Common-sense Learning

How sports can help us understand the benefits of mastery-based learning

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

This summer, France will host the Olympic Games. From July 26 through August 11, athletes from around the world will compete in 329 events in 32 sports ranging from swimming to archery. Commentary on the Games will no doubt touch on athletes’ abilities and training regimens, along with inevitable discussions of world affairs and the drama between athletes on the same national teams. But one thing will probably go unmentioned: how sports relate to education.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect sports commentators to talk about education during the Olympics. Unless it’s an integral part of a heroic backstory to an appealing underdog, education just doesn’t come up in discussions of sports. That makes sense. After all, if you’re watching sports, you don’t want to be distracted by boring broadcasters going off on tangents about topics you don’t really care about. Plus, it’s not like Jim Nantz (or whoever does the Olympics these days) is a renowned expert on education.

But sports actually do relate to education—far more than it seems at first glance.

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A few newsletters ago, I wrote about mastery learning. This is the concept of teaching students in increments and not allowing them to progress to the next level until they’ve mastered the current one. This may sound abstract, so let me put it into concrete terms. Imagine you’re in first grade. You spent all of last year learning numbers, along with the very basic mathematical operations of adding terms like 1+1 and 2+2. Now, your teacher wants to move onto bigger numbers. If you know what the addition sign looks like and you grasp the concept of adding, then this will be fairly easy for you. All you have to do is apply the same methods you learned using the smaller numbers to the bigger numbers. With enough practice, this comes easily enough for you, and you can then move onto things like adding two-digit numbers, subtracting one- and two-digit numbers, and even multiplying and dividing, which are really just more complicated versions of addition and subtraction.

But if you haven’t yet figured out how to add 1+1, you’ll have a very hard time adding larger numbers. The major hurdle you need to clear is not the size of the numbers but the concept of addition itself. For instance, if you don’t recognize that adding two numbers together will always yield a number larger than the ones you added together, then you haven’t yet mastered the concept of addition. It will therefore be extremely difficult for you to apply what you’ve learned to more complicated problems.

In a mastery classroom, your teacher will recognize when you haven’t mastered the previous concept and won’t let you move onto addition problems with bigger numbers until you figure out what the addition symbol means. This may happen in a non-mastery classroom, too. Indeed, much of my time in the classroom was spent reviewing with individual students the basic skills of grammar, including the structure of a sentence and the proper placement of a comma. And our school systems appear to rely on mastery-based learning to a certain extent. Geometry comes after Algebra I but before Algebra II because curriculum designers recognize that you can’t do Geometry without first mastering Algebra. Moreover, units within classes are usually progressive, meaning the content moves forward as students master easier skills.

But anyone who’s been in a classroom knows that teachers often move on before everyone in the class has mastered the concept. When I was teaching, for instance, I noticed that students usually averaged 60 percent on their end-of-chapter tests. Regardless of their obvious lack of mastery, I had to move on. After all, I had to get to the end of the book before the end of the year, so that students (in theory) would at least become familiar with the content before moving onto the next grade.

In reality, then, classes are not based on the mastery model. That is, at least in part, because of the constraints of our industrial education system. Back in the early 1900s, Americans decided that every child should receive an education. This was a huge upgrade from previous eras in which only the wealthy could afford such a privilege. But the downside was that millions of students would now be packed into classrooms like sardines. One consequence of this was that advanced students were grouped together with delayed students. As a result, teachers had to teach to the middle. Students who were ahead would be bored by the slow pace, and those who were behind would struggle to learn new concepts because they had never mastered the old ones. The ultimate consequence of all this is our current educational malaise, in which most students are educated reasonably well but many remain several grade levels behind.

Now apply this picture to sports. Imagine a basketball team made up of young athletes with varying ability levels. Some players have long since mastered layups, bounce passes, and free throws, while others haven’t yet learned how to dribble. The more advanced players either have a natural ability or have been playing basketball since before they joined the team (or both). Meanwhile, the lagging players are brand-new to the sport and haven’t yet discovered the physics of shooting a basketball.

In this scenario—which is obviously pretty common among teams with young players—could you imagine the coach trying to move the whole team forward as one unit? Could you imagine the coach spending a few minutes per practice trying to teach the worse players how to dribble while the better players play HORSE at the other end of the court? Could you imagine the coach cutting his losses and deciding to coach to the middle, spending a little time with each part of the team and impeding progress for everyone?

Well, actually, you probably could imagine this. The result would be a slow-moving, growth-restricted team. The players at the high end of the performance spectrum would see their athletic growth stunted because they would spend too much time going over skills they already mastered (or goofing off while the coach tried to teach the worse players to dribble). Those at the low end of the spectrum would likewise see their development slowed because they wouldn’t receive the support they needed from the coach to master the basics. In the end, the team would be far worse off than if the coach were able to develop each part of his team at the correct pace for them.

In basketball, as in every other sport, you can’t move onto the next skill until you’ve mastered the previous one. If you can’t dribble, you can’t advance down the court. If you can’t advance down the court, you can’t make a layup. If you can’t make a layup, you can’t make a jump shot, let alone a three-pointer. In tennis, you can’t learn to serve until you’ve mastered the forehand and backhand return. In archery, you can’t hit a bullseye until you can pull back the string without letting go. In baseball, you can’t turn a double-play if you can’t field a ground ball.

This is obvious to anyone who has ever played sports. You must first master the fundamentals before you move onto the higher-level stuff. And coaches recognize this. When I played basketball, there was a time where I wouldn’t hit the backboard during layups. My coach noticed this and pulled me aside at the next practice to drill me on layups. I probably did layups on my own for 15 minutes while my teammates scrimmaged or drilled plays. By the end, I knew to hit the backboard when I took layups. I experienced something similar during swim practice. My coach called me out for my lackluster streamlines, which I was doing despite the fact that I had been swimming for five years before. He then drilled me on streamlines until mine were some of the best on the entire team. Without those experiences, I would not have advanced in either sport at the rate that I should have because my fundamentals would have been off.

It’s the same with education. In every subject, you can’t move on until you’ve mastered the fundamentals. This is most obvious in math, where everything stems from learning the four basic operations. But it applies in all other realms, too. You can’t read a chapter book until you’ve learned how to recognize and determine the meaning of new words. You can’t calculate the velocity of a dropped object just before it hits the ground without first understanding acceleration. You can’t analyze the rise of the Third Reich without learning about the First World War.

And yet, we move students onto the next subject without their having mastered the previous one all the time. It’s the modus operandi of public schools in the U.S. If this were how sports leagues operated, there would be Congressional investigations and calls for coaches’ resignations left and right. That’s because mastery-based learning in sports is not some newfangled idea that hasn’t yet been tried. It’s second nature in the world of athletics. It’s a shame that it isn’t so in public schools.

So while you’re watching the Olympics this year, think about what lessons you can glean from sports. Don’t just marvel at the speed of the runners or the perseverance of the wrestlers. Think about what it took to get them there. Without their coaches’ dedication to ensuring that they mastered the previous step in the process, they wouldn't be there. Why should we think any differently about education?