Promoting Achievement in School through Sport (PASS) is a project of the American Sports Institute, a nonprofit organization in Mill Valley, California. PASS is a high school curriculum for integrating sports and academics that helps students fulfill their potential and gives them an enriching educational experience.
The PASS program is entering its third year as a year-long elective class. Results of the program have been encouraging. PASS students' grades have improved. Parents note greater confidence, personal initiative, and self-discipline in their children. And one school's athletic director reports that students he thought would never again be eligible to play sports are back on the team.
PASS grounds itself in what program developers Joel and Susan Kirsch consider the self definitions, personal qualities, and skills requisite to success in sports and, in their view, in schoolwork as well. Essentially, students identify these characteristics and abilities, extend them, and then apply them to exceed their current achievement standards in school and in their chosen sport.
Many athletes already have these qualities and capabilities in good measure—thus, their relative success in athletics. They just may not have put a name to them or employed them in the classroom. And also, because these young people usually have lacked an explicit understanding that they possess at least some of these strengths—or even that these qualities are strengths—they haven't known they could work to enhance them.
The PASS curriculum has three major elements. First is an emphasis on students' concepts of themselves and their personal philosophy. Students focus on the kind of people they are, on the way they hold the meaning of their lives. In this regard, the program promotes arete ('are-uh-tay)—from the ancient Greeks—a view of the athlete that stresses excellence and self-transformation in body, mind, and spirit.
PASS students read and discuss articles and biographical materials on the concept of arete and engage in activities such as analyzing a "quote of the week" that pertains to it. Also, both orally and in writing, they reflect on their own perspective of themselves in relation to the ideal of arete, exploring the consequences of their current orientation and the vision of arete for their academic and athletic pursuits.
At the same time, students are engaged in the second element of the curriculum: They learn (or, again, in many cases, re-learn and for the first time focus on) what the program calls Fundamentals of Athletic Mastery (FAMs)—concentration, balance, relaxation, power, rhythm, flexibility, attitude, and instinct. These abilities will undergird students' work to improve their achievement in sports and in the classroom. They read, discuss, and write about articles on each of the FAMs. In addition, students actually experience the FAMs in a series of physical movement activities. They can then define and investigate these fundamentals from more than simple visual or auditory exposure to them.
Experience of these qualities adds to students' confidence, as they realize they can, in fact, act in this way, and as they recollect that indeed they have been this way in some part of their life. They are capable people. They just need to commit themselves to improving in school and on the field.
The third element involves each student's designing a personalized Academic and Athletic Project directed at improving both school and athletic performance. For example, a student might want to improve her grade point average from a 2.1 to 2.7, and improve her 100-meter time. Each student is helped by the instructor, other students, and perhaps other school professionals to develop a plan to accomplish the goals, to set up a system of self-monitoring and adjustment, and to define a means to assess results of the work.
The PASS class acts as a team, encouraging development and implementation of each student's project and viewing success for any class member as success for all. This teamwork gives a motivation to students who may feel more connected to and supported by athletic field peers than by classroom peers.
Through PASS's integrated studies process, the students develop lifelong skills in oral presentation, critical thinking and problem solving, planning and collaborative strategies, time management and personal problem resolution.
PASS provides an alternative to the traditional and often paternalistic tutor- and rules-centered approaches to improving athletes' academic performance. Instead, PASS focuses on creating personal responsibility, initiative, and effectiveness in athletes. The PASS orientation may have applicability to university academic support program for athletes in addition to being useful in secondary school.
Students like PASS. Perhaps one reason is that the program doesn't tell young people who love sport that they must turn away from athletics too well in school. Students do not have to choose between sport and schoolwork; rather, sport and schoolwork are seen as equally important. In fact, PASS encourages intense interest and engagement with sport because then sport involvement will better even as an exemplar or metaphor to guide the student's participation in school.
Coaches like PASS. The program sees improvement in athletic and academic performance as complementary activities and thus stresses both. To coaches, that dual emphasis offers the promise of eligibility, better grades, and higher graduation rates without players announcing that they will miss practice because, after all, "school comes first." And there is hope that coaches will have more motivated and proficient athletes and thereby win more games.
PASS's attention to self-definitions and personal philosophy affirms to the rest of us the importance of these factors. Many study skills courses, for example, try to teach note taking or problem solving to students whose orientation toward themselves and school inhibits them from ever using the material effectively. We are perhaps trying to motivate and engage young people whose values don't allow our instruction or assignments to make any sense or have any weight or salience.
PASS provides a new look at achievement skills. Them emphasis on what may seem to be exotic qualities—such as rhythm and balance—raises the question: What really accounts for success? And not just with students. We might also ask: What enables us to get things accomplished in our own lives? We may need to test the accepted wisdom about what contributes to positive results in life rather than accepting failure, turning to excuses or self-condemnation, or attributing blame or responsibility to others.
PASS reminds us that physical activity is a way to learn. Physical movement activities underscore the worth of kinesthetic experience. Despite the talk about learning styles, schools still predominantly focus on verbal abstractions. Some students learn best, however, by directly experiencing a phenomenon and then articulating its meaning. Likewise, some students learn best through doing.
Working directly with students' awareness, orientation, resolve, and efficacy, PASS may actually help improve schools. PASS helps young people more effectively take advantage of the school circumstance, whatever it happens to be. It doesn't tell student to wait for improvements in the school and its teachers before achieving academic success. It lets students in on the fact that other students, no better, brighter, more advantaged, or more entitled than they, are learning, growing and achieving satisfaction in school—and so can they.
This attitude toward the responsibility, and possibility, of students to make it good for themselves in their school subjects, along with the empowerment PASS processes engender, may point to useful additions in our attempts to improve the school context. It could be that efforts to improve schools have not paid greater dividends because we have not worked harder to change the way students, athletes or not, use what we have created.
PASS illustrates how other educators can learn from sport. We often assume that athletics and schooling are separate realms. Coaches, like teachers, have to deal with motivation, cooperation, and achievement. But coaches often approach these issues differently. Whereas the teachers' message is frequently, "We will teach you; just come to class and cooperate with what we have you do. We care about you and want you to learn," the message of coaches, and PASS, is this: "If you choose to work hard to develop yourself and become more productive, we will support you, and we know how to do that. We believe you can succeed if you give your best."
The distinction between those two messages, though it may seem minor, gets at the heart of the difference between the relationship of coaches and athletes and that of teachers and students. In athletics, the prime actor ins the athlete. Coaches are there and active, but the endeavor isn't so much about them, what they're doing, and what athletes think of them. There may be some of that but, by and large, you go to practice to play ball, get better at it, show your wares, get help from the coach, and support the team.
This is how the sport culture defines your participation. More than anything, athletics is about you, the athlete—how well you are doing, your commitment and drive, how effectively you meet the challenge. You step up to the plate or field the ground ball.
In contrast, in most classrooms, the prime actor is the teacher, talking away, asking questions, passing out copies of things, etc. Many students show up basically to see what the teacher has come up with for the day. The tacit understanding is that primary responsibility is with the teacher to induce learning.
Students often grudgingly do the teacher's bidding and windup with little more than a few bits of information and strong opinion about the teacher and the class. A main outcome of classroom culture is that the teacher strives harder and harder to instruct well, accommodate students and be ingratiating. Although there are "up" days, in the end, that effort is never quite good enough.
Overall, the analyses of sport/school comparisons may be profitable for all educators, not just those in physical education. This is not to equate sport and school contexts or to set up the sport circumstance or coaches as the ideal. It is simply to note that many students whom teachers can't get to do much of anything become prideful, responsible, self-directed, and accomplished right after the school day ends. We might pay a bit more attention to how that happens and not assume we already know.
PASS's focus on Greek traditions reminds us that despite our current tendency to relegate sport to extracurricular status, see it in the frame of big-time college athletics and commercial sport, or consider it a matter of health and fitness or simple diversion, there was a time when sport was an integral part of a liberal education and fundamental to the growth and expression of human beings. We would do well to reassert that centrality.
Robert Griffin is Associate Professor of Education, University of Vermont, Burlington. |
