Physical education offers a valuable opportunity to impact all areas of child development (i.e. physical, mental, social, and emotional). As such, the purpose of this presentation is to provide Physical and Adapted Physical Education teachers with a variety of processes and instruments to be used to measure the present level of performance and progress of students with special needs in physical education class. Participants will be exposed to the assessment instruments commonly used in the United States. The purpose of these instruments is to assess the fundamental skills (e.g., running, throwing, catching) of school-age children. Even though there are limited assessment instruments to measure Social Emotional Learning (SEL), strategies to
assess and modify the PE curriculum to attend this area will be presented (E.g., Teaching Social Responsibility Model). The audience will be actively involved in a variety of physical to accommodate students with varying ability levels and diverse backgrounds in individual and integrated settings. In addition, this workshop will provide participants with strategies, activities, and documents that can be easily modified and implemented in the physical education curriculum when conducting assessment(s). Lastly, participants will be able to write short and long-term goals according to the current level of performance of the students.

Presenter: Luis Columna, a native of San Juan Puerto Rico, is currently an Associate Professor in the Kinesiology Department at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He teaches in the new Health Equity and Health Promotion Program. He received a master’s degree in Physical Education from the Interamerican University of Puerto Rico in 2003 and a PhD in Kinesiology (Adapted Physical Education) from Texas Woman’s University. He joined the UW-Madison Kinesiology faculty in January 2019.

Prior to coming to Madison, Professor Columna was an Associate Professor at Syracuse University, NY. His research focuses on ways to increase the participation of families (especially Hispanic) of children with disabilities into physical activity and also his research focuses on ways to better prepare physical activity professionals and physical education teachers to work with diverse populations. To address the physical activity needs of children with disabilities and their parents, Dr. Columna developed the Fit Families Program (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUSu-MX80X8). Fit Families is a physical activity program that brings together children with disabilities (e.g. visual impairments: autism spectrum disorders), their parents, college students and in-service professionals in the fields of adapted physical education, special educators, orientation & mobility (O&M), psychologist, physical education, and exercise science, among others.

This workshop is free thanks to the ISBE SEL Hub grant and co-sponsored by the Area 5 ROEs (ROE 3, 40, 41, 45, 50) Any questions, please contact: Ryan Wamser rwamser@roe40.com