SRU professor explains differences between health/physical education and wellness education
Slippery Rock University is transforming the way educators method overall health and actual physical schooling with a new product identified as wellness training.
Feb. 10, 2022
SLIPPERY ROCK, Pa. — Gymnasium course has been dismissed and there is a new way for instructing well being and bodily schooling that is now in session. It is identified as wellness training, and for the previous ten years, Slippery Rock University has been shifting the way K-12 educators tactic what has been typically known as phys ed, P.E. or fitness center course.
So, what is the variance concerning wellbeing and actual physical training and wellness education and learning?
“The previous design of wellbeing and actual physical instruction is geared all over sporting activities and game titles, and answering the query: ‘What are we likely to do these days?,'” explained Randy Nichols, SRU professor of physical and wellbeing schooling. “The new model is about ‘What are we going to master now?,’ and the mastering is centered close to self-care and nicely-becoming. The new design is a great deal extra independently dependent with customized understanding, whereas the previous product was about teams and groups playing a sport. The target is to give college students the self-assurance and expertise to consider treatment of on their own and to be engaged in their well-becoming.”
NICHOLS
The Pennsylvania Department of Education describes overall health and bodily training as giving “students with the awareness and capabilities that will help them to obtain and preserve a bodily energetic and healthful lifestyle, not only in the course of their time in university but for a lifetime.”
There are similarities between the two concepts. The new model emphasizes “properly-getting,” which refers to the holistic dimensions of an individual’s existence that is perfectly-lived, and “wellness,” which broadly describes a healthy way of living. Physical exercise is just a person of lots of components of a wellness training.
The exercise, nonetheless, is typically how the two types diverge.
“There’s a change between being a wellness educator and a gym teacher, and we need so significantly far more wellness instruction in faculties now as a substitute of owning children taking part in dodgeball, matball or what ever occupies class time,” Nichols claimed. “We require to educate them how to try to eat much better or how to control their pressure and stress and anxiety — individuals are all part of wellness schooling.”
In accordance to Nichols, there are six parts to a wellness education curriculum:
- 
- Actual physical action.
- Nutrition.
- Safety and injury prevention.
- Social and psychological wellness.
- The human entire body and the human body reaction.
- Well being-connected health.






SRU initially instituted this product in 2014 when physical and overall health education and learning undergraduate students were being offered a concentration in university wellness training. In fall 2021, SRU revamped its adapted bodily exercise graduate system and started supplying a Grasp of Science in Lifelong Wellness through Innovative Leadership in which students can opt for concerning two concentrations: tailored physical activity and the lately included college wellness instruction.
The SWE graduate method is offered absolutely on the net and is geared towards furnishing practicing lecturers and directors tactics for transitioning from a common wellbeing and physical education design to a university wellness education and learning product. It is also excellent for teachers needing Level II certification, which demands educators in Pennsylvania who have been instructing for 6 a long time to get hold of 24 write-up-baccalaureate credits.
Lots of university districts are adopting SRU’s wellness education model, which includes Deer Lakes and North Allegheny University Districts, to name a number of.
“Administrators at general public faculties are recognizing the worth and the impression of switching to the wellness instruction model and lecturers are acquiring additional goal and relevance in their professions,” Nichols stated. “Lots of general public universities have inquired about retraining their academics, or they have instructors who were skilled by our college throughout the past number of decades.”
Also, the wellness training product and the target on the total-baby solution to health and bodily training align with current initiatives from the Modern society of Health and fitness and Physical Educators, acknowledged as Form The us, and the Facilities for Disorder and Prevention.
“We’re self-confident that this product is here to stay and that is why this SWE concentration will have a lasting effects on planning the subsequent technology of wellness lecturers,” Nichols reported.
Much more data about SRU’s lifelong wellness via innovative leadership program and the SWE graduate application is readily available on the University’s internet site.
MEDIA Get in touch with: Justin Zackal | 724.738.4854 | [email protected]
