My colleague Sandra-Lynn Shortall recently published a post, Ten Years Strong: Building Physical Literacy, One Move at a Time, and it got me thinking less about physical literacy itself and more about what it means to stay committed to something in education long enough for it to become part of who you are as a community.
I have been in the district office for about 19 years. That is long enough to have seen a lot of ideas arrive with genuine excitement and then quietly disappear. It is also long enough to have watched a smaller number of ideas take root, grow, and become something real.
Physical literacy is one of those ideas, and it is worth pausing to understand why.
Back in September 2013, I wrote a post called But Can They Throw a Ball? I was wrestling with a genuine concern. We were doing a lot of work to get kids more active, which was necessary and important, but I worried we were sometimes confusing physical activity with physical literacy.
The ability to move with confidence and competence, to develop a positive relationship with movement that could last a lifetime, felt like something different.
At that time, Diane Nelson had begun laying the groundwork for this work in our district. There was energy behind it, but also a real question about whether it would last. That was not so long ago. It was also a very long time ago.
Reading Sandra-Lynn’s account of the decade since, I am struck most by how difficult it is to change the actual makeup of school. Not just the program. Not just the schedule. Not just the policy. The felt experience of what school is, what it values, what it looks like to walk through its hallways, sit in its classrooms, and experience learning each day.
That kind of change is slow. It is stubborn. And most initiatives, however worthy, do not survive long enough to produce it. The graveyard of promising educational ideas is vast.
Physical literacy has been different.
It has made it through budget pressures, shifting priorities, a global pandemic and the relentless churn of new urgent things demanding attention. It has lasted because of people.
Diane Nelson’s vision gave it a foundation. Amber Pascual and Erin Crawford gave it a heartbeat, showing up in classrooms year after year, building the trust and relationships that no program document can manufacture. Over the course of a decade, they have delivered more than 5,000 workshops.
I think about that number and what it actually represents. Thousands of individual moments of connection with teachers and students. Thousands of times someone walked into a gym, a classroom, or a professional learning session and made the case again that this work matters.
That is what I find myself writing about here, more than physical literacy itself.
It is the thing I return to again and again in this role. Powerful educators change things. Not systems in the abstract. Not policies on their own. Not initiatives because they appear in a plan.
People change things.
People who care enough to keep showing up. People who are stubborn in the best possible way. People who continue to make the case even when the attention of the institution has shifted to something else. They are the reason anything of lasting value happens in schools.
I have written about physical literacy several times over the years, in 2019, in 2024, and earlier this year. Each time, there was more to say because there was more that had actually happened.
That is the thing about a sustained commitment. It keeps generating stories. You cannot tell an ongoing story if there is no ongoing work to tell it from.
In our district, we have been explicit about positioning physical literacy and AI as two key areas of innovation. At first glance, they may seem like very different priorities. I actually think they belong together.
One speaks to preparing students for a world that is increasingly digital. The other speaks to preparing students for a world that is increasingly sedentary.
Together, they reflect something we believe about the whole child. Being ready to learn and ready to live requires both a capable mind and a capable body. Neither is more important than the other. Both require attention. Both require leadership. And both require the patience to become part of the culture rather than just part of the calendar.
That is the thing about the long game. It is harder than it sounds.
It asks something of leaders that is easy to describe and genuinely difficult to practice. It asks us to protect something through the moments when the excitement has faded and the real work of sustaining it has arrived. It asks us to look at something that is working and resist the temptation to move on simply because something newer has appeared. It asks us to trust that depth, over time, produces something that breadth never can.
Time moves quickly. 19 years in the district teaches you that.
What it has also taught me is that the most meaningful things in a school system are almost never the newest things. They are the things someone refused to stop believing in.
To Diane, Amber, Erin, Sandra-Lynn, and everyone who has kept this work alive and growing: thank you for playing the long game.
The students in our schools are better for it.
The image at the top of this post was generated through AI. Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers (for our students this post would be a Yellow assignment – see link to explanation chart) as I edited and refined my thinking.
