Public schools feel the pressure of raising standardized test scores that are often published in local news mediums.  But test scores aren’t all that matters.  

During my educational leadership journey, I’ve had the privilege of leading several schools as a building principal and together with our schools’ teams  guiding schools to increases in student data that is normally analyzed to judge a school leader.  But in addition to working to improve student performance on state assessments, I want to emphasize the importance of developing the whole student and how athletics and extra-curricular activities as keys to developing holistically to prepare for college and or career and life overall.  Here are things I’ve learned along the way as a principal, assistant principal, athletic director, varsity basketball coach, and teacher in schools from Midland, Pittsburgh, Erie, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to Stuart, Okeechobee, and The Villages, Florida.  

Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself

Being part of a team or organization teaches students how to represent something that’s bigger than themselves. Teams and groups go up together and go down together as one.  When a student participates as part of a group, he or she is assigned a role to fulfill.  If one single member doesn’t fulfill his/her role, the entire group struggles.  The Hall of Fame UCLA basketball coach John Wooden compared a team  to a fancy vehicle.  When asked what one notices most about a vehicle in their imagination, people typically mention items like the engine, the vehicle’s body, or the comfort and aesthetic properties.  No one ever identifies lug nuts as key components.  But if one of the four lug nuts on any wheel doesn’t fulfill its role, the vehicle will become dangerous to anyone riding it and jeopardize the entire vehicle.  When participating on a team, band, choir, or group, students learn to embrace a role for the betterment of the whole.  This process develops sacrifice, unselfishness, and loyalty.  All are important qualities for life.  

Work Ethic and Commitment

To be successful in any extra-curricular activity, it requires time and lots of it.  When sports or groups are in-season, students spend countless hours practicing and their craft and honing skills and mental processes.  To prepare for in-season activity, students spend the months around their activity’s prime time by being taught and coached and working to grow the skills needed to improve.  It takes time and lots of it all year round.  Students learn to have growth- mindset, to devote boatloads of time, to be punctual, to make sacrifices, and to give effort every single day if they want to succeed.  Students confront a myriad of choices with regard to how to spend their time, and it takes the ability to prioritize and to stick with something to become a successful part of a team or group. 

Social and Emotional Skills 

One of the most valuable skills that we can give to our students is resiliency.  The ability to persevere when things don’t go our way or we confront setbacks.  Sports teaches us to battle back when we fall behind in order to learn how to win.  We learn how to move on the next play and leave a bad one behind if we want to change a negative direction.  During my 17 years of coaching high school varsity basketball, I was fortunate enough to help 16 players move on to college basketball careers and to coach four championship teams.  The moments that stand out to me about the most accomplished players and teams I worked with involve great examples of resiliency, of battling.  Helping players commit to growth, to perseverance, to working harder and smarter, and to believe in themselves when they faced adversity.  As a kid, I also played the trombone and wow did that require practice that included many mistakes and refinement of performance.  To be good, you had to keep learning from mistakes and making revisions to your practice.  Students who participate in a choir or any club or committee face similar challenges.  Students have to learn to self-regulate emotions and remain focused in times of adversity.  And by doing so, they grow into young men and women who are prepared to manage and overcome the setbacks that life ultimately poses to all of us.  

Multiple Sports and Extra-Curricular Activities Leads to Well-Roundedness 

Not only should students participate in extra-curriculars, but they should participate in multiple organizations.  The vast majority of college-level student-athletes played multiple sports in high school and growing up.  Spreading one’s time between different sports during varying seasons helps kids to develop mental and emotional toughness in different ways.  The challenges presented by team sports like softball, volleyball, baseball, football, and basketball engage different muscle groups, eye-hand coordination skills, and a variety of approaches since sports all challenge athletes in different ways.  A large number of the players on the championship winning high school basketball teams I coached included key contributors who played football or baseball and the mental focus and physical toughness required of those sports became assets on the basketball court.  I’m certain that the mental toughness required of basketball players to continuously move on to the next play often without gaps in time helped players succeed in other sports as well.  Other extra-curricular activities engage students in analytical thinking, communicating effectively with others, collaborating with peers, supporting others’ successes and growth, and remaining focused on calm.  

Prepare Students for College, Career, and Life 

If we want our students to develop the skills and knowledge to be successful in college career and life, we need to encourage them to involve themselves in a wide variety of experiences in school.  A school’s teams, clubs, and activities benefit but most importantly our students will be equipped with the mental, social, emotional, and physical skills they will all need to sustain success for the long haul in all that life throws at us.  

Schools often include a commitment to preparing students for college and career in their vision and mission statements. According to research from the National Institute for School Leadership (NISL), a branch of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a school’s systems should all be aligned to the vision and mission overall. So, we must then ask whether a school’s instructional system aligns with a vision of authentically connecting classroom content with real-world applications that ready students for employment or further academic study. In too many schools, the answer remains an alarming no. And that must change; all schools need to embrace authentic learning as a chief component of their instructional systems so that our classrooms become workshops and students produce work that mirrors real-world products delivered by professionals to truly serve as preparatory institutions for our future work force.

I’ve spent my career in school administration, including the last eight as a principal or director, working to build this correlation between how we teach students and authentic preparation for college and career, and in the majority of my administrative stops, I’ve had to battle mindsets that didn’t embrace forward thinking. With the exception of my time as vice principal at The Villages High School in Florida and in my current role as principal/head of school at Midland Innovation and Technology Charter School (MITCS) in Pennsylvania, implementing authentic learning as a key domain in a school’s instructional system has been met with resistance. Schools, educators, and communities are often stuck in traditional thinking. Many seem to think that good teaching is what they know, what they experienced, and what they believe quality teaching to be rather than focusing on data and research. Facts tell the real story.

NISL has spent decades conducting studies on the world’s leading educational systems and on the science of how people learn for the purpose of developing a framework with which school leaders can draw research that can translate into successful practices. A key component of NISL’s work includes illumination around the process with which we all learn. According to NISL’s work, we must first engage preconceptions and sometimes misconceptions, involves ourselves in an acting learning phase, and include reflection. The active learning phase is what makes learning matter, gives us practice, allows us to make mistakes, and connects content with our futures and the world that surrounds us.

In a related body of research, Dr. Robert Marzano’s work around depths of learning while utilizing a taxonomy that plans for a scaffolded learning progression through four levels of depth ends with “Level 4 Knowledge Utilization.” At this final depth, students take what they have mastered in the first three levels of Marzano’s taxonomy — 1 — Knowledge Retrieval, 2- Comprehension, and 3- Analysis. The vast majority of standards are written at level 3, so analysis level student product will support standards mastery. With the most prominent standards, schools should target the goal of deepening students’ mastery beyond the level called for by the standard to ensure that the most important learning standards at a grade level are learned on the deepest level. Level 4 Knowledge Utilization level work requires teachers to design units and lessons in a way that converts students into active learners who design products, apply skills and knowledge attained, produce a product, and to help students reflect on their learning process to close any gaps that occurred along the way. This learning progression provides a perfect system to match an instructional system to NISL’s research on how people learn and how the world’s highest performing school systems align instructional systems to how students learn best. Enter project-based learning as the perfect catalyst to guiding all students to the deepest level of thinking and learning.

To effectively move students through the active learning phase, we need a catalyst. One of the richest, most applicable professional development workshops I’ve attended since I became Principal David Krakoff was held in Florida when I served as principal of Stuart Middle School. Led by the Buck Institute for Education (BIU), we focused on building instructional units while emphasizing the active learning stage for students in a way that required high levels of critical thinking and real-world applications. The BIU’s model articulated a plan for project-based learning to be carried out in every classroom that included the following steps that naturally connect content with cycles of work frequently replicated career paths:

• Key Knowledge, Understandings, and Success Skills.
• Challenging Problem or Question.
• Sustained Inquiry
• Authenticity.
• Student Voice & Choice.
• Reflection.
• Critique & Revision
• Public Product.

I came to MITC, a Western Pennsylvania charter high school in its first year of existence, largely because of its founders’ vision. Our school was created on the premise that we will create an instructional system that will send all students out into the world with the skills and knowledge required to be successful in college and or career. Our instructional system is designed to provide students with a journey leading to authentic projects in all classes that engage the higher-level thinking processes and real-world connections illustrated in the research from NISL, Dr. Marzano, and the BIU. To expand on what we offer our students, we offer studies in career pathways including: career technical skills trades, gaming and simulations, transportation and logistics, healthcare innovations, forensic science and justice, and aviation technology. When I worked as vice principal of The Villages Charter High School in Florida, we built an instructional system with the same authentic emphasis combined with what is now 14 academies. Students at both schools can graduate with college credits, industry certifications, and the skills and knowledge needed to tackle college, career, and life. It’s what almost every school’s vision expresses but only some schools actually provide. Though my leadership journey that includes serving as Principal David Krakoff at schools in Stuart and Okeechobee, Florida, Lancaster, Erie, and now Midland, Pennsylvania, I’ve appreciated aspects of every setting but admire the commitment to authentic learning held at The Villages Charter School and my current home at MITCS. I hope to continue to push all schools along the same path of offering authentic instruction and learning so that as a national educational system we fulfill the pledge we make to all students. All students deserve to leave high school with all options for a fulfilling life and career without limitation.