Kevin O’Keefe

Psy 205

http://eduref.org/Virtual/Lessons/Health/Body_Systems_and_Senses/BSS0004.html

Analysis Of “Cardiovascular Fitness”

“Cardiovascular Fitness” is an exceptional lesson plan for those looking to teach the importance of cardiovascular strength to their health education students. The plan involves multiple uses of different kinds of models. The plan is designed to stimulate students for optimal storage and retrieval of information from their long-term memory. The lesson plan indicates use of inductive teaching styles to cover the more concrete topics of the lesson. The lesson plan uses a style of learning that best suites students at the age the lesson is recommended to be taught, insuring each student is challenged based on Piaget and Vygotsky’s research. The lesson involves positive encouragement and uses intrinsic values to positively reinforce students to help avoid extinction of the desired impact.

The lesson plan begins by the teacher using a film of a cardiovascular endurance contest, such as a race, to strike the interest of the students in cardiovascular fitness. This video is a spectacular way to begin the lesson because it assists the lesson on multiple fronts. The first most obvious which is simply gaining their interest.

According to information processing theory, when students are interested in the subject being taught the information becomes more likely to pass from the working memory to the long-term memory. Once moved into long term memory the students will be able to more easily retrieve the image of cardiovascular fitness from their long-term memory because of its use as a visual aid. The image of the athletes in competition will be associated in their minds with the superior cardiovascular fitness potential of the human body. These superior examples also serve as mastery models. These athletes become mastery models due to their obvious mastery of the task in which the students will soon begin to plan as they continue on through the lesson.

Following the tape, the teacher is then, to explain to the students the benefits of cardiovascular fitness. This part of the lesson uses deductive teaching methods as the instructor explains the defining attributes of the benefits of cardiovascular fitness. The inductive learning continues as the instructor explains the concepts behind cardiovascular fitness and how it leads to the benefits previously stated. Because the students were given the defining attributes of the concept, the next part of the lesson naturally gravitates towards the students brainstorming different activities that meet the defining attributes.

The students are now placed into groups for brainstorming of activities. They are put into groups of three to four individuals to think of the activities and then the groups are later brought together to compare their activities. This is yet another part of the lesson that incorporates modeling. While the specific intent of modeling is not mentioned in the lesson plans, whenever students are placed into groups for group work, peer models will always appear in different forms for each student. Students will see others as mastery, coping, or incompetent models. Those others will see the same student as a particular type of model themselves. Following the small group work, another layer of models will be presented as groups see each other and the ideas they came up with, as some groups will excel and others struggle successfully and unsuccessfully to form the three models.

After this group activity students will have been presented with a plethora of different ideas of cardiovascular activities. The students will more than likely find an activity which they are intrinsically motivated to begin. Students will take the task they choose and implement it into their day-to-day schedules in a way that fits best for them. Students may choose group activities, which will incorporate even more opportunities for modeling, or they may choose to embark on a solitary task.

While not specifically mentioned in the lesson plan, operant conditioning can be found in any fitness and lifestyle change, which is what this lesson plan is promoting. The students will begin from the intrinsic motivation of their chosen task due to the sheer interest in the task, but as time goes on the students will likely begin to feel the benefits of the plan, specifically the benefits covered in class that they can now understand and attribute to the lifestyle change. As students come to realize these benefits, they are positively reinforced by their success and, therefore, will both continue with the new lifestyle and better be able to retrieve the information covered in the lesson as it gains more meaning through their success. The positive reinforcement in this particular instance will have an even stronger impact as the reinforcement flows naturally with the new fitness plan and lesson.

The final step in the lesson plan is to encourage students to implement their plans. This aspect of the lesson plan also is consistent with operant conditioning. Students who are in fact implementing their plans are likely to receive a positive feeling when they know that when the teacher reminds them of their task that they are part of the successful students who have implemented and are succeeding in their task. The mere ability for the students to say “Yes, I am following my fitness plan” will serve as positive reinforcement for the students, before the teacher even has to add any positive reinforcement of his own.

Overall, this lesson plan is consistent with the research and discoveries of Piaget and Vygotsky. According to Piaget, these students have just developed into the formal operational stage of development. This lesson is consistent with Piaget’s research because it teaches students about their internal health which, while physical, is something they have likely never seen with their own eyes, yet is still linked to concepts of the concrete world, of which they have a previous grasp. This means that the lesson is appropriately placed within the student’s zone of proximal development, as they are taking a concept familiar to them, exercise, and adding the abstract concept they do not yet understand, the benefits of cardiovascular fitness. This is also a form of elaborative rehearsal as the students relate what they do know about exercise to the concept of cardiovascular fitness.

In this lesson plan many different styles of learning are compensated for and the information being taught is given to the students in such a way to best promote retrieval from the long term memory. Students are given meaning in what they are being taught and are provided a multitude of models to learn from. The students are both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated to learn about and implement the ideas of cardiovascular fitness. Due to this, the lesson plan “Cardiovascular fitness” shows to be an obviously scientifically designed, affective lesson plan for teaching the concept of cardiovascular fitness.