TPSR Levels Of Responsibility Posters

The statement “PE helps students develop personal responsibility” is incomplete.

While it is true that physical activity provides an effective venue for teaching students how to develop personal and social responsibility, that kind of transformation doesn’t just happen on its own.

To achieve the results you’re seeking, consider taking a models-based approach.

Pedagogical models – frameworks that help guide the planning, instruction, structure, and learning within a lesson or unit – are proven to support learning across multiple domains.

With a growing body of evidence to support its validity and effectiveness, the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model is considered one of the best ways to promote responsibility, values, and life skills in physical activity settings (including physical education).

Don Hellison first developed the Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR) model in the 1970s.

At the time, Hellison was working with underserved students in urban high schools. He wanted to develop a program that would help these kids take responsibility for their development and support the well-being of others.

From his efforts, the TPSR model was born.

The Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility model’s purpose is to help youth learn how to take responsibility for their well-being and development, to be able to navigate and live in social situations in healthy ways, and to be caring and compassionate towards others.

The model is built around five cumulative levels of responsibility:

🤝 Level One: Respect for the rights and feelings of others (Respecting Other),

💪 Level Two: Effort and cooperation (Effort & Cooperation),

🧭 Level Three: Self-direction (Self-Direction),

❤️ Level Four: Helping others and leadership (Caring & Leadership),

🚀 Level Five: Transfer outside of the gym (Transfer).

Additionally, TPSR focuses on four core themes: strong teacher-student relationships, student empowerment, integrating responsibility into physical activity, promoting transfer of responsibility.

By learning more about how the TPSR model can help guide your teaching, you can take a more intentional approach to teaching personal and social responsibility in physical education.

This means that you can stop crossing your fingers and start seeing real results in your lessons.

This set of four TSPR Levels of Responsibility Posters was designed to help represent the levels of responsibility and break each level down into its components for both students and teachers.

Each poster features the level’s title, a brief description of that level, and three “look fors” (i.e. components). The idea is to have the posters displayed in your gym in a place where students can see them as you engage in awareness talks or invite students to self-reflect on their level of responsibility throughout the lesson.

You may have noticed is that there are five levels of responsibility but only four posters. That’s because the idea of the fifth level is to transfer everything you have learned along the way to situations outside of the gym. Instead of making a fifth poster, I decided to make Level Five a part of each poster for the four first levels. My hope is that this promotes the idea of transfer throughout the learning process, which is one of the core themes of the model anyway.

🥳 Happy Teaching!