A collection of articles details the history and significance of the early professional schools, also known as normal schools, that form the foundation for the physical education profession today. The articles describe each of seven institutions up until they either affiliated with a college or closed. (SM)

In the Praxis Series: Professional Assessments for Beginning Teachers program, trained assessors observe teacher candidates in their assigned teaching environments and determine their instructional effectiveness. The article highlights the program's improvements over its predecessor, noting the need to explore teaching performance as a new…

With the teaching for understanding approach, physical education teachers can modify standard game skills to help low-skilled secondary school students focus on the important concepts and strategies shared by all net games. The paper explains how to use the teaching for understanding approach in physical education. (SM)

To effectively interact with their students, leaders and teachers in sport and physical activity must be familiar with their students' cultural backgrounds. This collection of articles discusses how women of color deal with and have been affected by their racial and ethnic identities in relationship to physical activity and sport. (SM)

This series of papers examines the role of play from various angles, discussing play as an essential human function and universal experience, the role of play in developing cultural values and awareness, a symbolic interactionist view of play, early therapeutic recreation specialists, and the direction of commercialized play. (SM)

Using a peer tutoring strategy can help school and community athletic coaches and physical education teachers improve the frequency of instructional and social support behavior during practice and game situations. The paper describes and summarizes documentation of a peer instructional strategy in a small liberal arts college that was designed to…

Educators have recognized the limitations of artificial assessments and called for more authentic assessments of student performance, i.e., assessment that is contextualized. In the field of movement education, teachers have typically tended to evaluate their students by administering skill tests, categorizing children for their developmental…