The goal of certification in K-12 Health Education is to facilitate students’ understanding of the central concepts, structures, and tools of inquiry of the discipline(s) and how to create learning experiences that make these aspects of subject matter meaningful and engaging for all students. Students will also understand how individuals learn, develop, and differ in their approaches to learning, understand how to adapt to diverse learners, recognize the importance of long-range planning and curriculum development, and how to implement and evaluate standards-based curriculum.
For many of our PE majors, this will be an add-on certification; by completing the few extra classes, they will be certified to teach health, nutrition, and even some basic life sciences. But this now gives education majors another health sciences avenue other than just physical education. They can now be health education majors, teach middle school science/health/nutrition, high school health/nutrition and many of their tier one science requirements like biology. For health sciences majors, it offers an opportunity to make themselves more marketable and add an education major so they can be certified to teach.
This major could be a pathway for medical school, but also a combined major for health & exercise science, physical education majors, and could also be combine with sports management for someone with teaching goals who didn’t necessarily want to teach physical education. It will make our physical education majors VERY marketable since only a few area colleges have a physical education major, and now that they will be health certified, it will put them at the top of that list.
