Big lessons from sport
Sports matter in schools, as a way to provide all students with opportunities not only to succeed, but also to learn. Clint Perrett explains. Sport and competition go hand in hand, mostly because there’s usually a clear winner and loser, although for many who participate in sports, the competitive aspect can often be with oneself, seeking to achieve a personal best, or with similar athletes, such as in para-sport classifications. When Benjamin Franklin in 1789 noted that, ‘In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes,’ he could have added, ‘And competition and failure.’
Success and failure is a part of learning
There’s a tendency in education, from time to time, to think that failure hinders learning. Actually, the opposite is true. Consider the mistakes that we, and our students, make when we are learning and consolidating a skill. We learn both from the successful and the unsuccessful attempt. According to Associate Professor Dave Freyberg, from Stanford University’s Faculty of Civil and Environmental Engineering, ‘Failure is an integral part of the learning process – or should be – just as failure is an essential component of engineering. Engineers learn how to use failure as part of the design process,’ Freyberg said in his 2002 Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching Lecture. ‘We don't want to have dams and bridges that fail… but failure happens. That's why we have R&D (research and development). The “D” part is recognition that we will have failure.’
Freyberg’s point is that engineers calculate, design and test to failure in a safe environment so that the dams and bridges that are finally built don’t fail is an important one, and that’s where students can learn some big lessons from sport.
The experience of competition in sport prepares our students for the realities of life, where it’s inevitable that at some point they’re going to be on the losing side. Learning to cope with the emotion of losing, and possibly using these emotions to motivate their efforts to improve, are crucial to learning and should be embraced.
Off the playing field, research by Freyberg’s Stanford University colleague Professor Carol Dweck – the Carol Dweck of ‘growth mindset’ fame – from Stanford’s Graduate School of Education has revealed that praising students for their ability, rather than effort, taught them a fixed mindset, leading them to avoid problems that they might fail to solve but from which they could learn. Better, says Dweck, to have a growth mindset. As she put it in Mindset, ‘(A growth mindset is one in which) the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.’ Students with a growth mindset, Dweck says, show more grit, which is as important to academic success as is ability.
Learning from winning and losing
Back in the sporting realm, our students learn plenty from winning and losing in a safe learning environment, developing both a growth mindset – to take the hand they’re dealt as the starting point for development – and grit – the determination and passion that enables them to persevere in pursuit of long-term goals.
While winning in sport is sometimes absolute – Usain Bolt really is the fastest sprinter in the 100m with a world record time of 9.58 seconds – most winning in sport is relative. Because most school sporting competition is fragmented by school sports associations and divisions within these associations, and by regional geography and state, there are many opportunities for students to succeed. Sporting success can result in our students feeling good about themselves. In education, we talk about developing students’ self-concept – their beliefs about themselves, including their evaluation of their physical and mental attributes, and strengths and weaknesses – and self-efficacy – their belief that they can execute certain behaviours and reach certain goals. Success in sport helps our students to develop their self-concept and self-efficacy, especially if we focus our feedback to them on their effort rather than their ability.
Sporting success, but also failure, can also help students to set achievable goals and identify appropriate next steps. When students understand how to set and achieve goals, and the link between the discipline and hard work of training and performance, this can also transfer to their studies.
Sporting successes and failures also give students lots of opportunities to think strategically, and adapt tactically, again in a safe environment. Just about every sport requires an athlete to break the event down into more solvable problems, while reading opposition strategy, and adapting tactics, all within the defined rules of the game. Sport also gives students the opportunity to try strategies and tactics repeatedly. In many ways, sport in schools, like engineering, is an opportunity to test our approach in an environment of ‘safe failure’. Best of all, sport enables students to learn by doing, and adapt and apply their sporting experiences to other aspects of their lives. And when our focus is on effort rather than ability, sport also promotes a growth mindset, where losing a match or setting the high jump bar at 1.60m and failing to clear it is still something from which our students can learn – and succeed on a subsequent attempt, as Dana Pjanic did in clearing 1.61m in the Under 14 high jump at the APS Athletics Championships in 2012.
Learning teamwork
Some of the clear benefits of being part of a team that competes regularly are social bonding and a sense of belonging, with an effect on individual students’ self-concept and self-efficacy. Collaboration and responding tactically to the actions of team mates, taking responsibility, implementing coaching strategies and responding tactically to opposition strategies, all play out in a sporting context.
At Wesley College, sport is fundamentally a means to an end. It gives our students so many opportunities to learn. For some it may be an end in itself, but at the end of the day we want our students to apply what they learn in one area to other areas of their lives, preparing them for the challenges that lie ahead.
