Lessons from the Heart: Individualizing Physical Education With Heart Rate Monitors

Heart rate monitors (HRMs) are making it easier than ever before for both students and teachers to be fully accountable. They allow students to become responsible for their individual efforts and enable teachers to objectively determine each student’s progress toward personal fitness goals. Lessons From the Heart shows you how to use this technology to enrich and individualize your physical education program.

Veteran physical educator Beth Kirkpatrick, former NASPE Teacher of the Year, and Burt Birnbaum, who has been developing programs for the use of HRMs in education since 1977, present 38 practical lesson plans designed to stimulate student learning and motivation through the use of HRMs. All of the lessons have interdisciplinary applications, and many of them include reproducible worksheets. To make it easy for you to incorporate the lessons into your class, each lesson includes

• goals,

• key concepts,

• materials needed,

• a description of the activity, and

• helpful teaching tips.

Lessons From the Heart also provides essential background information about the structure and function of the heart, methods for measuring heart rate, and the use of heart rate monitors in the classroom. The book’s valuable appendices give you quick instructions for using heart rate monitors, information on meeting NASPE’s physical education content standards, tips for securing funding for heart rate monitors, and guidelines for curriculum development.

Whether you’re currently using HRMs in your program or just exploring their potential, Lessons From the Heart will show you how to take full advantage of this technology.

With 20 years’ experience teaching health and physical education at the middle school level, Beth Kirkpatrick is dedicated to preparing children to have the mental, physical, and emotional health to withstand lifestyles beyond the year 2000. Her excellent teaching methods have earned her many awards, including NASPE Teacher of the Year, Governor’s Cup for Outstanding Secondary Physical Education Program of Iowa, and U.S. West Outstanding Teacher of Iowa. In 1988 she became the only physical educator to receive the U.S. Department of Education’s Christa McAuliffe Fellowship.

Kirkpatrick’s physical education program has been featured in Life Magazine, Newsweek, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold’s Fitness for Kids, and on the NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw. Active in professional organizations, she is a member of the PE/TV Board of Advisors and a former chair of NASPE’s Middle and Secondary School Physical Education Council. She has also been a keynote speaker to national and state AHPERD conventions and to more than 300 other conferences, workshops, and conventions nationwide.

A recipient of the 1993-94 Emens Distinguished Professorship at Ball State University (Muncie, IN), Kirkpatrick lives in Grundy Center, Iowa.

Burton H. Birnbaum is vice chairman of Polar Electro, Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of heart rate monitoring, registering, and evaluation equipment. He designed the first pulsemeter, which was introduced to the sporting goods industry in 1977. Since then, he has been instrumental in developing programs for the use of heart rate monitors in education and has been a key supporter of incorporating technology into physical education.

A member of the American Alliance for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, Birnbaum holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from New York University and an MBA from Bernard Baruch College. He is a resident of Woodmere, New York.