THE OTHER CLASSROOM

SPORTS AS THE NEW EDUATIONAL PLATFORM

JEFFREY PRATT BEEDY ED.D

“Every school serious about character education should have PLUS in their toolbox.”

Dr. Lickona Educating for Character

We learn in many ways--a truism, of course, and yet many of us, alas, forget the ironic confines of our educational background: the way we were persuaded that the acquisition of knowledge began and ended in the classroom, or on occasion, the reading room of a library. All the time, however, we are potential teachers of one another, and for our children especially, an athletic game can be an occasion for many lessons indeed--emotional and moral, and too, cognitive of factual. Those of us who were active during our high school and college years in a particular sport well remember those moments when something was said or done that lived long and hard in our memories; a gesture, a nod, and effort of one kind or another, a remark—and suddenly a new sense of things, an awareness of this or that, heretofore absent.

Pulitzer Prize Winner Dr. Robert Coles write about Jeff Beedy’s PLUS

Forward

In the northern Marsabit County in Kenya Fatuma Abdulkadir, Director of Horn Of Africa

Development Initiative uses local children’s passion for street football to spark awareness of

violence to women. In the rolling fields of New Jersey, Positive Learning Using Sports (PLUS)

uses life sports such as golf, fly fishing, tennis, and skiing to understand their history in sport and

empower girls to be leaders. In the town of Galkayo, Somalia, Jeffrey Asoro, uses soccer as way

to teach courtesy to children who witnessed decades of violence and bloodshed in their

communities. Women Win, a global sport-based organization for women’s rights, educates

adolescent girls on sexual and reproductive health and gender and economic balance through

sports. Nolwazi Makhuluphala, a counselor for Waves of Change, turned to surfing as a way to

deter boys from entering violent gangs in South Africa. On the island of Cyprus, the Olympic

Doves Movement employs the neutral medium of sports to bring the Cypriots children together to

heal the divide and conflict experienced by their parents over the past four decades. At St.

Christopher School for the Deaf in Jamacia, Nick Roquemore empowers deaf students to

experience the world and to develop life skills they never dreamed possible through sports.

These are just a few of the many stories from around the world using sports for the betterment of

children. School is not the only place children learn. Leaders from around the globe are looking

for meaningful ways to connect around issues of self-respect, violence, community, health,

leadership, and literacy. The list goes on and on. What the Other Classroom brings to the

forefront is that the school is not the only place children learn. In fact, the argument can be made

that school is not the best platform to teach what youth leaders are calling 21st century goals such

as collaboration and the ability to work successfully in a team-based setting.

Children learn best when they passionate, engaged, and having fun. This is not a new idea. What

is new is that these new initiatives are intentional in design. These innovative sport-based

programs are designed with a specific goal of teaching children something they need in their life.

No different than teaching math to third graders or geometry to high school students. The idea

behind sport-based education is that leaders are now using sports as platform to teach targeted

skills such as collaboration. These new programs are not leaving the outcome goal to chance.

Sport-based programs have a philosophy, pedagogy, and curriculum that are aligned with

relevant research on child development. The goals may vary from country to country but the idea

of using sports as a platform for education is the common thread. The coaches are trained

teachers and counselors. The children’s passion for sports is the draw. Sports are the platform.

The key for all programs is the design is intentional. Simply rolling out the ball and expecting

something magical will occur and children will learn how to collaborate, persist in the face of

difficulties or become a self-advocate is wishful thinking. Up to now the common saying has

been “Sports build character.” This saying fuels many a debate with one side stating that sports

are bad and teach violence and cheating and the other side saying that sports are good and teach

important skills such as loyalty and teamwork. The Other Classroom is the first comprehensive

effort in positioning sports as a natural and potentially powerful platform to reach and teach

children around the world. The key is positive intentionality.

The idea of sports as an educational medium is catching on around the world. Global sport-based

organizations such as The Magic Bus in India and Women Win in Africa turn to football (soccer)

as a way to address health and safety issues with children who live in danger every day. Children

are drawn to activities they enjoy. For many, sports provide a new opportunity for hope and an

opportunity to live a better life. In poorer countries like India, Brazil and Africa, sports are

emerging as a new potentially powerful medium for education.

Focusing on the country of South Africa, there has also been a distinct shift in the positioning of sport in the overarching societal and cultural norms. South Africa has one of the highest crime rates in the world,6 low life expectancies, and unemployment rates as high as 75% in some communities.7 

Journal of Sport Development Vol 1. Issue 2. December 2013.

The main idea behind this new educational movement and this book is that sports can be

intentionally designed to help children develop the skills that lead to a better a life. On a larger

scale, sports can also help communities build a better future by providing hope and education to

the next generation. The Journal of Sport Development goes on to suggest, “With these complex

problems in mind, the government began to believe that sport could serve as a developmental

tool for the individuals residing in these underserved communities, leading to stronger

communities with healthier social, political, and economic environments.”

It is true that what is important may differ from country to country. For some children the

simple joy of playing may be a worthwhile goal. For others, learning how to work on a team or

turn away from destructive gangs may be worth goals. Tony Wagner, the author of Creating

Innovators, suggests that “work, learning, and citizenship in the 21st century demand that we all

know how to think—to reason, analyze, weigh evidence, problem solve. These are no longer

skills that only the elites in a society must master; they are essential survival skills for all of us.”

What makes this story compelling is that so many children around the world love to play sports.

Passion and fun attract the children to programs. Participation and intrinsic motivation are key to

hope and development. Whatever the desired outcome, the goal of this book is to explore how

we can better use sports to intentionally teach skills that will lead children to living happy, safe,

and productive lives.

Why I wrote this book

Many children around the world, especially in low-income areas, do not have access to

opportunities to develop the social and psychological skills to live happy, safe and productive

lives. Some children are fortunate to have the opportunity to go to good schools, live in vibrant

communities, and play in organized youth activities. For these children, if designed with

development in mind, sports can offer a meaningful way to reach many children. For many other

children living in poverty around the world they may never kick a soccer ball or throw a

baseball. And if they do happen to play in a pick up game what they learn may or may not be

positive. The goal of this book is to provide community leaders with access to how to best use

sports to teach what is important.

As an athlete, researcher, coach, and leader of schools, I know we can better use this other

classroom to reach and teach children. Some youth organizations are using sports to reach

children around issues of health, bullying and academic skills. Global sport-based organizations

such as Magic Bus, Sport and Development, PLUS, and First Tee recognize that schools are not

the only place to teach and learn. The premise of this book is simply that if we intentionally

design sports to introduce skills such as teamwork, responsibility, and critical thinking into our

children’s sport experience we can make a difference. As the book proceeds we will examine just

how this can happen.

How I collected data for this book

For the better part of three decades, I have been intrigued with how children experience the

world. I have listened to what children think and feel about playing sports. I have spent time as a

researcher examining how the theories of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol Gilligan,

Robert Selman, Howard Gardner, Maria Montessori and others can shed light on how to better

organize children’s sports. This book urges all of us to reexamine how sports can be reimagined

to promote what we all believe to be important.

I have used my personal experience as an athlete, teacher, coach, researcher, and headmaster to

collect data about the role of sports in children’s lives. I have sprinkled stories of my experience

as a coach, educator and headmaster to highlight research and best practices in child

development and children’s sports. I have turned to relevant research to support some of these

antidotal stories. My doctorate work at Harvard focused on the theories of child development

championed by the some the renowned child psychologists including Lawrence Kohlberg, Carol

Gilligan, Robert Selman, and Sesame Street founder Gerald Lesser provides the backbone of the

book. My research was titled, Understanding the Interpersonal World of Youth Sports and it

examined what children think about sports, winning and losing and the role the coach plays in

the process.

After Harvard, I created the Positive Learning Using Sports model based on my research on the

role of sports in children development. Each summer for nearly 20 years, the PLUS camp at

Milton Academy in Massachusetts employed the PLUS model. PLUS programs have been

implemented around the world including summer camps, after school programs, and competitive

sports. I have collected stories from these programs in Cyprus, South Korea, Africa, and

throughout the United States.

I have studied some of the best sport-based programs around the world including First Tee,

Magic Bus, Sport for Development and Peace, Women Win, The Right to Play, and Harlem RBI.

These programs are relatively new and employ some of the best methods to promote outcome

goals such as respect, health, literature, teamwork, and courtesy.

As the leader of a Montessori school in Alabama, I examined how Maria Montessori’s principles

of child development help to shape a positive learning environment. I questioned how these

principles might be applied to children sports. How can the sport environment teach important

life skills? I studied the works of Daniel Coyle, Daniel Pink, and Malcolm Gladwell with the

goal of blending their work into better understanding children’s sports and the new field of sport-

based education.

Use of real stories to support theories

To illustrate how the theories of how children learn play out in the context of sports, I have

employed real stories that I have witnessed over the years as a coach and teacher. This approach

employs what Lawrence Kohlberg referred to as bootstrapping where research informs practice

and practice informs research. For example, one of Maria Montessori’s principles suggests that a

“prepared environment” sets the child up for natural learning. To support this educational

principle, this book offers stories how a prepared environment in sports, such as offering warm-

up and cool-down meetings directly before and after games, promotes the learning of teamwork

during a soccer match. This bootstrapping method provides an opportunity to test principles in

practice and suggest ways theories of child development can enhance the teaching and learning

process in youth sports.

What I hope this book does

The goal of this book is to illustrate how sports can be intentionally designed to teach critical

skills. I have drawn upon children’s stories, research on education and child development, sport-

based programs, and my experience as a global leader of schools and youth programs. I have

tried to make the book make sense both locally and globally. The lessons learned by rural

African children, for example, may be different than the skills learned in a wealthy suburb of

Boston, necessitating customization for the culture and teaching in a way that makes sense for

where the children live. Sports can provide a forum to widen the spectrum of learning and show

children how these skills are connected to the world outside their homes. This book views the

idea of teaching culturally relevant skills as important and good, while at the same time

recognizing that the children will grow up in a global world and may someday need to transfer

these skills to a larger context.

How to use this book

I have designed this book to be simple. If the reader wants to explore the concepts in more depth

I have included hyperlinks to articles and programs that provide more detail and depth. The goal

of this book is to be a guidebook to link the reader to relevant research and curriculum exercises.

One of the major research sources will be New Science of Sport-based Education curriculum

found on www.positivelearninguingsports.com. This guidebook is written with simple language

and with goal of providing access to the new field of sport-based education. I have used

everyday real stories that we all experience and connect the reader to current research and best

practices in the field.

Sports as a Twenty-First Century Classroom

Using sports to build character is, of course, nothing new. Sports have been used to teach

children survival skills since time immemorial. One of the purposes of the game that would

become lacrosse, for example, was to toughen young Native Americans for combat. More

recently, in the 19th century, the Duke of Wellington credited the playing fields of Eton for

Britain’s crucial victory at Waterloo: “There grows the stuff,” he said, “that won Waterloo.” The

settlement houses of Chicago in the late 19th century offered sports programs for both boys and

girls, and futsal long has been viewed as a path out of the slums of Brazil. Clearly, sports always

have been seen as more than just children’s games.

However, combining youth development research with sports-based curriculums is a

recent—and welcome—movement. Integral to this innovative approach is the intentional design

of outcome goals in sports programs. Also crucial is the recognition that education, especially for

21st-century skills, does not end at the schoolhouse door. Via intentional design, sports can

evolve into classrooms comparable to their academic peers.

It is true that sports do not automatically develop leaders. Nor do they turn children into

win-at-all-costs cheats. But they can profoundly affect children, and, if we want sports to teach

the skills for the 21st century, they need to be structured intentionally, as academic classrooms

are, by incorporating the same skills and pedagogies that are prevalent in the 21st-century

education movement. To achieve this end, we must rethink and reconstruct the fundamental

fabric of children’s games and youth sports programs.

What do we want sports to teach?

Clearly, sports can be used to transmit social values. An intentionally designed program

can, in fact, instill the social values and skills that sports have long been said to foster, such as

leadership and hard work. But they also can transmit values not traditionally associated with

sports. For example, coaches—who often can reach seemingly unreachable children—can be

trained on AIDS and health education and teach their players about the importance of healthy

choices.

Proficiency in social and academic skills does not guarantee success, however defined, in

life. Recognizing this, there is a movement in education today that focuses on what are

popularly known as “21st-century education skills.” Embedded in this movement is the idea that

the world has changed, and children need an updated set of skills, not only to compete in this

new world, but sometimes just to survive. The skills needed in 21st-century communities and

workplaces—collaboration, critical thinking, and problem solving, to name a few—have not

traditionally been taught in schools. Youth sports programs, properly designed, can serve as 21st-

century classrooms to help bridge the gap between the skills learned in school and the skills

needed in the larger world. If children learn how to work and play better together and solve

issues of crisis they can lead a better life.

Over the past decade, programs that use sports to teach skills have proliferated. Global

sports-based programs such as First Tee, Women Win, Sports Without Boarders, The Right to

Play, Magic Bus, Harlem RBI, SOS, and PLUS Global are using sports successfully to better the

lives of children and producing concrete results. Essential to the effectiveness of these programs

is the developers’ understanding that, in order to make a positive difference and to provide

children with needed skills, research into the impact of sports on youth development must be

integrated with program content. As with all investigative scholarship, curiosity is the catalyst.

Five Big Questions

Throughout the thirty years I have spent working with sport-based programs around the

globe, I find myself asking big five questions:

What is important?

How is what is important taught?

How is what is important caught?

How is what is important measured?

How is what is important transferred to the next generation?

These five questions, the stories behind the questions and the research that examines

these questions provide the basis for the reframing of the children’s sports discourse. In this

book, we will examine what each question means in different cultural, geographic, and economic

contexts and offer the reader links to further explore each question. Our investigation will

encompass programs for socially elite youth, programs for poverty-stricken areas, and programs

for rural and urban youth. We will ask the questions for all children, so we can reimagine

children’s sports in an educational and positive way. Each program we examine will have

slightly different goals, but—whether in a rural African town or a wealthy Connecticut suburb—

each has the responsibility to produce something positive. To meet this challenge, the existing

system of organized children’s sports requires change. A major goal of this book is to begin the

necessary dialogue among parents, teachers, coaches, principals, and politicians. The five

questions above will guide us toward that goal. In the following five chapters, this book will set

the conceptual framework for remaking children’s sports and provide links to research and sport-

based development for more in-depth program development.

Chapter one simply asks the question, “What Is Important?” This seemingly simple

question sets the stage for what is taught and learned within any sports program. Within it resides

a complex bundle of additional questions: What do children need to learn and develop? Is

teamwork important? If so, why? Is developing a competitive spirit important? What are the

desired outcomes for playing sports in a given program? Are there universal skills that all

children need to be productive in their society? How can sports introduce these skills? Every

program, whether in India, New York City, or rural New Hampshire, should ask these questions.

We will explore these questions. We will find that sports offer natural ways to teach the deeper

social skills considered crucial in our globalized world.

Chapter two asks the question, “How Is What Is Important Taught?” In this chapter, we

will survey the relevant pedagogies of teaching and how they apply to youth development in

sports, as well as how role models, rules and consequences, and team dialogue can be tied

scientifically to teaching and learning. Modeling, relationships, dialogue, and reflection are

important teaching strategies and need to be present within the overall sports experience. Once

what is important is defined, the leader can use real-life dilemmas to bring skills and lessons to

life, yielding intentional, not random, learning.

Chapter three explores “How Is What Is Important Caught” that is, how children learn

what is being taught. This chapter will investigate the idea that children learn and develop in

different ways and that the coach has not taught until the children have learned. Through a

discussion of a variety of developmental learning theories, this chapter looks at how the sport

environment should to be structured for children to learn best. Drawing from educational

philosophers such as Jean Piaget, Howard Gardner, Carol Gilligan, and Maria Montessori

Chapter Three makes the point that it is important to ask children what they think is important.

This chapter explores what children think about teamwork, the importance of winning, the

distribution of playing time, and why they like to play sports. The answers to these important

questions help leaders to determine how best to organize sports for positive development.

Chapter four explores ways to “Measure What Is Important.” We tend to measure what

we consider significant (income, weight, SAT results, golf scores, and so on). The qualities and

skills we deem important need to be definable and measurable in ways children can understand

and learn. Rolling out a ball and yelling, “Hey kids! We need more teamwork!” could be likened

to a math teacher yelling, “We need to do more algebra!” with no explanation or instruction in

what algebra is. If we want sports to develop important skills in our students and players, then

these skills need to be clear and assessable, and the teaching needs to be intentional. Chapter

Two introduces a number of ways to accomplish these objectives.

Chapter five is the final step in the teaching and learning process. The central goal of the last

chapter is to bring attention to the importance of empowering children to take control of their

lives through positive leadership. Chapter five introduces the Learn to Lead Program and teaches

middle and high school players how to lead by teaching younger children. Learn to Lead is

based on the idea of learning by doing. The skills the older students are teaching the younger

students are the very skills they are themselves learning. The older students deepen their

understanding of teamwork and responsibility through a carefully planned leadership curriculum

using sports, project-based activities, and children’s literature. Teaching life skills to younger

children requires the older students to understand the skills, such as teamwork, and requires that

they create a positive learning environment. The future leaders learn many of the lessons

presented in this book through teaching and mentoring the younger children. In this final chapter,

we will explore how passing these lessons on to the next generation creates a circle of good

where eventually bullying and disrespect and replaced by the older students mentoring the

younger students.

All Of These Goals Can Be Achieved

Somalia 2014

“One thing puzzled me when I first set my foot in the town of Galkayo, Somalia the fact that

nobody seemed to care about courtesy. Twenty years of civil war taught, reinforced and made

courtesy a thing of the past. After several days in town, I come to realize that even the town

dwellers had no courtesy to one another. The thought of PLUS Global came to my mind having

read the activities and understood the basics of how powerful play and sporting activities can

cement societal barriers among the youths. We played football as a way of learning teamwork,

co-operation, and accepting defeat. Before the actual game, I took the initiative to probe them

with questions on teamwork, honesty and accepting a win or a defeat. Boys agreed that

everybody wants to be treated in a positive way. Before and after the game we reinforced the

virtues in an interactive session. I also used the opportunity to teach them a few things about

human rights, courtesy, self-awareness and hard work. Sports can surely develop critical skills,

which in turn help in character building.” Jeffrey Asoro Head Teacher talks about PLUS.

Waves for Change

Waves for Change is an innovative new program that uses surfing and therapy to promote mental

health. It offers surf lessons, a safe space and a sense of family—together with life skills training

and the opportunity to speak with a counselor. Nolwazi Makhuluphala, the head counselor, says

children are taught to recognize when they’re being overcome by anger or sadness, and how to

control their impulses.

East Harlem, 1991

A group of volunteers transformed an abandoned, garbage-strewn lot in Upper Manhattan

into two baseball diamonds for the youth. The park is now a hub of neighborhood activity,

connecting children, families, and volunteers through the power of team participation. Harlem

RBI, an innovative sport-based school, uses team sports, particularly baseball, to teach math and

science to inner city students who might otherwise drop out of school.

Cyprus, 2006

We knew sports could unite people in powerful ways, but we were not anticipating how

quickly and powerfully sport could unite two contentious groups. We had been asked to come to

Cyprus to run the Olympic Doves Sport Camp, with the goal of bridging the divide between

Greek and Turkish children. The groups of children, whose parents retained vivid memories of

the tumultuous events of the 1970s and the subsequent division of the island, had previously

been forbidden to speak to each other. But to our surprise, by the third night of the camp, the

Greek and Turkish children were dancing, singing, and laughing together. Using sports as a

neutral medium, the camp brought the next generation of Cypriots together, doing a small part to

heal the divide and conflict experienced by their parents.

Jamaica, 2010

Imagine sports being used to teach deaf students about teamwork. That is exactly what

Nick Roquemore, a deaf student from Gallaudet University, envisioned when he began his

internship with the Jamaica Association for the Deaf to support sports for deaf Jamaican

children. At St. Christopher School for the Deaf, Nick used sports to empower deaf students to

experience the world and to develop important 21st-century skills such as teamwork and critical

thinking.

Kenya, 2012

We all are aware of the AIDS epidemic in Africa that has left as many as 12 million

children without one or both parents, and approximately 330, children infected with HIV.

Imagine how soccer could teach African youth about Aids and HIV education? That is exactly

what the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust in Kenya envisioned, when they staged a soccer

tournament to engage youth in both sports and health education. Combining the joy of sports

with the importance of HIV education, the Trust provided all the participants with HIV tests,

counseling, and reproductive health education.

Coaches Across Continents

Our model has almost nothing to do with soccer in the sense that we’ve never played a

game where two teams score goals,” said Nick Gates, founder of Coaches Across Continents,

which helps countries with issues such as female empowerment, conflict resolution, life skills,

and HIV prevention. “It’s just that soccer is our vehicle for education.”

Intentionality

What do all these stories have in common? Sports, obviously. But, more importantly for

our purposes, these stories illustrate the use of sport for social good and for positive development

in children. Americans have long been bombarded with the “sports build character” platitude. In

this book, I will argue that while this idea holds truth, sports can be just as damaging as they are

beneficial. The key to a sports program benefitting a child’s development is the intentionality of

the program’s design: the program’s activities must be linked to the field of education.

Without intentionality, learning is random at best. That is, simply “playing sports” does

not guarantee that a child will automatically develop critical thinking, teamwork, and leadership

skills. A child may, in fact, learn skills most parents would rather their children NOT learn.

When sports programs are intentionally designed with specific learning goals, however, they

emerge as an opportunity to positively teach our children crucial skills.

The Other Classroom

I may not have realized it when I began my doctoral program at Harvard in the early

1980s, but my original thesis charted the cartography of a new domain—sports as moral

pedagogy, built on a foundation of research and experience. Today, this field has gained wide

attention and continues to attract the interest of more scholars and schools each year.

In the thirty years since I began my research, I have travelled this larger world, studying

how children experience sports and the role sports play in their lives. I have studied children’s

sport programs in China, South Korea, Canada, Cyprus, Canada, and throughout the United

States. I have started sports programs in rural Maine and New Hampshire, and in urban areas

such as Boston, Chicago, Hong Kong, and New Orleans. I have run after-school sports programs;

youth sports summer camps, Montessori-based sports programs, and elite high school programs

that train Division I- and Olympic-caliber athletes. In 2006, I co-directed the Positive Learning

Using Sports (PLUS) and Harvard Conference in Vail, Colorado.

I have learned many interesting things from my research, travels, and experiences, one of

which is that school is not the only place people learn. In fact, as I examined different programs

children are involved in, it became apparent that skills such as critical thinking and perseverance

are sometimes best learned outside the classroom. These skills may be taught more effectively in

places of passion, conflict, and joy. Sports provide these elements, for better or for worse, and, if

approached with learning in mind, can be a powerful medium for teaching these skills.

This book is about recognizing, as a society, the potential of children’s sports as a place

to teach leadership. For the past thirty years, my feelings about sports have fluctuated: on the one

hand, they are beneficial and constructive, without question; on the other hand, they prove

positive for the athletically gifted, but boring and outright painful for the athletically challenged.

Over time, I have come to the understanding that sport is a powerful medium – not unlike school

or family – but whether it is positive or negative depends wholly on how it’s organized, how its

relationships are negotiated, and whether it generates a sense of community where young people

are known, needed, cared for, and allowed to shape their environments.

Of course, there is the question of overspecialization, over-organization, and the lack of

children being able to learn how to engage in free time play and learn to negotiate with their

peers. There are many of us who remember the time when we played outdoors for hours and

governed ourselves around issues of equal participation and flagrant fouls. The great hockey

player Bobby Orr says it best. “I’m not trying to tell anyone not to watch TV, but if you’ve ever

spent a long winter afternoon playing shinny with the whole neighborhood, or a summer playing

softball with anyone who shows up at a diamond, you will know that kids who don’t have the

chance to organize themselves and solve their own problems and feel the exhilaration of sport for

its own sake are missing out on something.” There is a lot to be said about this often-missed

opportunity for learning. However, because so many children play organized sports, there is also

a need to examine the whole idea of teaching and learning in the area of sports.

It has long been known that sports affect children beyond the field or court; it is also well

known that these effects are not always good. Professional sports today are populated by

overpaid stars that may not exhibit the characteristics most parents hope to instill in their

children through athletic participation. However, this book does not purport to judge the ethical

or moral components of youth sports. Instead, it recognizes that sports programs designed

correctly and intentionally, are a natural, accessible, and inexpensive way to reach and teach our

children around the globe. If we want sports to serve as an effective classroom and a force for

positive change, then we need to fundamentally change children’s sports, as we know them

today. This book seeks to recognize and expound on this need. With this book, parents, coaches,

and youth leaders have in hand a roadmap to remake children’s sports for the 21st-century.

Jeff Beedy Ed.D

Summer 2016

Cape Cod, Massachusetts