Thirty-Eight Students, Six Basketballs, Forty-Five Minutes
Mr. Boone has 38 seventh graders, one gymnasium, six basketballs, 12 cones, and a 45-minute period that includes five minutes for dressing and five for closure. His plan is a 10-minute lecture on dribbling cues, 10 minutes of lines dribbling one at a time on two lines sharing six balls, then a full-court scrimmage with 10 players and 28 watching. In the first lesson, students averaged about three minutes between turns; two students began shoving in line, one bounced a ball off the wall, and the scrimmage ended in an argument. Pedometer data from a similar lesson showed students averaged 12 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. He is evaluated on whether students are actively engaged at least 50 percent of class time. The gym is shared with a lunch period that ends five minutes into his class.
1. Redesign the lesson to maximize practice trials and moderate-to-vigorous activity within the constraints. Show your reasoning.
Read the worked answer
The constraint is not the six balls, it is the two lines and the ten-person scrimmage. Thirty-eight students can be active simultaneously if the group size is small and the equipment is shared by alternating, not by queueing.
Redesign (35 minutes of instructional time)
- 3 minutes: instant activity on entry. Six balls in the middle, students without balls perform shadow dribbling in place with the same cues; rotate ball holders on a signal. Everyone moves, no one waits.
- 4 minutes: one demonstration, one cue (fingertips, waist high, eyes up), guided practice by echo count.
- 15 minutes: six stations of six to seven students, each with one ball and two cones: in-place dribbling to a beat, figure-eight around cones, walk-and-dribble, partner alternating dribble with one ball every 30 seconds, mirror dribbling with no ball, and a crossover step drill. Two minutes per station, rotate on a signal. No lines; each station's task card states what to do while waiting for a turn.
- 8 minutes: 3-on-3 half-court games in six games across the width, cones as boundaries, one ball per game; the other players at each court do the conditioning-free skill task assigned to that court.
- 5 minutes: closure and equipment return.
Practice trials rise from a handful per student to continuous trials, and the 28 spectators disappear.
2. Address the shoving and the argument with a behavior plan rather than a punishment plan.
Read the worked answer
Both behaviors have an instructional cause: long waits with nothing to do, unclear boundaries, and a competitive game with no officiating structure.
Proactive plan
- Teach and rehearse three routines in the first week: entry, signal-and-rotate, equipment collection. Practice them without equipment first.
- Post and state expectations in observable terms: ball in hand or beside you, move on the signal, talk to resolve a call.
- Use active supervision: move, scan, stay within a few steps of the highest-risk group, and give specific praise to students following the routine.
- Design out the wait. Shoving in line disappears when the line disappears.
- Give the students who need structure a role: station captain, equipment manager, referee trainee.
- For the game, teach a simple call-it-yourself rule and a two-touch limit, and rotate teams every few minutes so a disputed call cannot escalate over a long game.
Response when it happens
- Stop the activity, restate the expectation, and have the student practice the correct routine.
- Use a brief refocus timeout, then re-enter.
- Never use laps, push-ups, or wall sits as punishment. It pairs physical activity with penalty, may violate district discipline policy, and does not teach a replacement behavior.
3. How would you measure whether the redesign actually worked?
Read the worked answer
Offer evidence, not impressions, because the evaluation criterion is concrete.
- Interval time sampling: every 60 seconds, record each squad's status as moderate-to-vigorous, low activity, or waiting. Compute the percentage of intervals in MVPA and compare with the 12-minute baseline. Target at least 50 percent of total class time, which given five minutes dressing and five minutes closure means roughly 18 minutes of the 35 instructional minutes.
- Pedometer or step counts per lesson, averaged by class, compare before and after.
- Practice trials: tally ball contacts for a random sample of six students during a station block.
- Behavior data: frequency of shoving, off-task equipment use, and arguments per lesson.
- Transition time: stopwatch from signal to start of the next activity, with a target under 30 seconds.
Run the design for three lessons before judging it, since routines take time to teach. If MVPA stays below target, the likely culprit is a station with too much waiting or a lecture that crept back over three minutes; adjust that element and remeasure rather than changing the whole plan.