The Value Add of Coaches as Educators

I love going to conferences. It’s easy to feel bogged down in work or stuck on what to write / how to write, but then I go to a conference and it’s simply rejuvenating. 

As I head into day 2, what’s really sticking with me from yesterday is the morning keynote. It might have not been as interactive or imaginative as say the workshop on designing the future of education while role playing as a civilization on Mars in 2096, but the message really resonated with me because the speaker wasn’t originally in the education space at all, she started as a soccer coach. 

Luma Mufleh is the founder of Fugees Family, a non profit advancing educational justice for refugee and immigrant youth. Her journey in this space started when she joined a group of refugee kids playing soccer in the community. After a few weeks playing with the kids she helped them start an official team. Then that team continued to grow and as she learned about their stories and challenges in an education system that was failing them, she decided to open up a school. 

This is just a summarized snippet of Luma’s story, but my take away was how she talked about her journey from coach to educator. She talked about how people didn’t always trust or respect her because she didn’t have a teaching background. Yet as a coach she had an incredible understanding of the importance of teamwork, belonging, overcoming challenges, and pushing past limits.

I’ve been coaching gymnastics since I was 10 years old and still am now almost 15 years later. Yet when I talk about my experience in the education space, my work as a gymnastics coach usually only comes up as an after thought or a fun fact. Hearing Luma talk about her work as a coach was a reminder to me that my experience as a coach is so much more than just a fun fact. 

I practice curriculum building when I create my warm ups and assignment charts and personalize them to meet the different needs of each athlete. I am a mentor and guidance councilor when I notice a kid is having an off day and take them aside to discover they’ve been getting bullied at school and don’t have anyone to talk to about it. I assess and give feedback daily when seeing gymnasts perform routines at practice and prepare them for their competitions. I practice learner-centered pedagogy when I organize moments for gymnasts to practice goal setting and opportunities for providing input on things like their summer training schedule and brainstorming floor music. I even help kids with their basic reading and math skills when we have kids who haven’t learned to read that are trying to sound out the words on the assignment board for the day or kids who haven’t learned about decimals trying to add up their all around score at a competition. 

Coaches might not be traditional teachers, but they are educators. And coaches have more autonomy than the average teacher, so they have been able to prototype and pilot ideas for creating competency based, personalized, open walled learning for decades; this could be a game changing added value perspective to any team working to transform education. 

I’m excited for a world where we think more in the mindset of ecosystems of learning and coaches can be brought into the educator space as equally valued partners in the process of developing youth. 

The Evolution of an Idea

As a follow up to last night, where I choose to read old blog posts instead of writing a long new post, it seemed only right to reflect today on what I read.

One of the posts I revisited I call “The Gymnastics Theory.” I wrote this post back in 2014 but the concept of how the future of education could be influenced by the world of competitive gymnastics is something I frequently come back to. It was interesting to read this post that outlined some of my original thoughts on the topic, and because it’s a topic that comes up often for me I thought it would be good to reflect on what’s changed since my 2014 version of this theory.

Since 2014 I’ve definitely built on the theory quite a bit. In particular, a big difference is simply in my terminology. In this post from 2014, I talk about learning being “skill-based” and I’ve now realized this was my simplified way of saying that gymnastics is an example of an already existing, successful model of systemic competency-based learning. In fact, the main reason The Gymnastics Theory continues to come up for me is because I’ve found that it’s a helpful example when trying to explain what competency-based learning could look like. At a few conferences now, I’ve been given feedback that even for someone with practically no understanding of gymnastics, (ie. you maybe watch it in the Olympics and that’s about it) this was an easy to understand example for contextualizing competency-based learning for people just learning about this concept.

Furthermore, I’ve done a lot more thought into the division of groups in gymnastics versus traditional schools. In my old post, I simply mention how gymnastics levels are not determined by age and how practice groups may not be the same as competition groups because by practicing with levels above and below you there are more opportunities for peer-peer mentorship and leadership. All of these facts are still very true and relevant, but now I’ve taken this a bit deeper and started to imagine how the entire structure of gymnastics levels and transitioning between levels works and how it’s comparable with education.

I don’t want to go too in-depth into this right now, maybe I’ll finally get around to making a more official written update on my entire theory sometime soon… but for now, I want to focus big picture on what’s changed not all the specifics of my thinking. The summarized idea though is that gymnastics actually has two somewhat parallel tracks that gymnast can take depending on their needs/what they hope to get out of the sport, and between the two tracks there are three different types of levels designed to more efficiently test skill proficiency at different points in a gymnast career. I’ve done a lot of imagining about what it might look like if education followed a similar structure.

Finally, I think the biggest change in my thinking in my commentary on school not being a competition. Now that I’ve had 6 more years being in school and gone through the college process, I totally disagree with 2014 Anya. School is a competition. It might not be advertised that way, and we might even be explicitly told sometimes to not think of it that way, but at the end of the day, we’re always competing. This semester even, my Marketing 101 professor spent the first 10 minutes of class emphasizing how we are always competing for grades, jobs, promotions, etc so we might as well get in that mindset now and be ready to fight for the win. People are always being compared to others because everyone wants the best candidates for their team. School might not have formal competition events for assessment purposes, but it’s definitely a competitive atmosphere. I don’t think that has to be a bad thing, personally, I find competitions to sometimes be a great motivator, but it has to be healthy competition in order to be motivating and that’s something that school isn’t always great about creating the environment for. Again, I’ve done a lot more thinking in the realm of what “healthy school competition” looks like, but my thoughts are not fully formed yet so that’s as much as I’ll say for now.

Overall, I’m very amused by how much has grown and changed with my thinking since this original idea came about in 2014. These two worlds of gymnastics and education are both very close to me and it’s always fun to make connections between the two. Maybe re-reading this old post is the prompt I’ve been waiting for to finally attempt writing out all of my thoughts on the topic – and figure out a more articulate way to write them, because I’m sure this post is kind of funky just due to the fact that I’ve been thinking about this concept for so long that it’s getting all jumbled trying to come out of my head now.

(I drafted about three more paragraphs on my “summarized” version of the levels structure description alone before realizing that was way too much for this post… so trust me when I say there is lot’s more. I mean I didn’t even mention the scoring system.)

Now Is The Time

Today I got to partake in a video meeting with some educators from across the US and it was really great just to hear everyone’s stories about how their schools are dealing with the current changes.

One of the most inspiring parts about the conversation was how optimistic people were in light of everything happening.

This is the greatest disruption to our education system since the great depression. Disruption means there will be long term changes to life as we know it.

There is no question that when we get through this crisis things will be different. Change is inevitable. So the question is, what do we want that change to look like? 

Is this pandemic going to scare us backwards in an effort to make things “easier” or are we going to be inspired to charge forwards into opportunity-filled new beginnings?

Moving to distance learning has lots of challenges. To face these challenges it’s a lot easier for teachers and students both to simply watch some pre-recorded lectures and then take some online multiple-choice tests or write a 5 paragraph essay than it is to try and create opportunities for group discussions and collaborative projects compatible to a virtual environment. And honestly, with all the other stressors in life right now, making one part of life “easy” is really tempting.

But when students are sitting at home on their couch, why are they going to choose to watch a 2-hour lecture on the Pythagorean theorem as opposed to watching Mean Girls on Netflix? What’s going to motivate learners to take multiple-choice quizzes about the French Revolution instead of BuzzFeed quizzes that tell you which Disney character you are? How are we going to convince learners to write essays on Hamlet instead of Instagram posts about missing their friends?

If school isn’t engaging than learners will find something else to do that is.

Traditional schooling is not engaging.

It’s never fun to be “talked at” for hours on end, but it’s especially not fun when you’re sitting at your desk at home all alone in your room and staring at a computer screen. It’s mentally exhausting. And we already know multiple-choices tests are not indicative of actual learning.

Now more than ever, it is essential for education to be learner-centered.

We should teach lessons that are competency-based because while we can’t proctor tests as effectively online we can have virtual presentations that assess actual understanding and mastery of knowledge.

We have to find ways to engage young learners through personalized, relevant, and contextualized lessons or they just won’t log in to class.

We must encourage learner agency as a tool for staying mentally healthy and motivated to learn, explore, and create even while stuck inside.

We have to understand that learning is open-walled because we don’t know how long we will be out of our traditional classroom so we need to convince entire families that the absence of a room doesn’t mean the absence of learning.

And most importantly, while physically we might be social distancing, we need to ensure that mentally we are remaining socially embedded because a learner without a community is lost and we have enough loss in the world right now.

 

The world is changing. Education has to change too. While it might be “easier”, in the sense of having less thought work to do, we can’t rely on traditional methods to teach learners while they are at home with myriad other factors vying for their attention. Kids have to want to “go” to school because, in a way like never before, it’s really easy for them to choose not to. There aren’t many consequences to convince them otherwise so we have to use other methods to keep kids learning.

So how might we convince learners to want to “go” to school?

I propose that one answer is that schools need to be learner-centered. And maybe, just maybe, the greater impacts of learner-centered education will be so evident that we’ll be encouraged to continue teaching in a learner-centered paradigm even when we get to go back to our school buildings. So if you’re not already doing it, now is the time for learner-centered education. Now is the time to make sure we are being competency-based, teaching personalized, relevant, and contextualized lessons, encouraging learner agency, embracing open-walled learning environments, and remaining socially embedded even while distant.

There is no question that when we get through this crisis things will be different. Change is inevitable. So the question is, what do we want that change to look like? 

Working Hard

I’ve written a lot about gymnastics this weekend, but honestly, it’s been all I’ve done the past few days. I literally got up this morning at 6:15am to get to our state competition this morning and only got home at 8pm.

But it was totally worth it because all of our girls qualified for regionals!!!!! I’m so glad I got to be there today during everyone’s best competition of the season!

Gymnastics teaches a lot of life lessons, but one of my favorites is when our younger girls experience how hard work pays off.

The Gymnastics Theory

Not much has been happening today besides crunch time for party preparation. But this is a post I’ve been working on in segments for a while and finally am revealing it.

(This is not the first time that I have thought about this, the theory has been a work in progress for close to a year now, so I apologize in advanced for the length.)

(My beginning gymnastics competition days.)

I’ve noticed that school is a lot like gymnastics. You have coaches that instruct the students on how to properly do skills. The skills are taught by breaking them apart segment by segment and practicing these parts before putting them all together. There are different levels that divide the students based off of what skills they know. Then from time to time there are showcases where the students demonstrate their ability to perform different skills, and they are given a score based on how well they demonstrate the skills. (This also works for almost every sport, but gymnastics is what I can most easily relate to since I do and coach it.)

However, there are a few things that are different about school and gymnastics.

1. Gymnastics levels are not divided by age.
2. The different levels will also practice together at times.
3. And finally, it is a competition.

This post is about my theory of having schools incorporate more of these elements of gymnastics into the school program. I know there will be flaws in this plan, but for the remainder of the post keep an open mind and imagine…

 

 

In gymnastics once you have a certain amount of skills, and you get an all around score of at least 31 out of 40 on your current level (there are 10 possible points on each event, so this is about three 8s and one 7, which would be like a C in school terms), then you can move to the next level as long as the gym you go to allows it.

So what if school was truly skill based? School would still have a minimum age, but like gymnastics you can start at any time and your age does not determine your “level” (grade). Let’s just face it, some kids mature faster than others, so instead of holding kids back or trying to move kids ahead, just let them move at their own pace. Requirements can be set for each grade and when those requirements are passed students move on to the next grade.

 

Also in gymnastics, fall is just practice, the competition season where you can score out of a level doesn’t happen until the winter and a little in the spring.

During these times there are certain basics that everyone knows which everyone will work on. Then the more advanced girls might just practice a higher version of the same skill. For example if you are on team you can definitely do a handstand, but when you get more advanced you can work on a handstand full turn. There is also conditioning which makes you stronger that everyone can do together.

Working with different levels gives the lower level gymnasts something to  look up to, and makes their goals really visual. The upper level gymnasts then have to be more mature and focused so they can be good leaders. Plus working with different levels gives everyone the opportunity to stay connected as a team. It is the reminder that says, “While it might be an individual sport during competitions, you still need people by your side to help you through it.”

I think school could do a better job at mixing grade levels. I think working with kids not your age can really help bring in a mixed amount of perspectives. Younger kids also tend to be more free with their opinions. If they don’t like something, they will tell you without hesitation because they wouldn’t think of a reason to hesitate. Many people also think that younger kids are more creative, I think this may be because they aren’t afraid of failing (yet) and will say anything that comes to mind; something older kids could learn from. Also, like gymnastics, the older kids have to learn to be good role models and also practice being a mentor and facilitator for younger kids.

 

Possibly the biggest difference between school and gymnastics is that unlike school, gymnastics is a competition. It is natural instinct to want to be the best, but to get there you have to work for it. I love competition, and I think a good little, healthy competition can really make you work harder.

This last idea would probably be the hardest to incorporate into school because not everyone enjoys competition.  My friends and I can get really competitive during school just because it gives us something to work for, and makes the work a little more entertaining. However, maybe there is a way to encourage the hard work ethic through competition without making it too overbearing of a goal.

If school was truely project based as mentioned above, there would need to be a time for presentations. What if this was set up somewhere between an expo and a science fair.  Everyone would have their projects on display, but at the end of the day, certain groups were picked as the “winners” with maybe some sort of prize to show their accomplishment. (Probably a different name then “winners” though. Maybe something along the lines of “distinguished”. )  Maybe along the way there were even little competitions that were like challenges to learn a new helpful skill towards your end project.

This would just add another element of a goal. Some groups or individuals might not focus on wanting to “win” because they don’t think like that. But especially for people that play sports, I think this extra element of a competition could help motivate them.

 

 

A gym is just a school for gymnasts, so why is it crazy for a school for students to resemble it? The goal for both is to encourage kids to learn and grow in what they are passionate about. So maybe school can pick up some techniques from coaching gymnastics, like being skill based, mixing ages and levels, and being motivated by a little, healthy competition.

(Doing gymnastics in my school uniform.)