Meaningful, Inclusive Athletics

This brief article outlines some of the challenges that come with teaching Athletics and offers an alternative approach that could be used and adapted for students in KS2 through to KS4. This is detailed more fully in these FREE resources comprising of a sequence of Running lessons with some detailed activity suggestions. The same will be offered for Throwing and Jumping in the next blog.

For reflective practitioners, Athletics poses a particular set of challenges or at least it exasperates and amplifies challenges that are pertinent in a range of curriculum activity areas.

As is almost always the case, the challenge starts with Why? Why is Athletics on the curriculum? What do you want the students to learn?

And there will be a logical link between the answer and what the students actually do in class.

To exemplify; if the answer offered is to offer students a taster of a range of formalised/adult orientated events so they can take part on ‘sports day’ and/or have a chance of being selected for the school Track and Field team, then lessons will consist of students doing one or two ‘events’ usually 1 track and 1 field event (time and weather permitting). This may be accompanied by some recording of time/distance. Teacher input will typically be instructional focussing on the technical i.e., this is how you [insert technique]. At its best, students will have opportunity to have several attempts and those who connect to this ethos will be motivated to improve their performance. At its worst, the student experience can be a public display of failure with javelins falling a couple of metres and the high jump bar being knocked off in the ‘first round’ resulting in the student being ‘out’ for the rest of the lesson.

I would argue this approach is dominant. I am not aware of any research that supports this. The assertion is based on seeing hundreds of lessons in dozens of schools. It is how I was taught athletics many years ago.

If we want all students to foster a strong connection to this particular form of movement (and why wouldn’t we?), to feel joy/delight in running, jumping and throwing, to work together to solve problems, to experience the personal satisfaction that comes with improving, then we need to re-think our approach.

It is worth reminding ourselves that athletics events are highly technical. Good teaching looks to place each learner in their ‘sweet spot’ of just right challenge which is closely related to age and stage appropriateness. Giving a student a javelin be it plastic, foam or aluminium, before they have a well sequenced, fluent overarm/pull throwing action, is unlikely to result in any sense of success.

Offering part of one lesson to develop these complex movement competencies is also unlikely to result in success as learning takes time. So, what might Athletics look like if our purpose is for students to find a meaningful connection with running, jumping and throwing?

Let’s go back to fundamentals. Athletics is about seconds and centimetres. It provides a wonderfully rich learning context especially if we view it as nothing more than problem solving – how will you get from A to B in as short a time as you can? And you are successful if you can reduce your time when you have another attempt after plenty of learning and practice opportunity. The same applies to field events - how can you throw this thing/jump further than you did before? 

I also find it helps if we reframe the ‘events’ into much broader categories.

Running can be split into sprinting – running as fast as possible (which for most students is for up to 30 seconds), middle distance (30 seconds to 3-5 minutes) or longer distance (over 5 minutes). Similarly throws can be categorised as pull, push or sling (round body action) and jumping is for height or distance.

This FREE resource to teach meaningful, inclusive athletics (running) is designed to prompt conversations about what an Athletics units of work might look like. It is based on my curriculum in my last school. They offer suggestions about how we do less to do more (less breadth, more depth) to allow students time to succeed so that they move from doing Athletics to learning in and through Athletics.

Final word – I am increasingly convinced that we need not restrict ourselves to binary approaches i.e. we either teach for performance OR we teach inclusively. More students having more positive experiences will lead to more students being more motivated and more curious about better performance. But more importantly, we will be teaching more young people that they are athletes.