PE at Sabot might look a little different than what parents remember from their childhood. There is no gym, no whistle, and on any given day it might be more likely to see us running through the forest, or playing strategy games with pool noodles than perfecting the perfect sports swing/kick/throw. That doesn’t mean that sports don’t happen at Sabot, because they absolutely do. It just might look a little different. Sports have a place for every kid, not just the kids who are naturally really great at them. This happens in PE through collaboration. The aspect of collaboration that I see most often is the zone of proximal development. This is the area of learning between what the learner knows and what they can learn from others around them. With any given sport, there are always students in each class who have more experience than others. I ask only two things of the students. The first is for those who have a lot of experience to be helpful. The second is for those with less experience to be patient and kind with themselves. That is a bit of a tall order, especially knowing how frustrating and process driven learning a new sport can be. Throughout the grades, however, the students almost always rise to the occasion.

The middle school students are currently in a football segment. The goal is not for everyone to like football. Some kids do and that is great, but the ones who don’t can still take something meaningful out of the experience. And they do so mostly by learning from their peers. If everyone is invested in making sure all students are able to participate then the ones with less experience feel more comfortable about taking risks. The kids in the class who know the most about a sport still stand to gain a lot by collaborating with their peers. It’s often a lot harder to teach a skill or set of rules then it is to actually play yourself.

One of the many beautiful things about Sabot is that in every grade, (except the 2 year olds in the Forest Room) students have a chance to be a leader to younger students. This year the 7th grade students have displayed much more confidence in the football segment. As 6th grade students last year, many of them came in with very few skills mastered and football felt very foreign to them. Those same students are now helping some of this years 6th grade students learn. I witnessed more peer learning during lower school recess. They have recess right before middle school PE and one day two of the middle school students jumped right in to play with them. I’m not sure who had more fun.

It has been fun to watch the students become more confident over time. It comes from first taking a risk in a peer-supported environment, then being committed to learning a skill, mastering the skill and finally teaching it to others. The confidence and leadership skills that happen during team sports transfer well beyond the physical benefits of the moment.

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