Professional Conferences

In any profession it is always important to continue to learn and get better at what you do. As Physical Educators, we have many of opportunities ranging from observing other teachers in their classroom to attending national conferences. This past Friday, SUNY Cortland held a NYS mini-conference where teachers could come and attend sessions to learn new activities and skills that they could incorporate back in their own schools as well as listen to a keynote speaker. This year the keynote speaker was Dr. Sarah Armstrong. Her presentation focused on the connection between physical activity and the brain. I found her presentation to be very interesting and it provided good information to strengthen the argument that physical activity is crucial for learning. This is good for us as Physical Educators because during the average school day, we only have each student around 45 minutes, sometimes even less. We can incorporate other subjects into physical education to help our students, but also being able to give other classroom teachers ways to help their students learn by getting them physically active in the classroom is a very good thing.

We are very lucky as students to have been able to attend this conference and get all of the benefits from it from a variety of excellent Physical Educators. By attending conferences like these, you are able to not only learn new skills to put to practice in your own job, but we students can use this opportunity to start networking. In a very competitive field of Physical Education where there are many graduates looking for jobs and not too many jobs are available, we should take every opportunity we can in order to expand our networks which could possibly help us land a job in the near future.

Conferences are a perfect way for all teachers to be up to date and on the same page on what is going on in the various schools around the nation. This helps teachers keep a type of consistency in schools throughout the nation on what the students are being taught and assessed on. This helps us Physical Educators establish more standards for our profession thereby establishing more legitimacy for Physical Education.