Mental Health in Sports and Wellness of Athletes
Parker P
https://classroom.google.com/c/ODY3NzkzNTc0Mjg1
Kevin McNamara (Pod i)
Overview
This is an important topic, and I appreciate how thoughtfully you delivered it. I have never been a student athlete, so I can’t speak from experience about the mental health issues that exist within competitive sports. Nonetheless, your explanations of the issues, rationales, and strategies regarding the topic are insightful and engaging. As a draft, this learning design environment is highly functional and contains sufficient information to accurately educate your audience. Your use of interactive engagement tools was helpful. With a few tweaks, I think this could be a highly valuable teaching tool for young student-athletes.
Strengths
The Google Classroom format worked quite well for organizing all the information you were delivering. The integration of quizzes and discussion posts was helpful for learner engagement. The educational videos were well-selected and offered valuable insight into the ways mental health in sports has already begun to change. Your focal topic was concise, but you did a good job teaching it.
I appreciate that you chose a topic which is specific but pervasive in sporting communities. Mental health is very important, but competitive sports have such a long history of unhealthy coaching and training routines that ignore mental anguish, if not seek it out. Your inclusion of prominent pro-athlete voices helps make this learning design impactful for young people, because the performance stress often comes from comparing themselves to these global sports icons.
Areas to Improve
I had difficulty navigating some parts of Google Classroom. I’m not sure how to proceed to the next unit after completing the quiz or discussion post activities. Some of the readings you assigned seem a little above the level I would expect 14-18-year-old student-athletes to engage with. You might want to consider abridging them to highlight the most critical information.
I also felt that some activity prompts could use more explanation. I really like the idea behind the Personal Wellness Plan assignment, but I think it was too open-ended. Consider expanding on it to include a template or checklist for what the plan should include, so that student-athletes can personalize it to their sport’s expectations. The plans could prompt them to develop mental health strategies for weekly training, as well as specific mindfulness strategies for before big events, and healthy unwinding strategies for after wins and losses.