JOURNAL OF TEACHING IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION. 1994.13.421-428 e 1994 HUMAN KINETICS PUBLISHERS. INC. Breaking Out: Codependency of High School Physical Education Mary O'Sullivan, Daryl Siedentop, and Deborah Tannehill The Ohio State University This project was an intensive study of 11 physical education teachers, their teaching, and their programs in contemporary high schools. The monograph attempted to describe, discuss, and understand perceptions and practices of these physical education teachers, their students, and parents in light of a contemporary analysis of physical education. The teachers in this study were chosen because they had good reputations among both their peers and the researchers as profes- sionals who cared what happened in their programs and were teachers who tried to provide a quality experience for their students. The contexts of these teachers differed significantly. With the exception of facilities, differences among these teachers' programs could not be described in terms of their suburban and urban locations. Nor were their differences based on whether they were male or female teachers or on whether they were coaches or noncoaches. Indeed, their concerns about teaching physical education, as well as their rewards from teaching, were more similar than different. The purpose of this article is to draw a number of conclusions about these high school physical education teachers and their work based on our thinking and reflecting on the findings of the articles in this monograph. These conclusions are presented using the six overriding research questions set forth at the outset of the study. We then present some implications for high school physical educa- tion, staff development, and physical education teacher education. Physical Educators' Sense of Their Work The 11 teachers in this study saw the major purpose of their high school physical education programs as exposing students to lifetime activities and fitness in the hope that they would continue these activities into their adult lives. Although the teachers clearly articulated this perspective to the researchers on several occasions, they never shared this view in any explicit way with students during their physical education lessons. Students' views of the purposes of physical education shared characteristics with their teacher's views. For many students, the best part of physical education was that it provided an opportunity to play several different physical activities. While most students believed physical education was about learning how to play team games, almost half the students did not think they were being taught how to do that. Though parents and teachers viewed fitness as a goal of physical education, the students did not. In some ways, the students we observed seemed 421