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Before listening to Diana Laufenberg’s TEDtalk, How to Learn? From Mistakes, I hadn’t really thought about how much differently athletics teaches than our academic cohorts. I’ve always been the flag-waving “we’re on the same side” person who believes in the value of sport and what it teaches.
Not that I’ve changed my opinion, I still believe in how awesome athletics is and I believe in its value as an educational collaborator with the academic side of the world, but now I see the biggest difference between the two and why we sometimes struggle with getting our athletes into an athletic frame of mind.
Academics focuses on perfection while athletics focuses on failure.
- Athletics isn’t a standardized test for which there is one correct answer…but that’s what academics celebrates.
- The goal of athletics isn’t to get one hundred percent, but that’s what our high-achieving students want to receive…on and off the court or field.
- Athletics isn’t about memorizing facts and reciting them, but understanding situations and responding appropriately to them.
Failure as part of the learning process.
- Did you know there are sports, like track and field for example, where you can win your event and still finish the day as a failure? The winning high jumper or pole vaulter is only the final person to fail if we look at the world through an academic lens. Through an athletic lens, they not only won, but perhaps challenged a previous personal best.
- I would guess in most of our gyms, we design practices around failure. We know certain drills will be very difficult, if not impossible, to complete correctly…yet we put the team through them anyway. Why? Because failure is part of the learning process.
- Imagine if teachers posted the results of each quiz and test online for everyone to see. How much more difficult would it be for students to excel? Yet, that’s what we do with athletics and I believe the accountability which stems from that public knowledge makes them mentally stronger than the average non-athlete. (Totally biased, I know.)
According to Laufenberg’s talk, there are three stages to creating an environment where failure isn’t seen as awful. I’d hazard a guess that lots of us are doing these things already.
- Experiential learning. Give your athletes the opportunity to experience every possible scenario in order to increase their sports IQ. This is a novel idea on the academic side, but it’s what we’ve been doing for years.
- Student voice. As we work on their sports IQ, we have to remember that the goal of our practices isn’t to do all of the thinking for them. Our goal should be to guide them so that when they’re in game situations, they know what to do. They won’t succeed at this task if we don’t give them a little room to be innovative in practice.
- Embrace failure. “Being innovative” is a really nice way of saying screwing things up until they finally figure it out. Of course, the coach is there for teaching and guiding, but how will my players know how to succeed if I never let them struggle and fail in practice. Maybe when left to her own devices, my setter comes up with an awful game plan for her hitters. What better place for that to happen than in the safety of our gym?
I hope you have a chance to check out the video, it opened my eyes to the stark differences in teaching methods between athletics and academics. Though many schools are moving to our side of the fence in terms of how to teach effectively.
