Events

2023 PHE National Conference

Program–at–a–Glance

*The session descriptions are subject to change. 

Virtual sessions are designed for an online audience and may differ in content and duration from the in-person session (if the session is offered in person at the conference). If you have registered for the in-person National Conference, you will have access to the virtual conference sessions and will not need to re-register.

Registration for the virtual session closes on June 20. Sessions will be available to registrants from May 15 through August 31, 2023.


Virtual Session Registration Rates: 
• Individual – $150     • Student/Retiree – $75


Register Now

Keynote: Indigenous Allyship in Canadian Health, Wellness, and Education

Keynote Speaker: Len Pierre (he/him)
 
Len Pierre is Coast Salish from Katzie (kate-zee) First Nation. Len is an educator, consultant, TEDx Speaker, social activist, change agent, & traditional knowledge keeper. He has a Masters degree in Education from Simon Fraser University focusing on Indigenous curriculum and instructional design. His experience includes Indigenous education and program leadership from various organizations across colonial Canada.
 
He specializes in the development of educational programs and services with decolonization and reconciliation as its core values. He comes to us with an open heart and open mind, and hopes to be received in the same way.

Keynote: Indigenous Allyship in Canadian Health, Wellness, and Education

R. Tait McKenzie Scholar Address

By Dr. Kellie Baker

Dr. Kellie Baker has dedicated herself to the advancement of physical and health education as a public school teacher, teacher educator, researcher, curriculum specialist, professional development facilitator, and volunteer on local, provincial, national, and international boards, committees, and councils. As an Instructor in two faculties at Memorial University of Newfoundland, and curriculum specialist with the Newfoundland and Labrador Department of Education, Kellie supports educators, at all stages of their careers, in reconsidering what is said and done in the name of physical education. Currently collaborating with teams of international scholars from Australia, Ireland, Norway, Spain, and Wales, Kellie is researching topics such as Models-based Practice, Policy in Health and Physical Education, Vulnerability in teacher education, and has co-designed the Socially-Just Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility approach.

yellow stripeVirtual only session

yellow stripeKey Concepts and Teaching Materials from 'Stand Tall and Move Easy'

Presenter: Joanna Farmer
Target Audience: Grades 10-12, Post-secondary focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education
Language: English

This session presents posture as a basic fitness component and means to better physical performance. Attendees will be introduced to   teaching materials to help students improve their posture through: knowledge of simple anatomy, awareness of muscle tension and joint discomfort, self-assessment, general exercise to develop stability and mobility, written reflection to identify the factors affecting their posture, assessment of personal lifestyle habits and the development of a personal plan for better posture. Attendees will be introduced to and practice standing, sitting and walking tall. They will experience  muscle tension/relaxation and joint discomfort/comfort associated with posture. They will be given the basic quick-fix for posture improvement, an updated vocabulary to discuss posture, and a model for teaching fitness and sport through posture concepts. They will be given a computer link to access the posture assessment and/or to obtain a copy of the book. 

A key posture concept is that perfect bodies are rare and that with the right knowledge and tools, students can improve their posture and maximize their athletic performance. Terry Fox and Usain Bolt are examples of elite athletes who overcame their alignment challenges. With posture education students can be empowered to reach their goals.

yellow stripeRiding a Bike Is a Life Skill - Let’s Teach It in Schools

Presenter: Laura Shutiak
Target Audience: Grades 7-12 focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education
Language: English

Laura will start by sharing data from Calgary schools that shows 10 % of students say they have Never been on a bike, and at some schools, only 45% even have bikes. Most schools have old, tire-bender racks that don't allow locking. How can we encourage active travel to school when students face so many barriers? Laura will share how Youth en Route has been able to increase ridership - up to 800% at some schools - in just a few months with simple solutions, including getting kids on bikes in classes. YER's innovations include re-designing the school bike rack to make it functional - and getting high school welding classes to do the work. We've also created Lock Libraries at schools, so kids who can't afford a good lock, or don't want to lug it around, can access a lock at school. If we want youth to choose active, sustainable modes of travel, we need to help empower and encourage them, with skills, confidence and tools.

yellow stripeA Healthy Me in 2023

Presenter: Kevin Landreville
Target Audience: Grades 7-12 focus
Strand: Quality Health and Well-being Experiences
Language: English

Want to take charge of your own health and wellness? Let's examine practical skills and strategies that PHE students and teachers can use TODAY to enhance their physical and mental health. Concepts/Resources for lessons will be shared that can be applied for middle and high school students. Empower yourself and your students to be a Healthy Me in 2023!

yellow stripeBarriers Faced by Non-binary Youth in Sport — How Teachers Can Be Part of the Solution

Presenter: Martha Gumprich
Target Audience: Grades 7-12 focus, Post-secondary, Before and/or after school, Administration focus
Strand: Social Justice in PHE
Language: English

Attendees will learn about non-binary youth participation in organized sports in Canada. This session also includes the potential and current barriers to participation, threats to the safety of non-binary youth in these settings, where participants have felt the need to change their gender expression and/or experienced abuse.

yellow stripeIntro to BOKS: Program Overview and How to Start

Presenter: BOKS

At BOKS (Build Our Kids’ Success), we believe that every child deserves the opportunity to play. Our mission is to provide free, fun, and easy to follow resources that allow kids to get moving throughout the day. Be sure to tune in to the BOKS Virtual Training to learn more about utilizing the many resources offered and how to run the BOKS program effectively.

The True Sport Experience: A True Sport Resource for Educators 

Presenter: Sarah Bennett, Melissa Sullivan (she/they), Canadian Centre for Ethics in Sport (Ontario)
Target Audience: Grades K-3 Focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education | Classroom Session
Language: English Session

The True Sport Experience -- Volume 1: FUNdamentals is a PHE Canada-endorsed resource for educators of children aged 6 to 9 consisting of a series of physical activities that facilitate learning the True Sport Principles. Whether you are a teacher, coach or recreational leader, The True Sport Experience offers a balanced and intentional approach to physical activity by focusing on the development of both ethical literacy and physical literacy. The activities can be applied in and out of the classroom, as well as in the community and align with current Canadian physical education curriculum. Educators will walk away from this session with a tangible, ready-to-use resource. The active session will showcase the resource, highlight activities, and provide evidence for the many benefits of bringing True Sport to life. 

Physical Education and Its Complex Puzzle of Diversity

Presenters: Sarah Adams, Dr Alison Murray (virtually), Public School Board PEI (Prince Edward Island)
Target Audience: Grades K-12, Post-secondary Focus
Strand: Social Justice in PHE | Classroom Session
Language: English Session

Diversity is complex. We are made up of internal and external dimensions that shape who we are as individuals. This intersectionality creates an interesting puzzle which can have an impact on learning.  The puzzle pieces are not uniform, some segments are larger and more prominent than others indicating the significant role they may play in one's life. This session seeks to provide a means for invested educational stakeholders to integrate reflective and reflexive opportunities for pupils within their teaching. It fuses ways of thinking using ethical reasoning through a meta-awareness of diversity. It opens contemplation and conversation around the interconnections of the individual with and through a collective community identity. By adopting a culturally consciousness approach to teaching and learning, we will develop a deeper awareness of individuality in order to develop a high quality, accessible PE program.

Disability-Centred Movement: Supporting Inclusive Physical Education

Presenter: Andrea Haefele, Ontario Physical Health Education Association (Ophea) (Ontario)
Target Audience: Grades K-12, Post-Secondary, Before and/or After School Focus
Strand: Adapted PHE | Active Session
Language: English

Inclusion is a process and a goal; it is an ever-lasting search for better ways to respond to diversity. The workshop will support designing physical education programs for students with disabilities and provide a collection of capacity-building tools that enable educators to embed universal design into their practice and to plan their programming to meet students' individualized needs. Participants will investigate inclusive practices through curriculum programming and differentiated instruction in an active session that will share evidence-based strategies, promising practices and ideas for adaptation to meet individual needs of students with disabilities. Participants will also learn about Ophea's Disability-Centred Movement: Supporting Inclusive Physical Education resource.  

GuysWork Atlantic Canada

Presenters: Derek Smith and Chris Gilham, GuysWork (Nova Scotia)
Target Audience: Grades 4-9 focus
Strand: Quality Health and Well-being Experiences | Classroom Session
Language: English Session

GuysWork is an innovative and evidence-based health promotion program designed to disrupt  unhealthy presentations of masculinity that impact the health of young men and their peers -- particularly young women. GuysWork was developed in Nova Scotia in 2012 by the departments of Health and Wellness and Education and Early Childhood Development to help remove the stigma around help-seeking that was preventing school-age guys from accessing the province's Youth Health Centres.These pro-social spaces were quickly recognized as a place wherein young men could have important conversations connected to partner-based violence. Beginning in 2022 GuysWork is implementing a three-year pilot project bringing GuysWork to the other Atlantic Canada provinces and evaluating its impact over multiple ages and stages of guys' lives. The pilot endeavors to inform a national strategy to engage young men in efforts to reduce partner-based violence and promote gender equality, while also increasing help seeking behaviours among youth participants.

New Entry-Level YOU.FO Equipment: YOU.FO FUN

Presenter: Giel Bos, YOU.FO BV (Gemert, Netherlands)
Target Audience: Grades 4-12, Post-Secondary, Before and/or After School Focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education | Active Session
Language: English Session

YOU.FO is an award-winning and versatile sports and leisure game, based on throwing and catching an aerodynamic ring with specially designed sticks. It can be played as a competition game or freestyle, in teams or one- on-one, at the beach, in a park, on city squares, and even indoors in a gymnasium. Developed in the Netherlands, YOU.FO is a non-contact game that is easy to learn, fun to play, and includes mixed gender participation. This active session will teach you the skills and strategies of YOU.FO.

Creative and Innovative Ways to Teach, Assess and Report on Fundamental Movement Skills / Des approches créatives et novatrices pour enseigner, évaluer et rendre compte des habiletés motrices fondamentales

Presenters: David Arsenault and Joanne Lawson, Champions for Life Foundation (Québec)
Target Audience: Grades K-3 focus
Strand: Assessment | Active Session
Language: Bilingual

Are you looking for NEW ways to get your students excited about moving? Designed and tested in collaboration with PE teachers for PE teachers, our physical education resources are designed to complement your curriculum with tools and fun activities to help provide quality, physical literacy-based lessons for your students. We also believe that the formative assessment of fundamental movement skills (FMS) is essential to delivering a quality physical education program. We will introduce the Champions for Life FMS Assessment Activities App: an interACTIVE digital tool to help PE teachers teach, track, assess and report on their student's progress. We'll share how you can deliver more meaningful movement experiences in your classroom and support your students to build physical literacy during their critical years of development.

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Êtes-vous à la recherche de NOUVELLES façons de stimuler le goût de l’activité physique chez vos élèves? Conçues et éprouvées en collaboration avec des enseignant(e)s d’EP et destinées spécifiquement aux enseignant(e)s d’EP, nos ressources d’éducation physique sont un excellent complément à vos programmes scolaires. Nos outils et nos activités agréables à faire sont axées sur des leçons de littératie physique de la plus haute qualité. Nous croyons fermement que l’évaluation formative des habiletés motrices fondamentales (HMF) est un aspect clé de n’importe quel programme d’éducation physique de qualité. Nous vous montrerons l’application Champions for Life d’activités d’évaluation des HMF. Cet outil interACTIF numérique aide les enseignant(e)s d’EP à enseigner la matière, à suivre et évaluer les progrès des élèves, et à rendre compte des résultats. Nous vous montrerons comment introduire des expériences de mouvement plus authentiques dans vos cours d’éducation physique, et comment aider vos élèves à renforcer leur littératie physique durant cette période critique de leur développement.

Mindfulness, Literature, & Yoga: The Art of Yoga in Your Classroom

Presenter: Leanne Whiting (Nova Scotia)
Target Audience: Grades K-6, Administration focus
Strand: Quality Health and Well-being Experiences | Active Session
Language: English Session

The combination of storytelling and yoga is a unique and powerful way to help children build self-awareness and relate to and understand others in their world. This session will review literature related to yoga in schools, highlighting the current research for yoga in the classroom and have you participate in a dynamic and engaging story and yoga class. You will be introduced to Breathe.Read.Yoga., an online classroom resource featuring a diverse library of classes that combine breathing practices, stories, and yoga postures for you to seamlessly integrate into your themes and daily lessons. You will leave this workshop with a greater understanding of the mental, physical, and social and emotional benefits of yoga and storytelling as well as a clear understanding of how to integrate these practices to create a calm classroom and peaceful presence for you and your students.

Meaningful PE: Getting Started

Presenter: Tim Fletcher, Brock University (Ontario); co-presented by Doug Gleddie, Stephanie Beni, Grace Cardiff, Ty Riddick, and Spencer Briggs
Target Audience: Grades K-12 Focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education | Classroom Session
Language: English

Meaningful movement is offered as part of a renewed vision for physical education - one that is focused on prioritizing the quality and personal significance of the learner's experience and grounded in their local contexts. But how can teachers facilitate meaningful experiences for students with intention and regularity? Meaningful PE uses democratic and reflective principles to inform how teachers can use the idea of meaningful movement as their main filter for pedagogical decision-making. This session is designed for K-12 teachers who are interested in learning about implementing the Meaningful PE approach. Authentic and rich exemplars from teachers will be used to illustrate and demonstrate strong use of Meaningful PE.

The Interactive for Life Project: Social Emotional Learning in Action

Presenter: Rebecca Lloyd, University of Ottawa (Ontario)
Target Audience: Grades 4-12 , Post-secondary focus, Administrator, Before and/or after school focus
Strand: Quality Health and Well-being Experiences | Active Session
Language: English

The 5-year, multiphase SSHRC-funded InterActive for Life (IA4L) project is premised on understanding the ways we can develop social emotional learning in and through the language of movement with emphasis on postural, positional, gestural, and energetic awareness in the teaching of games and sports, dance, and fitness pursuits. In this active session, knowledge gathered from interviewing, observing, and creating documentary videos of seven world renowned experts in the partnered disciplines of equestrian, salsa dance, martial arts, and acroyoga will be mobilized into a series of InterActivities which emphasize the many ways relational awareness and motion-sensing responses to others may be enhanced (Nyentap, etr. Al., 2020). Through a combination of experiencing the IA4L resource, as well as watching mini video examples and testimonies of physical education teachers applying the IA4L project to their practice (Lloyd & Smith, 2022b), participants will walk away with practical, research-informed ways to teach relational connection in any physical education program.

Compassion Fatigue, Burnout, and a Way Forward

Presenter: Astrid Kendrick, University of Calgary (Alberta)
Target Audience: Administration Focus
Strand: Educational Leadership | Classroom Session
Language: English Session

This interactive session will discuss the literature and findings connected to a recently completed, two-year study on compassion fatigue, emotional labour, and educator burnout. Understanding the connection between educators' mental and emotional well-being and the occupational hazards of providing emotional labour will assist health and well-being leaders with developing a positive and more resilient school culture. Dr. Kendrick will focus on how health and wellness leaders can use resources developed from this study, known as HEARTcare planning, to proactively address their own emotional well-being and can use these resources to build collective well-being and collective compassion as a key part of their school culture.

A Blueprint for Action: A Tool for School Communities to Prevent Substance-Related Harms /  Un plan d’action définitif : une ressource pour aider les communautés scolaires à prévenir les méfaits liés à la consommation de substances

Presenters: Rosamund Dunkley, Public Health Agency of Canada (Ontario), Florence Bergeron, Students Commission of Canada (ON)
Target Audience: Grades 7-12, Before and/or After School, Administration Focus
Strand: Healthy Schools | Classroom Session
Language: Bilingual Session

This session explores a Public Health Agency of Canada resource, the "Blueprint for Action: Preventing substance-related harms among youth through a Comprehensive School Health Approach". As school communities cope with the wider impacts of the pandemic, this tool is a helpful starting point for conversations about substance use and how substance-related harms can be addressed both inside and outside the classroom. The Blueprint model brings together the Comprehensive School Health framework, a well-established approach to building healthy school communities, and four evidence-based approaches to preventing substance-related harms: upstream prevention, harm reduction, stigma reduction, and equity-oriented approaches.

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Cette séance se penche sur une ressource de l’Agence de la santé publique du Canada, le « Plan d'action : Prévenir les méfaits liés à la consommation de substances chez les jeunes par une approche globale de la santé en milieu scolaire ». Alors que les communautés scolaires s’affrontent aux répercussions plus durables de la pandémie, cet outil est un excellent point de départ pour déclencher des conversations sur la consommation de substances, notamment les moyens d’aborder, dans le contexte scolaire et au-delà, la question des méfaits liés à la consommation de substances. Le Plan d’action s’appuie sur l’approche globale de la santé en milieu scolaire, un cadre bien ancré pour développer des communautés scolaires saines, et déploie quatre approches fondées sur les faits pour prévenir les méfaits liés à la consommation de substances : la prévention en amont, la réduction des méfaits, la réduction de la stigmatisation et les approches orientées vers l'équité.

Rockstar Teaching: Unleash the Power of Clarity and Confidence in Your Instruction

Presenter: Joey Feith, ThePhysicalEducator.com (Québec)
Target Audience: Grades K-12 Focus
Strand: Quality Physical Education | Active Session
Language: English Session

Since 2010, I've had the honour of working with physical education teachers from around the globe. In almost every group I have worked with, I've met teachers who felt unsure about aligning their teaching, assessment, activities, and grades to their local curriculum outcomes. Although many manage to hide this via flashy and exciting games, that lingering feeling remains: "I don't really know what I'm supposed to be teaching". Join me as we explore various teaching tactics that will help you infuse your lessons with intention and purpose.  In this active session, you will be guided through an outcomes-based lesson designed to help you experience the thrill of teaching from a place of confidence and clarity. Together, we will explore how to establish clear targets for learning, engage students in ongoing formative assessment, introduce various discussion protocols, and design games aligned to outcomes. You will leave this session with various evidence-based, teacher-tested tools added to your pedagogical toolbelt that will empower you to approach your teaching with rockstar confidence!

STOMP: Taking a Whole School, Youth-Focused Approach to Prevent Smoking and Vaping in School Communities Across Canada

Presenter: Ryan Fahey and Shivani Solanki, PHE Canada (Ontario)
Target Audience: Grades 7-12, Administration focus
Strand: Healthy Schools | Classroom Session
Language: English

Smoking and Vaping are a real issue in schools. So, what can we do about it? Join school champions, youth voices, PHE Canada and the SIRCLE Lab as we share the Students Together Moving to Prevent Tobacco Use (STOMP) project and how youth are taking action when it comes to addressing smoking and vaping and creating a healthier school environment. In this session we will also share resources you can use to address substance use, tobacco and vaping at your school.