And he would go and he'd walk

over to the next spot, you know, and it was a challenge for him to get there before the tagger saw him. But then he saw, okay, if they're far away, I can get that spot over here. So we had some

safe spots for him to accommodate speed. Okay, that's something we can do. We can change how kids move. So let's say that boy is the tagger who moves really slowly. What can I do? Okay,

well, I can make the space smaller so it's a little bit harder for the kids to get away from him. Okay, I could change the movements for the other kids. Everybody has to jump on two feet or hop

on one foot. That'll make it easier for this guy to be successful. So I'm trying to, you know, gauge what's the best way to make this child successful accommodating his needs for speed and

dealing with speed. Okay, I can have multiple taggers, so he's one tagger, I have another tagger, but speed is something I want to think about. Accuracy, endurance, those are some other

things. Balance I mention here. Again, the trick here is to make these accommodations so that the child is safe and successful and meaningful and balancing with this idea of am I challenging

the child and I want to make sure the game is fair for everybody. So I'll give you another example here. We had a boy who was in third grade, and he couldn't shoot a ball into a basket, so

we got a cardboard box and just put it on the floor next to the basket. And we would say, when it was his turn to shoot, he would just put the ball into the box. Well, it turned out that that was

way too easy for this kid. Most of the kids in third grade, even on a six-foot basket, were making like one basket out of five. This kid was 100%, boom, boom, boom. So kind of a good thing

is when we pick teams, everybody -- oh, I want him on my team, you know, because we're going to win. He's great. Because -- then, okay, we got to figure out how to modify this a little bit,

so we decided to put the box up a little bit higher. He had to really reach, he had a time limit, so there were different things we could do in that situation. So these are some things that

are in the language of a physical educator. So again, when you say, I'm including this little girl who's in my class and she's blind, the physical education teacher's going to freak out to

begin with. Oh my god, what do I do with a child who's blind? But then once he calms down, you'll say, these are some things I think are going to be some issues. I think she's got pretty

good strength. Looks like she can probably do your pushups and sit-ups and I think she could, if you give her some auditory cues, can shoot at a regulation basket, and I think she can throw

pretty far. I think she's okay with that, okay. Speed, because of her vision, I don't think she's comfortable running really fast, so that's going to be an issue you're going to have to

deal with, okay. But endurance, she's -- you know, her mom said she goes to the gym and she walks on a treadmill and she's pretty fit, so that's not going to be a problem. So now the person

says, okay, I'm thinking about what I need to do for that child there. Oh, coordination, there it was. Instructional modifications. So these are things that you would do -- and let me go to

this slide here. These are things that you would do for kids who don't understand your presentation of information. Okay, so I'm assuming that -- here we go, I'm assuming that here in

Pennsylvania, like in Virginia, you have a million kids with autism. Is that true? Yeah, we have -- you know, million might be a little bit high, but it's close to that. Just every child who

seems to come to our school now is diagnosed with autism, and it's a challenge for our physical educators. And the big challenge is, you know, the kids can do some stuff, but I don't know how to

communicate with them. The style I use to teach, the way I present information just doesn't seem to work for these kids. They don't understand to seem what to do and that gets them

frustrated and then things fall apart from there. So what are some things we can do? Well, teaching style is do I do direct instruction so we're all going to do the exact same thing the

same way, we're going to teach you how to do a basketball shot. So everybody grab your basketball, put one hand behind it, the other hand to the side of it, spread your legs out, bend your

knees. Okay, now we're going to push it, we're going to follow through by reaching our hand, and that's what you shoot a basketball. We're all going to do it together. That's a direct

teaching style, we're all going to do it the same way together. Now that's a great teaching style to teach skills. It just might not match a child's learning style or their abilities.

All right, so we had a girl in our -- in one of our classes who had arthrogryposis. This is a disability that starts during prenatal development and, for some reason, the joints fuse so she

can't bend her arms and the muscles atrophy so she has hardly any muscles. And everything gets internally rotated. All right, so she's stands here like this, okay, and then she walks by

doing this type of stuff, and she can move her arms this way, but that's how she is because she can't bend her elbow. Now sometimes those kids actually break the elbow, reset it here, so now

she can feed herself and do different things. But so, you know, and normal intelligence. It's just one of these awful prenatal types of thing. So we're teaching the kids how to do the

overhand throw and we're saying, hold your ball like this, bring your arm back, step, throw. And she's like, wait, I can't do any of that stuff. All right, so this direct teaching style

where we all have to do the same activity the same way at the same time didn't match her at all. All right, so we said, let's use the other teaching style, which is an exploratory style. There's

no right or wrong answer. You choose what matches you. That's the exploratory. No right or wrong answer. I would like to see you get the ball across the gym. You can throw it, you could

kick it, you could bounce it off your head. There's no right or wrong answer. So the exploratory style is different from the direct style. All right, so we asked her, I said, Kristen, while

we're teaching other kids to throw this way, you explore your body and figure out what's the best way for you to throw. Here are some bean bags, here are some balls. I have a peer over there

to help with you, and you figure it out and tell us what you did. How would you throw a ball if you were like this? I worked at a camp one summer, Camp Bestershills in Virginia. I had a

couple of boys like this. They were really good pitchers. They would stand sideways, they'd take the ball here, kind of rotate their body, gets the momentum going, phew, just throw the ball as

hard as you can imagine. Vroom, like that. Then we play -- then it was their turn to bat. Same thing, they'd stand sideways, toss the ball, they could turn and do rotate and hit the ball.

Then they had to go to first base. How do you think they got to first base? Okay, drop the bat. That's how they walk. Too slow. Threw himself on the floor and did log rolls. You know, it's

amazing, you know. If you -- given the solution, that's pretty the wrong solution, you know. So this little girl, Kristen, she's standing like this. I'd say, Kristen, show the class how you

figured out the throw. Put the beanbag in your hand, right? She goes, no. I forgot that she was barefoot most of the time. She would move her electric wheelchair with her feet, put the

beanbag between her toes, put her leg back, and just kind of flipped the beanbag across the gym. We're all going, whoa! Kristen, way to go! You know, so again, the answer here is that there are

different teaching styles. We didn't know which is the best way for her to move, so we figured let her figure it out. The exploratory style. Okay, now the opposite. I'm a good physical

education teacher. I'm teaching kindergarteners, first graders, second grades, and I think an exploratory style is appropriate for those kids. So rather than saying we're all going to skip

this way, I'm going to say, boys and girls, show me how you can travel. You can run, jump, gallop, skip. There's no right or wrong answer. You choose how you want to travel around the gym. And

when you're traveling, show me how you can do it using different directions. You can go forwards, backwards, or sideways. Really have fun. Explore how you're going to do this. So the

kids are going. I'm saying, oh, look, Sarah's going backwards skipping, and I see hopping on one foot forward. And then you say, okay, let's stop. Now show me how you can travel and do a

different locomotor pattern. If you ran last time, do something different. If you jumped, do something different. And this time, let's explore pathways. You can go curvy pathways. You can go

a zigzag. You can go straight. Explore how you want to go. So that's the exploratory model. No right or wrong answer, okay, it's just -- and then you can do this at higher level. Get a

partner. We're going to play soccer. I want you to figure out a way to dribble past your partner. Your partner will be kind of passive, playing defense, but figure out how you might dribble.

What's the best way for you to dribble by your partner, to beat your partner? So a neat teaching style, very appropriate. But now I have a child with autism and I say to the class, show

me how you can travel and show me at a high, medium, or low level. So you can be really tall or really small or medium level. Show me how you can travel. Okay, this kid with autism didn't

understand a word I said. Doesn't understand the concepts of high, medium, or low. Doesn't understand what I mean by traveling. Doesn't seem to work at all for him. So now I have two

choices. One is I can say, you know what, that teaching style doesn't work for him. And even though I think it's great for the other 20 kids, I'm going to scrap that teaching style to accommodate

his needs. Okay, I don't think that's a good solution. I think a better solution is to say, teach these kids using this style and for this child, I'm going to use a direct style. Okay, now I

might do it myself where I say, boys and girls, show me how you can travel, high, medium, low level. and I go over to Timmy and say, Timmy, let's practice our jump. Come here, Timmy. We're

going to practice our jump. Remember, arms back, arms forward, and jump. Good jumping, Timmy, do that again. Now I'm stopped, looking at the boys and girls, give them some feedback. Great

job, everybody. Okay, Timmy, jump again. Arms back, arms forward, and jump. So I'm using a direct style for Timmy and I'm using a exploratory style for the rest of the class. Too hard for

me to do? What's your name? Martin? I say, Martin, can you help Timmy here? I don't think he understands. We're just working on the jump. Arms back, arms forward, jump. Okay, and Martin's

going to be fine to do that with him, okay. So again, the point is that when I'm faced with that dilemma, accommodate the kids. Don't throw out what I think is a good teaching style.

Accommodate their needs. Some other things here. Instructional cues. These are things like do I give verbal directions or do I give demonstrations or do I do pictures or do I have the

students come and practice this skill? I mean, how do I present the information to the children? So again, I have a child who's visually impaired. Everybody close your eyes real quick. Close

your eyes real quick now. See if you can do what I'm doing. Okay, I want you to bring your arm back like this. Okay, and then when it's back here, I want you to take a big step like that. Okay,

and now don't forget to really bend over like this and then really release the ball with a good high follow through, okay? What do you think -- okay, you can open your eyes. What do you

think I was showing you how to do? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Throw a baseball? MARTY BLOCK: Throw a baseball. I was actually showing the underhand roll. Okay, same thing, but you don't know

because the cues were so non-descriptive. All right, so again, if I'm working with someone with a visual impairment, I need to be more descriptive in my cues or maybe physically guide the person.

Okay, kids with autism, when I say, boys and girls, we have five stations today. Over here, we're going to do shooting, okay, and you see there's some different size balls and baskets. Over

here, we're going to do passing with a partner. There's some Poly Spots. Just pass back and forth with a partner. Over here, we're going to dribble. I have some cones, but you can also go

straight ahead. And over here, with your partner, you're going to play defense. One person dribbles, one plays defense. Anybody have any questions? Okay, you got -- you know, the kid with

autism is freaking out. I have no idea what you said. All right, so in that situation, again, I've got to figure out do I change how I teach the whole class? So boys and girls, we're -- oh,

shoot, I forgot there's David in the class. All right, Dave, shooting, shooting, shooting, shooting, okay? Over here, dribble, dribble. He understands that, but the other kids are looking at me

like who are you? Where'd you get your teaching license from, you know? So what I do is I say -- again, I'm sorry, what's your name? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Joe. MARTY BLOCK: Joe. I say, boys

and girls, we're going to have these stations. Joe, I don't think -- your name? Beth? I don't think Beth understands what I want you to -- can you be her guide at that station? And Joe helps

Beth over there, explain what to do, physically guide her. So again, I'm teaching to the whole class, knowing that Beth doesn't understand. I'm going to get Joe to help out a little bit,

okay. But I just have to be aware of that. I just can't say, oh, well, you know, Beth, whatever. You know, I can't do that. I got to say -- I got to figure out how to accommodate Beth. So

again, I don't think that's that hard, and I'm a big fan of using peers to help in those situations. So instructional cues. Start and stopping signals. This seems like a real simple little

one. Okay, a lot of PE teachers use their whistle. Okay, again, kid with autism, blow your whistle. That's not going to work. You know, they're going to put their hands on their ears,

they're going to run away, they're going to get all upset. So I mean, some kids. So again, how can I do it differently? Okay, so I've seen lots of teachers who have put their arms out, put

their hands up, hold one hand up, all the kids stop, put their hand up. There's lots of different things we can do for starting and -- yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi Marty. I just had a question

about I knew you mentioned it in the beginning about getting those other kids on board, the general ed kids on board with, you know, having this gentleman being this girl's assistant over to

that corner. I get a lot of -- I teach life skills, high school, and I get a lot of backlash from my, you know, phys ed teachers that they feel like they're putting out the other kid by putting

them with - - you know, and they have some -- they say, oh, well, I have a few kids that are really good with your guys, so maybe I'll ask them to help out. But where does that start? And

maybe you were going to get to that in a few minutes but where does that start, bringing the whole group in to be an inclusive, you know, group? Not just, you know -- MARTY BLOCK: Yeah,

that's a good point. I will get to that, but we will -- I think you need to bring the whole class together and talk about we're going to be including a couple kids from the life skills

class. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Before they even come into that class? MARTY BLOCK: Exactly, yeah. This would be done way ahead of time. And again, we don't do that. We don't do that at all, and

so the kids see a child with a disability, they don't know who that person is. That person may have a teacher assistant with them and they're like, well, it seems like Mrs. Johnson's helping him,

so I'm not sure if how -- what if I talk to him and he gets mad at me and I set him off? So they don't know what to do and they stand back, so I don't want to blame the kids. And I think we,

as educators, need to get together and prepare the peers. So we'll talk about that, but that -- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Because I feel like they're just like -- my guys are just like thrown into it

day one of class. But maybe keep them back, you're saying, from that first day and do like a session with the regular ed kids, you know, about including them in. Okay, that's a good

idea. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, so again, I'm sorry, her question was when we include a child and we're getting peers involved, if we don't prepare the peers ahead of time, they may not willingly

volunteer to help out. So we need to prepare the peers, which we'll talk about, yeah. The other thing I do with peers is I would never have Joe help out for the whole hour and a half of PE.

Joe, can you help her at this station? At this next station, Martin, can you help Beth? That type of stuff. So it's that type of thing we do. Okay, so some starting and stopping signals. When

I do this in front of physical education teachers, a lot of them say, no, I wouldn't do this. Duration of instruction. So you have a kid who has severe attention deficit and the teacher is

-- has all the kids sitting down and she's doing something where it just takes a couple minutes to explain what's going on. And the kid is just, you know, crawling out of his skin, pulling a

little girl's hair, scratching other kids. He just -- he can't sit there. So I tell the PE teachers, why don't you have that child get up with a peer and start some activity? Because he just

can't sit as long as the other kids, but I need the other kids to sit so I can explain everything. Now half the PE teachers say, yeah, but if I let that one kid get up, then all of the kids

are going to want to get up. I said, okay, that's true. But you know, if you explain, you know, John has trouble sitting, so we're going to let him get started. But a better solution is

maybe I'm talking too much. You know, if all the kids are getting a little antsy, maybe I need to get the kids up and moving a little bit faster. So that's another possibility

there. And then level of motivation. You know, some kids, when you say we're going to run the mile, very few are going, yeah! Mile run today! So all the kids need different levels, but

some of the kids we work with a disabilities might need more motivation to do things. So I always go to the special ed teacher and say, what is the reinforcer you all use for this child with

autism in the classroom? And can we replicate that in the gymnasium? Or is there something the child really loves in the gymnasium that we can do, riding scooter- boards, shooting basketball,

something like that, that we can use as a reinforcer? So now we say, we need to do this beeper test where you run back and forth and try to keep pace with the beeps. All right, that's a way

of measuring endurance. So we're going to do that. And I know that's not your favorite thing, but if you really work hard and try your best, I pulled out some scooters and you can ride

scooters afterward. So that's a different level of motivation that the other kids might need. Okay, so again, I just need to be aware of some of those things. And again, some of the

kids, you may need even different levels of motivation, really unique things for them. We had a boy, this boy Timmy who's now about 25, but he -- when he was in second grade, he liked to

hold a penny in his pocket. So he would do anything for that penny. So we'd say, Timmy -- Timmy had autism. Timmy, here's a penny you can keep in your pocket, but I need you to go over to

that station and shoot the ball five times. And there was like five balls, so he could see when a ball was shot, he'd pick up another one. When all the balls were gone, he knew he was done

shooting. All right, so five shots. So Timmy was like, okay, I'll do that, because he loved holding that penny. All right, so again, we could use those types of things here. So again, just

to be aware of teaching styles. Lot of my students have made schedules, picture schedules, task organizers. They use very vivid borders now so that kids can see what they're supposed to do.

So lots of visual supports for the kids with autism. And they didn't know how to do that. They went to the special ed teacher, the autism specialist. So again, your take-home message as an

administrator or as a special ed teacher is to say, I have some kids with autism who need these types of accommodations. I am happy to make these. You tell me the types of things you need

and I will print these out, laminate them, give you a board, and now you can put them in order. So now when we say in PE we're first going to do this, you can point to the picture schedule

and the child with autism will be successful. So again, that's the type of stuff we can do. Some other things we can do here. Cooperative learning. This is one of my favorite things to do that

some PE teachers do. Most, not as much as I think you could. But this is when you just get a group of kids together and you're working on a kind of a team goal. Okay, so it's not the

individual goal, it's the team goal. As a team, we have to accomplish whatever it is we want to do here. Okay, and you can do this lots of different ways. You can do it in a kind of a

nonsensical way. There's a fun game where you -- called knots where you get seven or eight kids. They all put their hands in the middle, and they all grab someone else's hand, all right, and

what happens is you made a little big knot here. And the kids have to kind of untangle each other till they're holding hands in a circle. So there's no real purpose other than you have to

talk to each other, work together. You have a child in a wheelchair, well, they have to step over the wheelchair. You have a child with autism who doesn't like to hold hands. Well, that's a

good chance to practice some of this, you know, so we can do that stuff. So that's nonsensical, but it's a fun thing to do. Fitness. Again, if you're like me or like our physical education

teachers, when the phys ed teachers says, everybody drop and give me 20 pushups, you don't get kids going, yeah, high-five! Pushups time. Kids don't like doing that. But when you tell the

kids, get in groups of five or six, decide how many pushups you think you can do as a group. So one little girl says, I think I can do 10, and some other boys says, I can do 30, and then

another little girl says, I think I can do 15, another boy says, I can do 5, and you add it all up, okay, I think we can do whatever that was, 80 pushups as a group. All right, and another

group is over here. Another group, and they're all deciding. And then you say, okay, let's see how many you can do. And let's say they reach that goal of 80. The next day they come to the

gym, say, what was your -- what did you get last year? Get back in your group. You did 80? Okay, this time see if you can beat that by five. Okay, well, all of a sudden, these kids want to

do pushups. And then next time, let's see if you can beat that by five. So it's an individual group. I'm sorry, it's a group, but there's not as much individual goals, so it's the can we beat

this group goal? And so they're more motivated to participate. And we can do things for teaching skills for basketball. We have to make, as a group, 100 points. Okay, but everybody has

to make at least 10 points and some have to come from three and some have to come from over here. Now we did this once, and again, this boy Timmy with autism. Everybody had to score at least 10

points. Well, everybody had made all their points except for Timmy. He needed to make two more baskets. What did that dynamic look like? Four kids who weren't really friends with Timmy

going, come on Timmy! You can do it! Come on Timmy! Let's show this -- push it over! Timmy, come over here real close! They were giving him feedback, patting him on the back, trying to get

them so that their team could finish and meet their goal. All right, all of a sudden Timmy's getting all these people talking to him. So again, that cooperative learning is a real neat model

there. Let's see what time it is. Oh, flying along here. Okay, let me skip down some of these things here. And these are all in the handout. See, I talked about some of these. Oh, this is

one of my favorites too. Class-wide peer tutoring. So we teach our students to give very explicit feedback. Okay, so if I have 20 children and we're doing the overhand throw, I'm going to watch

the kids throw and give them feedback. That was a good throw, Sarah, but I really need you to take a long step. Okay, so next time you throw, take a long step. And then I go over here, Beth,

let me see you throw. Okay, Beth, that was a good throw, but you're stepping with the wrong foot. I want you to step with the opposite foot, so let's work on that. And what's your

name? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Bev. MARTY BLOCK: Bev? Okay, so Bev, let me see you throw. So I'm watching -- so what I'm doing is I'm watching each child perform the skill, and I'm giving them

feedback, very specific feedback on how to improve the skill. Now great teaching model, great teaching model. However, remember I said you have 20, 30, 40 kids in class, so I'm going down

the line, giving feedback, it takes 30 seconds, 45 seconds for each kids. Meanwhile, there's a young lady in the back who's standing here and throwing and stepping with the wrong foot and she's

doing that 50 times, 70 times. So now I have to un-teach that because I didn't get to her till the very end. Okay, so what I tell physical education teachers is a wonderful simple model is

called peer tutoring, class-wide, which means you divide the class up into partners. One child is the teacher, one child is the student. Okay, and so now I watch Bev throw. I'm a peer like

her, and I watch -- I'm watching her throw and I can give her feedback. Bev, that was a good throw, but I think the teacher wanted you to take a really long step. So take a longer step. We

do that for four or five turns, then we switch. Now Bev watches me and Bev gives me feedback. All right, so now that issue of me taking multiple turns and not getting good feedback doesn't

happen anymore. And now because Bev has to give me feedback, for those of you know when you have to teach something, you have to know it more in-depth than other people. So now Bev is

teaching me to throw and she's saying, you know, you're stepping with the wrong foot. And I've seen this happen over and over again, two little girls saying, you know, you're stepping with

the wrong foot. And the little girl goes, oh my god, I've been doing that too. You know, all of a sudden she realizes, I'm stepping with the wrong foot. So yeah, as teacher, you realize what

you might be doing incorrectly as well. So this is a wonderful little teaching style that I really like, okay. Okay, so we talked about curricular overlapping here. I mentioned it before the

idea of different goals with the same activity. You know, again, we have kids who are working on things like walking in their gait trainer, rolling the ball for bowling, things like that.

Those are things we can overlap. Cooperative learning and class-wide peer tutoring are easy to do too. So if we have class-wide peer tutoring, and we have the -- all the other kids are

working on the forearm pass in volleyball, and this little girl has a goal for learning how to push a ball down a ramp for bowling, well, her partner takes her over and practices pushing a ball a

ramp down for bowling. So just a little bit of a different thing there, okay. All right, okay, so this last thing here before we move onto something else here is where is the -- okay,

so this is something that I really -- I think we have lots of kids -- a phys ed teacher can include a kid with an attention problem and mild autism, but when there's someone who's really

severe, that's when it becomes more of a challenge. So we have these two, in the bottom here, the ones I really want to talk about, multiple activity selection and pulling out from within.

So multiple activity selection means that -- and when the class comes in, we say we're all playing volleyball. And you say, oh my goodness, there's a girl in a wheelchair. Well, I guess she

can't play volleyball. She'll just sit out or keep score. Okay, now if I say, we have two activities today, we're doing volleyball and we're doing bowling. And because of our space

limitations, we all can't play volleyball, so you're going to rotate over here to bowl. And this is a good goal for this child in a wheelchair. So now by having two activities, one for the child

in a wheelchair, one for the group, and having them rotate in, it kind of becomes seamless and the kids don't realize that, oh yeah, this is kind of really for her. Let me give you an

example, two examples. So we had a boy who -- fairly severe disability, had a feeding tube. And we were doing a tumbling unit, or the PE teacher's doing a tumbling. There's a forward rolls,

log rolls. And we weren't sure if this kid could roll with this feeding tube. This is like 20 years ago, 15 years ago, so we weren't sure. I said, you know what, probably shouldn't do

tumbling with him on the mats. Let's work on his underhand roll. So we had a box of balls for him, he sat in a chair, there was a target, and he would do the underhand roll. He was kind of

by himself doing this activity. So we talked to the PE teacher and said, once kids do their rolls, could they rotate over and work with Chris? And then rotate back and do their rolls again,

you know. So she said, yeah, that makes sense. So now kids would rotate over, they would talk to Chris, they would take turns with Chris. They would retrieve balls for Chris. There'd be two

or three kids over there at a time. So now Chris wasn't by himself, so we had two different activities, but we kind of seamlessly rotated the kids through. Less downtime, more kids talking to

Chris. So fairly simple. Another one, we had -- again, this was a long time ago because this boy is now like 20, but the child had autism and the mom, like a lot of moms, was struggling

with what's the best way to teach this child? What's the best thing to do? So she, at that point, had bought into kind of a sensory integration model. She wanted the child to spin a lot. She

wanted the child to have like deep pressure on his joints, things like that, so that's what she wanted him to do. So the PE teacher's like, but I'm teaching the underhand roll. How can I do

that? So we talked to her and we said, okay, let's have the kids -- each child had a bowling pin and a tennis ball, and they would practice the underhand roll to try to hit the pin. They

would do that 10 times. When they finished 10 times, they would rotate over to scooter-boards. They'd sit on the scooter-boards, and they'd spin around on their scooter-boards as fast as

they could. Kids love doing that. They were like first, second, third- graders. They love doing that. This little boy Harry, he spent most of his time spinning around because that's what the

mom wanted. Then he would take a couple of turns doing the underhand roll, but really a lot of it was the spinning. Now that's why we set that up. Then we had some mats set up where kids

would hold each other's ankles and do kind of a barrel walk. That was one of the therapeutic things the mom said was good for his arms, for joint compression. So he would do that. So we'd

say spin and then get a partner and do a barrel walk back and forth, then go do the underhand roll again. So you know, it's kind of a seamless activity. The kids didn't know, oh yeah, we're

doing that because of Harry. They didn't know that. They're like, oh cool, we get to spin on scooters? We get to do barrel walk? That's fun. So again, we just made sure we had an extra

activity for him, but rotated kids in so he wasn't by himself and isolated. So again, that's the -- a simple thing. And pulling out from within is almost the same thing. Pulling out for

having a special activity just for that child, off to the side, doing bowling or different things like that. So anyway, so that's a real quick -- really quick review of some of the key things

here. Oops. So kind of a summary before we move to this attitude stuff. Again, you are trying to sell this to your physical education teachers. Okay, what type of a teaching style, what type

of a physical education teacher do you want to be? And again, I always go back to saying we're including this child with a disability, but the reality is you have a lot of diversity already.

And how can you accommodate all that diversity if you're really a good physical education teacher? So do I have one standard for all? We all have to do it the exact same way, or are there

multiple standards? Okay, we're going to work on throwing, but you can throw it this way or that way and -- so there's lots of ways to solve this problem. So multiple standards, I think, is

a good idea. Do you have one activity and one game for all, or do you have choices in activities? Okay, so again, if I have one activity, it might not accommodate all the kids. But if I have

three basketball hoops going on or if I have three volleyball nets going on or if we're doing some other activity and I have multiple games going on, then there's lots of different choices,

lots of different levels I can embed. So I like to have lots of choices, so there's many choices. And then within the activity, choices in equipment. So when you come over here, you can pick up

a wooden baseball bat, you can pick up a plastic baseball bat when it's your turn to hit. You have one of those big bats you can buy at Toys"R"Us that go like really big. You know, you can't

miss with that one. You can hit a ball that's off a tee. You can hit a ball that's pitched. There's lots of choices. You can choose which ball you want to use. We're playing

volleyball. When it's your turn to serve, there's a whole box of balls here. If you want to serve with a beach ball, well, for that point we play with a beach ball. If you want to use a

regulation volleyball, well, for that point we play with a regulation volleyball. But you're in control because you get to choose the equipment, so that's kind of a neat thing. And do

we use regulation games or do we modify games? Regulation or modified? There's a wonderful little book that's out of press, unfortunately. And I use some of it for my book, but it's like

modifying games. And one of the things the person says in the beginning is games are for everybody. Okay, and games in their regular state are not for everybody, but games are for everybody.

And we can accommodate anybody in every game. Okay, and rules are not sacred. And I try to sell this to PE teachers. Rules are not sacred. You're a physical education teacher. You're not a

coach. So I go to a school, and again, I used this example, and the kids were playing volleyball. And I say, why can't we have this little girl move a little bit closer to the net to serve

because I don't think she can get over the net? And the teacher goes, but the NCAA rules say she can't do that. And I say, yeah, but we're not playing NCAA volleyball. We're playing in

physical education. We want her to be successful. Can we make that accommodation? We had a boy who had spina bifida, but it's something that happens pre-birth and you're usually

paralyzed from the waist down. His was fairly low where it happened, so he could walk, but he was just really weak. And so this PE teacher had the kids in middle school playing softball. And

she -- I think it was the softball bat she used when she played softball in college. So it was this heavy wooden bat. And it was when this -- and all the kids had to use that bat. And most

of the kids could barely hold this bat. When this kid came up to hit, he took the bat and he was literally dragging it, you know, and he kind of threw it over his shoulder and he was ready

to hit. And the teacher's the pitcher and she's like trying to strike everybody out. She's like, oh, come on, you suck, you know, that type of stuff. So this kid, you know, he just missed

everything, wasn't successful. You can see the look on his face. So we went to the teacher and said, do you think we can -- I'll go to Toys"R"Us and buy some plastic bats. Can we do

that? And her first reaction was NCAA. I said, I know, I know, I know, but just to make it more fun for this child, okay. And she said, okay, we can -- we'll let him use the different bat. And I

say, you know, I don't think he can hit a pitch ball. What do you think about letting him hit a ball off a tee? But the NCAA. I know, I know, I know, I know, I know. So she finally agreed to

do that. Then we had this last little kicker. We said, you know, if we make this rule just for this boy, he's going to really stand out and look really different. Can we have a rule that

everybody gets two pitches and then if they miss after two pitches, they get to hit a ball of a tee? Well, her head almost exploded. But once she calmed down, she said, okay, we'll do that.

So she explained this to the class of about 30 kids, and what do you think half the class did? Oh my god, I'm going to get a hit for once! I'm going to hit the ball! Because most of the

kids couldn't pick up her stupid big bat and couldn't hit a pitch ball. So again, just a real neat example there, so. All right, let me just -- if this works, we'll see. If you need to stand

up now -- never mind, it's not going to work, okay. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I have a question and I hope you address it. I come with a parent perspective, but communication between the gym teacher

and the parents is critical. We could be doing things and tell them to reinforce things in gym class if we know what's coming up. So how do you address making sure that the gym teacher --

because usually, you know, the regular ed teachers, they're always talking to parents. The learning support teacher, always talking to parents. But the gym teacher, we never really ever got that

communication. So how big are you of like stressing that information getting to the parents? MARTY BLOCK: You know, I don't -- the question is communication between the physical education

teacher and the parents. And he was saying that the classroom teachers do a great job, the therapist, but the PE teacher not so much. And I've -- that's actually something I haven't thought

about as much. I think it's a great idea. I think you as a parent have to be proactive and probably say to the life skills teacher, can you make sure the PE teacher tells us? And she'd have

to go down to the gym and say, can you tell us what the next unit is? And then maybe I can kind of help with some accommodations. So I think that's a great idea, but I don't think the PE --

most PE teachers aren't going to be proactive. You're going to be have the one to do it through the life skills teacher. I think that's how that'd work, but I think that's a great

point. AUDIENCE MEMBER: A lot of times, I tell my parents just to contact them directly because they get sick of your [inaudible]. They'll respond faster to a parent than they will

me. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah. And giving the heads up to the life skills teacher, going down to the gym, saying this parent is really interested in what you're doing in physical education, you may

be getting some emails. Great parents, please respond, you know. Or really difficult parents, please respond. Either way, either way, please respond, you know. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's

like, you know, they're doing baseball. I'm out in the backyard playing baseball with the neighborhood kids and my daughter. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, and that's a type of thing that the PE teacher

would love to hear, that you're reinforcing that. So I think that's great, yeah. So yeah, that communication is -- you take the lead on that, I would say. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or like the

volleyball, you know, Nerf ball [inaudible]. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, yeah, exactly, yeah. So all right, well, I'm way up too far here, sorry. Okay, so with the last minute -- few minutes of time I

have left, I think I have about, what, 40 minutes or so? And we'll save -- and I'll save a little bit of time for some questions here. This is something that's real close to my heart. This whole

idea of attitudes and how do we change attitudes. Attitudes of the physical education teachers and attitudes of the children without disabilities. And I've done some research on this

and we're continuing to do research, and we're trying to figure out ways to help the PE teacher be more receptive and help the kids be more receptive. Now again, understand that the typical

physical education teacher in their training takes one course in adapted physical education. And that's a survey course. What is Down's syndrome? What is autism? What is spina bifida? What is a

visual impairment? And they don't really have a chance to get into much detail about how do I accommodate these kids. And even if they do, they never answer the question, you have 30 kids

and you have a child who's blind and you're playing basketball, how do you deal with that? That just doesn't seem to get addressed, so the physical education teachers don't really have the

training or preparation, so kind of ongoing in-service things is what they -- what they need here. Okay, so I mentioned this before about the social stuff. I would never put a child in for

social reasons alone, but it's a great opportunity for social acceptance and interaction with peers. Okay, and we know that these are some wonderful things that could happen. Now look at

these things for kids with behavior disorders, kids with intellectual disabilities, kids with autism. What a wonderful thing to do to work on turn taking and waiting a little bit longer and

working in a group, listening to directions, playing cooperatively, being quiet when the PE teacher's giving directions. Those are all important skills that we can do when we're -- when the

children are included. Okay, now again, I'm not against having a special class with all kids with autism. But when you do that, all the kids with autism are feeding off each other, you

know, so they're learning each other's, you know, challenging behaviors and things like that. As opposed to there's one child with autism in a group of 30 kids without, and when that child

is starting to shake his hands or do something, the other kids say, you know, you need to stop doing that. We don't do that. You know, that type of stuff. So those things can really help here.

Again, with children with autism behavior disorders, this may be a huge thing to work on is to work on these types of things in physical education. So social goals, along with their motor

goals, is something we can really help out in physical education. Okay, benefits to peers without disabilities. Okay, again, it doesn't happen naturally. Okay, just putting a child with

a disability in a general physical education class doesn't mean the kids without disabilities all of a sudden are going to be more sympathetic, more cooperative, going to go work at a soup

kitchen. I mean, that's not going to happen. You got to plan and prepare for these things to happen here. But if you do it well, they can learn about these kids. Oh, I didn't know that he

liked or she liked Justin Bieber. You know, Bev's got a big Justin Bieber shirt on. I didn't know -- at the cafeteria, I saw him eating pizza the other day. I had no idea that pizza was his

favorite food. He was wearing a Boston Red Sox hat. I had no idea he was a Boston Red Sox fan. So by being in those settings, you get to interact with kids and see those things. And then

you also get to see people who might -- that might struggle a little bit more and things might be a little more difficult for them. And so you become a little more empathetic. You know, so yeah,

I'm tired, I had to stay up really late last night and studying for a test. But oh yeah, gosh, she has autism, she's in a wheelchair, she's doing all this stuff. It must be much harder for

her. Why am I complaining? So it gives kids perspective. You know, I think that's kind of a healthy thing. And then hopefully it gives kids a chance to really - - if you teach them how to be

friends with peers, interact with peers, and truly accept peers for who they are, I think those things can happen. Okay. Again, simply placing a child in general physical education doesn't

ensure any of this is going to happen. And in fact, placing the child in that setting is going to ensure, I think, in some cases, the opposite from happening. So there's been three studies

that were very damning, I think, about physical education. And it was the experiences of children with physical disabilities. One was in Illinois, one was in Canada, and one was in Israel.

And in all cases, the kids, when they interviewed these kids, not a whole lot, 10 to 12 kids with physical disabilities, what was your experiences like in physical education? Okay, they all said,

you know, there were -- kind of the theme was there were good days and there were bad days. Good days, the teacher accommodated me, the kids were friendly to me. Bad days, you know, not so

much. Israel was the worst. I mean, the kids would steal kids' crutches and lock their brakes on their wheelchair when they weren't looking. I mean, this was kind of like what the hell's

going on in Israel? But anyway, this is the stuff from Illinois. So this is the study from Illinois. I participated, but I just sat and was a line judge. Sat there and cheered, I just sat

and watched and clapped. My teacher that I had didn't have nothing for me to do. I sat up on the stage from the day I got there for every class. So basically it was -- said I can't figure

out what to do with you, just sit up on the stage. Okay, it made me feel different, like there was something wrong with me. Then I realized it was just the way some people are. So

again, being in that setting, you know, they already feel different, but they're even made to feel even more different. Okay, and this is my favorite here. My freshman year, I had taken one year

of PE to graduate. I had to take one year. Teacher said, you're a liability, go to the library. So I went to the library for the whole semester and my -- got my report card, I got an A! So

how that worked out here. So and then this final one, when asked if you like physical education, well, not that much because I get embarrassed. I can't walk well, I can't run well, I can't

do volleyball. I can't do those sports, so I get embarrassed. So again, no accommodations for this child here. So again, the phys ed teachers need to step up and do a better job

here. Now again, related to this, and I mentioned this before, if you don't do this right, you're going to get the wrong attitudes. All right, so again, if I say, we have this class and we

have this boy with autism and he's going to be on your team, and this team is a bunch of kids who are really competitive and I don't make any accommodations, they're like, we're going to

lose. I hate PE. I hate you as a PE teacher. And then so why is he on my team? Why is she making those noises? You have to explain these things to the kids, and you have to do it ahead of

time. Okay, so what can we do? Well, the first thing is what can we do for the physical education teacher? This is the most important cog in the wheel to make inclusion work, and again, to

really get the kids to feel like they belong. And I'm asking the PE teachers, and this is an administrator or special ed teacher, read these things and say, are you asking the physical

education teacher to do all that much? Number one, have a positive attitude. Number two, be the teacher for all your students in class. I was at a school, two different schools, like night

and day. Little boy comes in in a wheelchair, the teacher is greeting all the kids. These are like first graders, second graders. The teacher's bending down, saying, hey Billy, how you

doing? Hi Sarah, how you doing? Creed, this little boy in an electric wheelchair comes in, or actually at that point he -- a teacher aide pushed him in. She goes, Creed, how you doing? So

glad you're in PE today. Come on in. Just all the other kids are looking at how this teacher, Mickey, was interacting with this little boy, Creed, and all of a sudden, they're saying, well,

she values Creed. I guess I should value Creed too. She's making the effort. I'll make the effort too. I mean, that's subtle little things that she's saying by just greeting him. Another

school, I swear I saw this. The kids were walking in. This was a middle school. Teacher's saying hi to the kids. Teacher aide comes in with a boy with an intellectual disability. Teacher turned

his back, waited till the kid's walked away, turned back around, started talking to other kids. Do you believe that? I mean, overtly ignored that kid. So again, what's that message to the

other kids? I don't want this kid in my class, I don't like this kid, and that's what the other kids feel. So again, it's just the subtle little thing about the teacher for all the kids.

Model appropriate behavior. When you're going around going high-fives to kids, you find Creed, you find Timmy, you find Sarah, you find those kids with disabilities and make sure you're

giving them feedback and you're modeling appropriate behavior. Include the child in as many activities as possible and be with the child when you can. So I'm teaching all the kids, I'm

supervising all the kids, but I'm making sure I take time to go over and work with that child with a disability and accommodate them. Again, I gave you the example of rollerblading. This boy

with his helmet on and the roller-blades, and he couldn't move his feet, but just the teacher trying to help him and a peer trying to help him. Just -- you know, because the teacher was trying to

help him, the peers wanted to help him as well. You know, because he had -- Robert's part of the class, Evan's part of the class, we got to make this work. And that was the message by doing

that stuff. Reinforce appropriate interaction. So when Bev goes over to the Beth and helps her with something and Beth has autism, I'm going to go, Bev, thanks for talking to Bev, I really

appreciate that. Or Bev, thanks for helping Beth, I really appreciate that. So those types then reinforce those types of behaviors when you see them. Okay, and then be knowledgeable

about the child. You don't have to go and do a research on Down's syndrome or autism, but you need to go talk to the life skills teacher and say, you know, tell me a little bit about this

child. What am I -- what should I expect in terms of behaviors, in terms of him understanding? How should I teach this child? What are some things you do to teach the child? What happens if he

goes off? You know, how do I deal with that? So again, the PE teacher has to do that. Now unfortunately, the PE teacher, at least in our schools, has like a half-hour break, and then a

thousand classes back to back to back to back to back. So unfortunately, you as a special ed teacher are going to have to go down to the gym and say, hey, we're bringing down Sally. We have

this new girl that just moved in here. Here's what Sally is all about, and I'm going to also send you an email that has kind of some things here. I printed out some pictures, this little

picture schedule for you because she does much better with that. You're going to have to be the one proactive. The phys ed teachers are just -- you know, right or wrong, they're really busy

and they're not going to be able to do a lot of that. So these are just simple things to do. And I'm going to show you some little video clips, but I would show some video clips too of kids

being included, kids being successful. If you're in your district as an administrator or a special ed teacher and you know that there is another physical education teacher in your district

who's doing this really well, then I would say, I hear over at, you know, Brookshill Elementary School that there's a teacher who has similar kids to what we have here. And I talked to our

principal. He's going to give you a day off so you can spend the day seeing how that child is being -- how that teacher accommodates kids. Okay, and that -- or that teacher's willing for you

to email questions back and forth. But they -- the PE teachers value someone who's from a similar situation. I go in there and say, you should do these things. Oh yeah, you're at the

University of Virginia. You haven't been in a gym in 50 years. But now if I go to a peer who's in the gym and they say, oh yeah, I have the same situation you do, but I'm dealing with it,

you know, then they're more likely to do it. So these are some simple things I would do. And I'll show you -- I think I can get some videos to work that I also might recommend downloading on

YouTube and sending to the PE teacher. Hey, here's a really cool video I found about kids playing sports, about kids doing different things. Oh, what'd I do there? Huh. All right. Now,

preparing peers. To me, this is, again, a critical element. When there has been research on attitudes of peers without disabilities, okay, before doing any type of intervention, do you think this

child should be included in your class? Do you think we should accommodate his needs? Would you mind modifying activities? Overwhelming, the kids are like, yeah, I think we should let this

kid be in my class. Yeah, I think we should do these things. So right away -- in fact, the research doesn't show the effects of the disability awareness program works very well because the

kids start with a really high positive attitude. They just don't know how to do it. They want to do it. They say, yeah, I'd love to have Joe in my class. I just don't know what to do. And

then so if I don't know what to do, I kind of stand back. All right, so we need to teach them what to do, so there's kind of a series of things you can do here. Circle of friends. Let me

see what time we have here. Oh good, okay, circle of friends is a simple -- how many people have heard of the circle of friends before? Lot of people have done that. Okay, so basically it's kind

of an empathy-building activity. You have -- and I would do this with a child out of the classroom when he has therapy or something going on. And you're trying to get the other kids to

realize what this child's life is like, and we want to get him to be more included. So you say, okay, I want you to make this little chart, put you in the middle, there's me, and then I want

you to put around the outside a little circle and write down all the people who are your relatives who are really close, who live with you. So kids are writing down their mom and their dad,

maybe their grandma, and you do one for the child with a disability. Here's Robert. Robert lives with his mom and Robert lives with his dad as well. Okay, or Robert only lives with his mom. Some

other of you might only have your mom as well, so that's what Robert's situation's like. Okay, now next circle is circle of acquaintances. This is like your friends. Actually, circles of

friends I think is the next one. So circle of friends. Write down all the people you would say are your really good friends. Okay, and you can see these little girls going, oh, oh, Jessica,

Sarah, Michelle, Stephanie, and they're writing, all these kids are writing friends down. And now you say, okay, I did this for Robert and you know what? I don't have anybody's name in this

class on Robert's list because I don't think anybody is really friends with Robert. How many people put Robert on their list as a friend? All these kids are going, oh, geez, I didn't put him down

on my list, yeah, yeah. So how would you feel if you had a graph that looked like Robert's with no friends? All right, and again, you have to be careful going from empathy to sympathy and

feeling sorry for Robert. But you say, what can we do? Okay, what can we do? When you go down to the gym and the teacher says, get in groups of three or four, you can get with your little

group of friends, but you can also grab Robert and bring Robert in. When we do stuff in the classroom and I say, find a partner, well, somebody could be Robert's partner. You know, when

we're doing activities, when we're going to the cafeteria, someone could sit with Robert. Someone can take turns pushing Robert in his wheelchair. So we just want to make him have more

friends. All right, so that's the idea of doing this. There's some other little circles. One of the other circles I think that's very telling is the circle of participation. What do you do

after school? All right, so here's where the kids go, well, I go to the Y, I belong to a church group, I play Little League soccer, Little League T-ball, I'm in 4H and I'm in Boy Scouts, you

know, doing all these different things. All right, now we do Robert's little list here and we say, well, Robert's mom tried to take him to one activity once, but they said because of his

wheelchair, he really couldn't do it, so she didn't take him back. And then because of his behavior, sometimes he makes some noise, she tried Sunday school, but that didn't seem to work

either for Robert. So basically, Robert comes home after school and he sits by himself and watches TV, okay. Now again, you guys get to do all these things Robert doesn't. How would that

make you feel? What can we do to help? So in school, we can be really -- give Robert lots of support, really interact with him, and things like that. So I think that's a good thing we can do

here. A couple other things here, then I'm going to come back to this, see if I can get these to work here. Role playing. So you have a child who's in a wheelchair, you know, let's all get

wheelchairs and try to move around, see what it feels like. You have a child who's blind, let's be visually impaired. So let's just try to do that and see what it feels like. Okay, so again,

not saying, yeah, now you know what it's like to be blind, but at least you have a little bit of a sense how a challenge that is in physical education. There's a really cool program that

the Paralympic committee, the International Paralympic committee created several years ago called the Paralympic School Day Program, Paralympic School Day Program. I mean, it's a little

package that you go out to the schools and you teach kids without disabilities about the Paralympics and they have guest speakers and they have activities. And part of it is simulating being --

having a disability. They have Paralympic athletes who come in and talk about it. But again, the idea is to give the kids a better understanding of, oh, even though I'm blind, I still might

be a really good athlete. Even though I use a wheelchair, I might be a really good athlete. So that's kind of a neat model there. Discuss the concepts of rules and handicapping. A lot of kids

don't know that there's built-in handicapping in sports. What sports has built-in handicapping? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Golf. MARTY BLOCK: Golf. Yeah, I can go out and play with Tiger Woods and

beat him to the ground because he's going to give me like 40 strokes. But that levels the play, so that makes it challenging for me and for him by giving me some strokes. So you explain that

that's what golf handicapping is. Bowling has handicapping. I average 20. You average 200. But if I hit my 20 every time and sometimes you get a 190 or 180, I'm going to win because you're

giving me 180 pins. That kind of stuff. I read this book about Seabiscuit not long ago, about this horse back in the '30s, amazing horse, but it wasn't like the horse that won the Triple

Crown. It was the horse that won all these handicap races, but the handicap races, he had to wear more weight than everybody else. So he was running with like 130 pounds, whatever, and the

other horses had like 120. And he still beat all these horses, but that's handicapping. So again, explain to the kids, that's often done in sports. So when we come to the gym and we're playing a

game, we're going to do some handicapping. We're going to make modifications here to make it fair for everybody. That's a good thing to talk about. Discussing disabilities in general and

then the specific child who's being included, I think, are important. So again, before the class even starts, saying, okay, we have a child who's going to come in who has autism. I have the

autism specialist who'll talk about autism. I have the classroom teacher's going to talk about this specific child. I have his mom and dad coming and saying, this is what my son likes to

do. This is what my son struggles with. I'm sure that the PE teacher will be thrilled to have all these people come in and explain that to the class. So I would have people come in and talk

about the child with a disability. AUDIENCE MEMBER: A question. Disabled child -- is the disabled child involved in that or is he excluded from the room when you discuss him? MARTY BLOCK:

That's a great question. So do I exclude the child or include the child when we're discussing that child? Depends on the child. If it's a child with autism who's maybe nonverbal, I would probably

say no. If it's a child with intellectual disability who might not understand the conversation, I might say no. If it's a child who's in a wheelchair and wants to explain this is why I'm in

a wheelchair, this is how my wheelchair works, I would say yes. Okay, if there's a child with a medical condition, diabetes, asthma, a heart condition, and this is why sometimes I need to

sit out from PE, I would say yes. I've read about where kids with AIDS or HIV have come in and said, this is my condition, this is what I have. So it kind of depends on the situation. So I would

err on the side of asking the parents. We would like to talk about your child and help the other kids understand. Would you think it'd be appropriate to have your child in the setting when

we do this? Or do you think it'd be better to have your child out of the setting? How would you answer that? You have a child with Down's syndrome, would you want her to be part of that

discussion or away and separate? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Depends. When she was younger, separate. When she was older, included. MARTY BLOCK: Okay, good. And that depend on her age. And you know your

daughter, yeah. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Do you ever run into any confidentiality issues with that? MARTY BLOCK: Well, that would be, again, asking the parents, so the first thing to do is explain to

the parents that I would like to talk about your daughter in the physical education class. Are you okay with that? And this is the types of things I'm going to say. And if they're okay with

that, then I'm okay. If they say no, I don't want you to do that, then we would have to not do those things. Then I'd be more general about how do you include kids and things like that, but

I would always go to the parents first, yeah. And then explain specifically how do I interact with a child with a disability? All right, again, the kids, the research shows their attitudes

are positive. They just don't know how to do it. And when you -- the other research shows when you put a teacher aide into a setting, it's great that the teacher aide is there, but she

becomes like a wall to the other kids. All right, and there's the graphics of the hovering or the helicopter or those different things, but stuck like glue. The teacher assistant, they're

trying really hard, it's their job to help the child, but sometimes in the gym, they -- that backfires. All right, so when the teacher says, find a partner to do sit-ups, one person holds

the other person's legs, the teacher goes, okay Martin, I'll be your partner. Well no, I need to find -- Beth, can you be Martin's partner? I'll be here to help you, but you know, you need

to have a partner who's a peer. So how do I talk to the child? How do I help the child? This child has autism. If I get too close and he tries to hit me, I know I shouldn't do that. If the

child does something inappropriate, I know I need to ignore that behavior. But when they do something appropriate, I need to reinforce that behavior. Okay, the child likes these things, the child

doesn't like these things. You don't just go and grab Martin and say, come on, let's go, time to go to the station. You say, Martin, come on, we're going to the station. Do you need some

help? Do you need me to help you push your wheelchair? That type of stuff. So again, how do I interact with the child? How do I help the child? What are some things that are okay? When

we're throwing balls, playing some type of a throwing game, picking up balls and giving them to Martin or Bev or Beth, that's a great thing to help him with. Okay, so those are just how can I do

these types of things. Okay, now the last thing I mention here is having guest speakers or stories that dispel stereotypes. So I think I can get some of this to work here. Let me pop

this up here. Oops. Oh, error code, try again later. Oh shoot. AUDIENCE MEMBER: It's because you don't have wi-fi. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, I had it and I kind of lost it, so. I'll -- if I

can't get this to work, I'll tell you stories, that's fine. No, I don't have anything here. So that's all right. So let me tell you a couple stories here. So one of these little video clips

was kids with -- actually adults in Special Olympics doing weightlifting. So there was three adults with Down's syndrome. All right, and again, you have a child with Down's syndrome in the

classroom. That child may not be liked by peers for whatever reason, they might be isolated, they don't think in physical education she can do anything. You show a video clip from Spec

Olympics on YouTube, again, the PE teachers, you can get that for the PE teacher. You can get it for the PE teacher. Say, here, here's a cool video clip you can get. And these kids are

power-lifting lots of weights, they look like weightlifters. They don't look like kids with Down's syndrome trying to pick up weights. They look like weightlifters. They look really, really

powerful. There are some other clips on here I could show you too, but let me just end with there's lots of -- if you go on YouTube and do disability sports or soccer disability, basketball

disability, you find tons and tons of stuff out there. And those are great things to show kids without disabilities, but also show the PE teacher, okay, kids with cerebral palsy playing

soccer. Blind soccer's crazy. Have you ever seen that? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Goal ball. MARTY BLOCK: Goal ball. Goal ball's a great game, yeah. Yeah, so those are fun to do. So just anything like

that, you can find on YouTube. So let me -- yeah? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, my daughter actually plays floor hockey Special Olympics. She likes to go on and watch the professional floor

hockey for Special Olympics, you know, on the state national level. She goes in competition. She wants to just reinforce it in her mind so she's a better floor hockey player. MARTY BREAK:

That's a great idea. AUDIENCE MEMBER: A student with disability actually [inaudible]. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, that's a really good idea. I never thought about that. So let me end with a story, a

true story that kind of summarizes how you can make this whole thing work, all right. With the idea being if I accommodate the kids, the first thing I talked about, if I can accommodate the

kids at their level so they're successful and meaningfully involved, you will get changes in attitudes, positive attitudes from kids. All right, so when I was in Illinois, there was a

middle-schooler named Jimmy. Jimmy had Angleman syndrome or Angelman -- Angleman, we'll say it -- Angel? Angelman syndrome. So he was nonverbal, had intellectual disabilities, some autistic

tendencies, and he walked very stiff. So one of his goals was that he had to hold onto something and walk and improve his walking and holding on. So you'd see Jimmy in the beginning of the

school day taking the cafeteria count to the office with a peer. And he'd take that over. They'd come back to the classroom. Then they'd give Jimmy the roll. Take it down to attendance. So he'd

walk down the roll with attendance and he'd take that down there. So that's what Jimmy was doing, he was working on that. When he came to the gym, same thing for physical education. He was

working on walking, holding things, stretching, following some basic directions. That's what he was working on. So basketball unit in eighth grade. Kids are playing basketball and Jimmy's

big thing was, with a peer, he would take this little basketball and one of those little cardboard Michael Jordan baskets, he would take his basketball, walk over to it, and put it in the

basket. And after three weeks, he got pretty good at doing that. He understood what he was supposed to do. So now it's at the end of the unit and the teacher wanted to play some basketball

games. So one of the popular games for basketball is called line basketball. You have a line of kids and you number then one, two, three, four, and they all get red pennies. And you have

another line over here and they get blue pennies, one, two, three. All right, and they're all lined up here. And what the teacher does is calls out three random numbers. Seven, 12, and 14.

And kids with that number here and kids with that number here come out and they play a game of three-on-three basketball. You're allowed to pass the ball to kids on the line, but it's

basically a three-on-three game for about three minutes. And then the teacher calls some more kids. So we keep a running score, so the first group is was three against two, three-to-two, and

then you keep on adding scores up. All right, so everybody's names have been called. There's about three minutes left, the teacher looks at his watch and says, okay, number seven, 15,

and 20. And Jimmy, that was one of his numbers, so Jimmy came out there and it just worked out that the two peers on Jimmy's team that were called were like the worst players in the class.

All right, the three kids over here who were called, the three best players. So like, oh, we're going to win, the score is tied. We're going to win, you know, you guys suck. So that type of

stuff. So they call -- and Jimmy has a peer who comes out. The rule was every third time down court, Jimmy got to take his little ball and he got to walk and put it in the basket. If he did

that within ten seconds, his team got a point. If he didn't, his team didn't. All right, so the teacher throws the ball up, the really skilled kids grab the ball, dribble down, shoot.

They score, their team is now winning by one. All right, next time down the court -- I'm sorry, the other team gets the court. They're dribbling, it bounces off one of the boy's foot, goes

out of bounds. The real skilled team gets the ball back again, they dribble down, they shoot, they score. They're up by two. Okay, Jimmy's team gets the ball, they dribble down, they

somehow make it down the court, but they throw the ball out of bounds. The skilled team gets the ball, they dribble down, they shoot, they miss, the ball goes out of bounds. So a third time

down, they teacher says, okay, Jimmy gets a free shot. They gives the ball to Jimmy, he starts his stopwatch, Jimmy walks over, puts the ball in the basket, good. Now Jimmy's team is only

losing by one. All right, skilled team gets the ball back, they dribble down, they shoot, they score. Now they're up by two again. So there's a couple kids over on Jimmy's team who's on the

sidelines here, and they're, you know, like oh god, we're going to lose, this is ridiculous. And then all of a sudden, like a light bulb goes off, you know, I don't think Jimmy's going to

miss. I don't -- you know, hey, pass the ball to Jim! Pass the ball to Jimmy! Pass the ball to Jimmy! So the kid gives the ball to Jimmy, Jimmy walks with this ball, takes the ball, puts it in

the basket. All of a sudden, his team is down by one. So now the other team realizes that Jimmy's gold. Jimmy's not going to miss. So they dribble down, they get a little nervous, they miss.

And the ball goes out of bounds. Jimmy's team gets the ball. Well, what do you think every kid on Jimmy's team is yelling? Pass the ball to Jimmy! Pass the ball to Jimmy! Pass the ball

to Jimmy! Give the ball to Jimmy! Takes his ball, walks down, puts the ball in the basket, the teacher blows the whistle. Three to three, Jimmy's walking back. High-fives, Jimmy's the man!

They're walking down the hall, Jimmy, you're the man! You know, everybody here is how good Jimmy was in basketball. Why? Because we made simple accommodations and made him have a meaningful

part of the game. And again, you as administrators, you as special ed teachers, you have to sell this to your physical education teachers. It's not impossible to do. You just got to give

them the strength and the confidence to be able to do that stuff. Thank you, and I'll be happy to entertain questions. PRESENTER: Do you have any questions? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't know

if it's a question or a statement. I hear you -- I hear what you're saying about encouraging the phys ed teachers in that. Do you encourage schools to also do some parent trainings for other

parents to include that as a part of like, you know, like a PTA meeting or an open house thing or send a notice out? And with my son, I found like when he was younger, like kindergarten,

preschool, until he got into third grade, even though his behaviors were not acceptable, the kids accepted him. Well, once they get into fourth, fifth, and then into middle school, then, you

know, his oddities from being on the spectrum really excluded him. So is there anybody that's ever done like any research to see why it is that kids are so accepting when they're younger and

then we start losing that in third and fourth grade, in middle school? Because a lot of the things that happen in school and as adults come out of the home, so I don't think it's just an

instructing teachers and staff, it's also getting that back into the home. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, so that's a great point. So just to repeat for that -- the tape, the question is should we

prepare and instruct parents of children without disabilities to help them understand so when they're home they can tell their kids, I understand you have some kids with autism, whatever, in

your class, and how are you helping this child or the things you can do. So I don't know of any research on that. I think it's a wonderful idea to get the parents of the children without

disabilities more involved. Why -- and I agree with you, why in third grade and fourth and fifth grade do things seem to not go as well and middle school? Again, I think it goes back to

selling it to the kids that you really need to include this child. We really want this child to be successful. And just doing these little discussion groups, showing videos, talking about

handicapping, making accommodations so it doesn't ruin the game, but allows the child to be successful, reinforcing those behaviors. I think all those things have to happen every year and

maybe even multiple times. You know, we do it in the fall, but let's do it again in the -- in January, let's remind everybody how we interact with these kids. So I think you got to hammer

it over and over again. Good question. Other questions? Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: Just to comment on that, I think kids, that the older they get, will also naturally become more competitive.

And then see like the children with disabilities as holding back their team, so I think it is our responsibility to do these accommodations so that they're not looked at as being a hindrance to

whatever competitive activity is going on. Whereas when they're much younger, it seems much more cooperative and everybody's, you know, a part. Whereas as they get older, I think that

feeling of competition really takes its -- you know, plays [inaudible]. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, and I agree. And we've done some research on attitudes and we have a question, how competitive

do you think you are? And you rate yourself. Like my daughters would be like off-the-chart competitive. And we thought kind of that it would have to be that the kids who are more competitive

would be less likely to include the kids. We didn't find that in our research. We're not sure if that's just the kids aren't being truthful about it, but I think that's an issue. But again,

having multiple games where the kids are real competitive and want to play regulation volleyball is available. But if the kids are not as competitive, have that available for them off to the

side where they can play with a child who's not as skilled. But I agree with you. Competition is real, real important. And I want to win, and this is going to -- so yeah, so. Yes? AUDIENCE

MEMBER: And I would say that probably talking about regular parents, getting them used to having their child in classes with handicapped children, they don't typically care to be educated as long

as their child isn't impacted negatively. You know, as an administrator, I had district-wide informational sessions periodically. It was hard to get special education parents to attend.

Never got regular parents. So I think it's a good idea that regular ed parents understand the disability of a student that might be in their child's classrooms, but I don't think they're

going to voluntarily go through that [inaudible] and help their kids understand. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, maybe a newsletter that includes a little piece or maybe an email, notes saying, hey, we're doing something

really cool, that this is happening, you know. We brought in a wheelchair basketball team, just to give you a heads up and look, all the kids play it. Or we had a disability awareness session

about autism because we have lots of kids in our building with autism. Just to let you know that your son participated, your son or daughter. Maybe, you know, you might want to talk to them

about it. Maybe that would prime them a little bit, but I understand your concern. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So it's almost like you read my mind. I was going to say the newsletter. Because as a

parent, the principal always put out a newsletter [inaudible] and we read those. And I noticed that the principal would put in some stuff, informational things about that, and it was a great

way of getting the information disseminated. Parents read that. MARTY BLOCK: Yeah, yeah. And I would look at the newsletter, said, geez, you have a kid with autism in your class? I

didn't know that. When did that happen? You know, how's that going? You know, it's going okay, yeah. He's got a teacher aide and, you know, the PE teacher, you know, he's some made some

modifications. It's going pretty well. So yeah, it gets some feedback from that. I think that's a good idea. Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well, I'm curious now that there are so many students

[inaudible] kinds of issues and how that impacts phys ed as we look at the fact that our whole purpose in phys ed, you know, and being reminded of the target of what's the standard or what

do they want kids to leave school with and why are we having them in phys ed class may have more to do with lifelong enjoyment or leisure or those kinds of things. And how that's working out

on college campuses as you train. Phys ed teachers teachers were not giving skills to them so the kids can go out and, you know, slam home runs or do volleyball. Whatever that could be

recreational to have [inaudible]. MARTY BLOCK: So the question is do -- you know, are physical education teachers trained now not to just teach skills, basketball, volleyball, tennis

-- AUDIENCE MEMBER: Or concentrate on those standards. MARTY BLOCK: But to have more of the lifetime leisure. And I think it varies from school to school, and PE teachers have a

tremendous amount of autonomy. Just for you administrators who have all these issues -- or not issues, but standards to your kids have to pass reading, math, writing, as long as the gym teacher,

there's nobody complaining about PE, a lot of administrators are like, good, that must be fine. You know, I have all these other things to worry about. So a lot of PE teachers do whatever

they want. Some tend to focus on skill work. Some focus on lifetime leisure. So I agree. We as educators need to prepare our physical educators more for teaching lifetime leisure skills and

the enjoyment of being physically active and understanding, accepting lots of differences. So it just -- it varies so much. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Competitive students who, once you get out of high

school or college into the world, you don't have a lot of choices to do competitive sport things unless you have learned how to get along with people that have a skill set that's different

with you. Everybody who shows up for recreational softball isn't going to be great. MARTY BLOCK: That's a good point. Yeah, that's a good point. And I don't think we do a good enough job. You

know, phys ed teachers, I hate to stereotype us because I'm one, but we were athletes and that came easy to us. And math didn't come easy to me and I hate math teachers. And I'm sure if, you

know, the PE teachers look at kids and say, well, I don't understand why you don't -- can't do this stuff. You know, and it's just -- it's hard for them. At the elementary level, a bit

easier, but middle and high school, their standards are a little bit different. So, and it's worse. I do a lot of research and work in Europe. I was just in Hungary and they really teach you

got to throw, catch, kick, play volleyball, play soccer at this level. And when the kids don't do it, they get very upset at them. And they don't really include a lot of kids with disabilities.

And they it would be really hard to do that because they're just -- they're really still very harsh and you got to master these skills, so good point. PRESENTER: Okay, so actually we're

going to need to stop here. So thank you. You can ask it here. Marty, I'd like to thank you for a wonderful session. MARTY BLOCK: Thanks, I enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you.