Promoting Achievement in School through Sport (PASS) operates as an elective class that helps middle grades and high school students interested in sports do better both athletically and academically. PASS is in place in a total of 28 schools in the San Francisco, Chicago, and San Diego areas, and more schools plan to adopt the program in the future.
Anecdotal and hard evidence point to PASS’s success, particularly with minority students who have to this point comprised a majority of its participants. Data has been collected over a four-year period on PASS students in eight different schools, and comparisons with control groups revealed that PASS participants were more likely to show improved grades and retain, or regain, eligibility for sports participation (American Sports Institute 1995). What is particularly intriguing about PASS is that beyond what it teaches about improving the academic performance of athletes—a major concern in itself—it might well provide direction to teachers in regular classrooms.
A distinctive feature of the PASS program is that it does not tell its students to play down sports in favor of academics. For one thing, teachers who use PASS do not want to tell anyone to back off from something or do it less well, particularly an activity he or she loves and finds gratifying. In addition, and very important to how the program operates, PASS is grounded on the belief that increased—not decreased—emphasis on and attention paid to sports can, under the right circumstances, contribute to improved academic performance.
Thus, PASS says to youngsters: "Stay as involved in sports as you want, and get even better in your chosen sports; but at the same time learn how to use your investment and accomplishment in sports to improve your success in school." In line with this orientation, the program teaches its students to identify and develop the traits that make them and other athletes successful in sports and then helps them to apply this knowledge and capability consciously in the classroom and on the athletic field to increase their levels of accomplishment and satisfaction in both contexts.
To answer the question of what, beyond pure physical talent, accounts for success in sports, the developers of PASS have identified what they call the Fundamentals of Athletic Mastery: concentration, balance, relaxation, power, rhythm, flexibility, instinct, and attitude. Students read, discuss, write about, and make presentations on these eight fundamentals. The program has put together a collection of articles on each of them that provides a major source of student reading.
The reading on balance is typical in the way it uses the examples of prominent sports performers—in this case, Michael Jordan and Jerry Rice—to define and illustrate the value of this particular fundamental. Writing often takes the form of accounts of student attempts to implement a fundamental in their sport or in classroom work. The fundamentals pervade the PASS program; for example, student presentations are assessed with an evaluation form that directs attention to the speaker’s concentration, attitude, power, and so on.
An ingenious aspect of the PASS program is a series of physical movement activities that actually allow students to experience the fundamentals. These exercises, which are described in a manual given to instructors, are derived from a number of sources, including the martial art of aikido. Students participate in a physical activity and then put words to what they experienced and its meaning to them.
With the physical exercises, learnings have concrete, physical referents and do not remain simply abstract concepts. Thus, the PASS classroom may have a rather exotic appearance to an observer as students move about in dance-like ways in order to create an experience base for, by way of example, a consideration of rhythm. Giving impetus to all of these endeavors is a philosophical view derived from the ancient Greeks that stresses excellence in body, mind, and spirit.
PASS is grounded in the values and principles of the world of sport—its culture, ways, and wisdom—resulting in significant differences in approach between PASS and most other teaching. These differences may prove useful for educators in nonsport areas to contemplate. One key difference is that the school culture in recent years has stressed going to students, as it were. The press has been for teachers, and the school generally, to understand and accommodate students; to adjust to students’ histories, circumstances, issues, styles, needs, and preferences; and to be adaptive, flexible, and responsive to students (Stevenson 1992; Rose 1995). In contrast, the message that typically comes through to athletes from coaches and is supported by the overall ethos of the sports setting is: "We aren’t going to you; you are coming to us."
In sports, the coach is likely to hold up the ideal of the finest approximation of an undertaking, whether basketball, football, or volleyball, and challenge the participants to strive to match up to the way the game is played when it is played right. The messages goes something like this:
There is a way that good athletes go at it, and that is what is expected here—of every one of you. And you’re the ones who are going to do it, as individuals and as a team. You aren’t going to get away with showing up here every day to watch me coach and decide whether you find it interesting or boring. This is a place where I watch you to see what you can do and whether you have the drive to go beyond yourselves. I’m not promising it will always be fun, although I hope it is some of the time, or that you’ll always be successful and not have to experience failure, but if you give it 110 percent every practice and every game, it will turn out to be rewarding for you. You’ll be proud of yourselves, and I’ll be proud of you.
No matter what the activity in sports, the focus soon turns to the nature of the athlete as an individual and the nature of the athletes as a collective, as a team. The question quickly becomes, Do the athletes—not the coach—have what it takes to get the job done? The job has to be done. The game stays as it is, whether it is interesting or not, and regardless of how these particular athletes or the coach may feel about it. A group of athletes has the wherewithal to be successful at a certain level of effectiveness at the present time, and with the help of the coach they should continuously push themselves past this level of performance.
To be sure, the students who enroll in PASS find sports interesting and relevant, but according to PASS developers that is not why students are successful playing sports. They are successful athletes because they engage in sports in a particular way; they think and act in a manner that brings them accomplishment and satisfaction. A premise of PASS is that, if these young people would learn what that way is, they could perform the same way in school to learn more and get better grades. Thus, PASS does not ask the school to adapt its curriculum to the students’ immediate interests. Rather, PASS encourages the school to continue with its best course of studies and try to get these kids to go to school the same way good athletes play ball.
As in sports generally, PASS uses the body, integrated with the mind, as a vehicle for learning and self-transformation. For example, students toss 10 tennis balls into a container 10 feet away in 20 seconds in a concentrated, relaxed, and rhythmic way and then discuss what they learned from the experience. Students articulate the nature and importance of relaxation, concentration, and rhythm more precisely and see more clearly how systematic self-monitoring—attending carefully to one’s thoughts, mental states, emotions, kinesthetic experiences, actions, and the outcomes of one’s efforts—can be a rich source of self-awareness and personal improvement.
Even as good athletes review their own approaches and performances, students can learn to monitor their own study habits or test-taking strategies in order to improve performance in school. Teachers can develop other activities following this same basic approach to allow students to experience concepts, rather than only reading or hearing about them, as well as to teach students to be on their own case—not to wait around for teachers or the school to make them perform better.
The PASS approach turns many things around 180 degrees from how they are almost invariably done in schools. The conventional wisdom in education, for example, is to keep student evaluation a private matter among the teacher, student, and parents. Of course, assessment is a public affair in sports—you play the game on Friday night with the whole world watching. One day I observed a PASS teacher announce individual student grades in front of the whole class. Students congratulated and encouraged one another. This public assessment appeared to have a motivating effect on students, and no one seemed diminished or embarrassed under the strain.
Particularly significant for educators is the PASS developers’ contention that the eight fundamental attributes are fundamentals of academic as well as athletic mastery. It would undoubtedly be helpful to review and compare the fundamentals to the usual list of goal setting, problem solving, and study skills competencies one finds in education. The success of PASS programs raises the question of what is truly at the heart of mature engagement and achievement in sports or school or anywhere else.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking and potentially instructive of all of the aspects of the PASS orientation is the view of student engagement as a skill and not as an immutable characteristic of an external circumstance. PASS sees engagement as a capability that can be taught and learned and utilized right now in a student’s life. PASS underscores that for many youngsters it is not that they do not want to do well in science; rather, the problem is that they find science boring and irrelevant and they do not know what to do about it. These students are stuck, dependent upon the teacher’s ability or willingness to make science interesting or meaningful before they can move forward, accomplish something, and feel better about themselves.
What makes this orientation important is that the ability to engage when it is called for is an invaluable tool in constructing a productive and satisfying adult life. There are places for people who do not grow beyond the need to have a good time right now, and it is not the major leagues of society. Educators must think about how much their good faith attempts to make school interesting and relevant, modify assignments, nurture and care for students, and motivate them are unintentionally keeping these young people from hitting .300 in the game of life.
American Sports Institute. 1995. Promoting Achievement in School through Sport: Three-year impact study and summary report covering data from 1991-92, 1992-93, and 1993-94 school years. ERIC ED 382 587.
Rose, M. 1995. Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Stevenson, C. 1992. Teaching Ten to Fourteen Year Olds. While Plains, N.Y.: Longman.
Fourth-year data and further information on the PASS program can be obtained by contacting PASS developers Joel and Susan Kirsch, co-directors of the American Sports Institute, P.O. Box 1837, Mill Valley, CA 94942; telephone 415-383-5750.
Robert Griffin is Associate Professor of Education for The University of Vermont in Burlington. He is author of the forthcoming book, Sports in Children’s Lives: Success on the Field and in Life.
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