Confessions of a Swim Dad: 5 Things Education Can Learn from Swimming

So there it was … stuck to the back of my car: a magnet I had never seen before. It was a random evening in December and I was walking toward my car with a friend when I saw the white oval magnet with black writing stuck to my trunk for the first time. As I later discovered it had been placed there by one of my colleagues; a colleague who knew me well enough to know I would get a kick out of it being there. For just a moment upon first seeing it, though, it felt like a joke, and I briefly denied that I was old enough to wear such a label. It was fleeting, though, as in the next moment I broke into an inward smile (and probably outward as well). After all, the words on the magnet perfectly described one important aspect of who I have become: SWIM DAD.

Yep, that’s me. Many evenings and most weekends, I can be found next to a pool. Of course, I can never be found IN one. I am the lucky father of three year-round swimmers, and I can’t deny it: I love to watch my daughters swim. One of the great joys of parenting is watching your children excel at something you can’t (or perhaps more appropriately, won’t) do. When I watch my girls swim butterfly, I am proud and impressed that they can even do it at all, let alone do it well. Whenever I tried I am sure I looked like I was drowning! It happened almost as if by accident: one day my girls were jumping into the water and struggling to get from one end of the pool to the other, and the next I was SWIM DAD.

Of course, I wear many hats, and I have lately been thinking about all the reasons why I love the sport of swimming. And since the largest part of my life is spent living and thinking about education, perhaps it was inevitable that I would begin to see connections between education and swimming. Actually I believe education can learn some things from the way many sports are taught. There is something unique about swimming, though, which I see as the most democratic of all sports. So, without further ado, here are 5 things I think education can learn from swimming:

• Focus on Continuous Improvement and Striving toward Mastery: Swimmers constantly set and reset goals. For most swimmers, a “personal best” is as important as anything else they might accomplish. I have known the very fastest swimmers to win an overall first place in an event, only to express disappointment that they had not beaten their best time. Swimming is a perpetual quest for improvement. Swimmers finish a race, then immediately want to know their times. They compare the time they swam to the goal times they have set for themselves, goal times which are based on their best times. In swimming, as in most individual sports, the notion of averaging is considered absurd. The same should be the case in education. If we are teaching skills, how much sense does it make to average a time a student is able to demonstrate a skill with a time they were unable to demonstrate it? If my child swims a 50 meter freestyle in February in a minute, then swims it in 40 seconds in October, are her times averaged? The notion is absurd. It should be equally absurd in education. Sadly the practice of averaging is all too common because it’s the traditional way of doing things. We should instead challenge all students to focus continually on improvement, then when we must grade them (the system still requires it, after all), we should base the grade on the best they have shown us.

• Focus on Learning Skills by Doing: The broadest evolution in education may be the move from students passively receiving content in large chunks to students receiving small chunks of content and then doing something with it—in other words, content in isolation vs. content in action. Content in action is really about skills development, which is the modus operandi of most sports. In swimming, there is no way to improve without getting in the water and doing the strokes. The best swim coaches then focus on the discrete parts of each stroke beginning with the most fundamental. Education should mirror this process.

• Provide Continuous Actionable Feedback Resulting from Formative Assessment: Imagine a swim coach sitting a group of potential swimmers down on the bleachers. The coach then dives into a long description of how to do the breaststroke. He talks about breathing patterns, the position of the feet, the motion of the kick, head and hand position, the streamline, the glide, the pull-out, the turn, the timing of the kick and arm stroke, etc. The swimmers go home and study all the information. The next day they all get into the pool and implement what they have studied. Based on the coach’s evaluation of what they did in the water, he gives them a grade. Then he moves onto the next stroke. Back to the bleachers! Chances are almost none of those students presented a mastered stroke, let alone even a legal one. What really happens is the swimmer gets in the water, the coach watches her swim, he provides very specific feedback about one element of the stroke, then the swimmer swims again while the coach watches, then there’s more feedback. The coach also offers praise and encouragement throughout. This process never ends as depth and complexity are continuously built in, and it never should. In this model the swimmer continuously improves. This also works in a skills-based classroom: a student takes action, the teacher assesses the quality of the action, the teacher provides feedback based on the assessment, the student takes action again. The process never ends as depth and complexity are built in.

• Foster Collaboration, Provide Support, and Ensure Both Individual and Team Accountability: While swimmers are in the water, their teammates cheer and exhort them on. Their coaches shout encouragement and parents cheer (there’s some hand wringing, too). Even though they typically swim in individual events, they can earn points for the team. Of course, there are relays as well. Different kids are better at different strokes: one might be a backstroke specialist while another might excel in butterfly. No matter what they coach each other, cheer each other, and share in the pride of what they are accomplishing. Coaches work hard to make sure the swimmers both feel proud of what they have done, and have some new goals to think about. One of the great day-to-day challenges in education is to foster collaboration, a necessary life skill, and to know what each individual can do. How do we make students accountable both to each other and to themselves? The feedback and improvement cycle described above is one way, but it is also important for teachers to create a classroom culture where collaboration is valued. It is important to ensure team tasks require the input of every member, while at the same time allowing for each individual to showcase what he or she can do.

• Leave No Child Behind: It is amazing on many levels how the enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act has warped the simple concept that lies at its core. Perhaps the greatest aspect of competitive swimming is that all kids compete. There is no bench; there are no starters. Every swimmer who wants to compete does. At a swim meet, events are divided into heats. Each heat consists of 6-8 swimmers. In the early heats, the slower swimmers typically compete against one another, and each subsequent heat features faster swimmers than the heat before. The swimmers are seeded into heats by the best times they previously achieved. While each swimmer swims against the other swimmers in the heat, they also compete against themselves, and their primary focus is on the next level, the next best time. It is in the nature of the sport that swimmers constantly strive toward achievable goals that are both based on what they can already do, and that challenge them to stretch. The first time one of my daughters swam, she was the slowest child in the pool. While I was feeling desperately for her as she slowly crawled across the pool, and admittedly just a little embarrassed, something remarkable happened. Everyone waited for her to finish, then started cheering for her. When she got out of the water on the other end, she felt proud, and so did I. Most importantly, she wanted to get back in and try again. One great thing about swimming is that she could. No one defined her by that first race. A year and a half later she is among the fastest swimmers in her age group. Isn’t that the essence of what we mean in education when we say no child should be left behind? Meet them where they are, let them show you what they can do, teach them something, then let them show you again. Repeat, over and over again, while constantly encouraging and keeping the bar just above their comfort zone. That’s what I want for my kids.

Maybe all this is more complex than it needs to be, though. Maybe Dorie summed it all up best in Finding Nemo: “just keep swimming, just keep swimming.” The process and the goal run hand in hand in both swimming and education: “just keep learning, just keep learning.” Learning is a process that never ends. We should stop treating it like a product.