The unlimited ways Olympians can bring the Olympic Values to Life - A case study from Ireland where over 145k studentstook part in the Dare to Believe Olympic Movement Break challenge, by RoisinMcGettigan-Dumas OLY.

"Olympism in schools, it must been couraged," Pierre de Coubertin wrote in the 1890s. We at the Dare to Believe Olympic programme in Ireland have taken those words written over 120 years ago to heart. We have been on a mission to bring Olympic values and ideals into classrooms since 2019. To date, we have engaged over 300,000 children and 8,500 teachers from every single county of Ireland through various activations with over 40+ Olympic & Paralympic ambassadors. Today, I will give you an overview of our different Dare to Believe offerings and then focus on our Olympic Movement Breaks initiative.

 Olympic Dreams

Dare to Believe is a deeply personal passion project to me and my co-founder Roisin Jones. Growing up in Ireland, Idis covered my love for athletics at a young age and dreamt of competing at the Olympics after being inspired by Sonia O’Sullivan and other Irish athletes on TV. Despite many doubts and distractions in my teenage years, I pursued my athletics passion with the support of a dedicated coach and parents, earning ascholarship to Providence College in the USA. Surrounded by Olympians and a brilliant coach there, I eventually realised my Olympic dream in Beijing in2008. However, despite the heats being dream-like, the final was a nightmare and really broke my heart. Despite the disappointment I was dealing with, I returned to Ireland to unexpected acclaim where I was asked to go into all the local schools. But, I felt unprepared. I had travelled the world and had incredible experiences and I wanted to give the students a world-class presentation and insights into my sport. I felt like I missed an opportunity to inspire students and this bothered me. It motivated me to do something to help other athletes be effective at giving back to their communities. I envisioned a program to support Olympians during their careers in sport, post-Games and post-career, that would also inspire youth to stay active and benefit from sports participation. When I was forced to retire from competitive athletics due to overtraining, I moved on with my life, had my own children and became a mental health counsellor, but the idea to do something for Olympians and children persisted. Almost a decade later, I reconnected with a fellow college teammate, Roisin Jones who had just returned to Ireland after being a corporate star in several companies around the world. Together, albeit remotely, with me still being based in the USA, and Roisin being back in Ireland, we developed "Dare to Believe." Our idea was endorsed by the Athlete Commission,the new CEO of the OFI Peter Sherrard, and funded by IOC Solidarity. Dare to Believe is rooted in Olympic values of excellence, respect, and friendship,echoing Pierre de Coubertin's vision from the 1890s that sport is a vehicle for teaching values and developing character.

About

At its core, Dare to Believe aims to inspire the young people of Ireland to ‘Dare to Believe’ in themselves through interactive Olympic values curricula and visits from Team Ireland Olympic and Paralympic role models whose lived experiences and stories bring the values tolife. Our Olympians are incredible ambassadors of the Olympic ideals as they live into these values every day: striving for excellence, balancing healthy mind and body, courage and fair play, friendship, and respect. Essentially, our aim is to maximise Olympians’ influence as role models in their communities through authentic storytelling, exposing young people to different sports and promoting the many bio-psycho-social benefits of exercise. We help athletes do their part to reverse the worrying statistic that only 11% of teenagers inIreland are getting the recommended amount of daily physical activity (source).

Athlete-Centred

We have been so lucky to have such brilliant and inspiring ambassadors nominate themselves to take part. Our current roster of 31 athletes includes Olympic Champion boxer Kellie Harrington, Olympic bronze medalists, rower Aifric Keogh and boxer Aidan Walsh, Double World & European champion gymnast Rhys McClenaghan, in addition to multiple European medalists and Irish record holders from over 16 sports. We train and pay each athlete for all visits and ambassadors take part in creating our educational resources, videos, partake in club and community appearances.They are the cornerstone of our programs and they participate on their ownterms, when it suits their schedules. We benefit our ambassadors by helping them improve their public speaking skills, hence increasing their hire-ability skills during and post their sporting careers. Athletes report that school visits are fulfilling, meaningful experiences that connect them to their communities and help them to make meaning from their own journeys. We help athletes to give back and promote their own sports but students often inspire the ambassadors too.

Dare to Believe Programmes+

When we launched in 2019, we began with a5-module primary school curriculum based on the Olympic values, on boarded and trained 12 athletes, visited 63 schools and reached 4000 students. We were chuffed because teachers were happy, students were happy and athletes were happy. The combination of Olympic values curriculum coupled with the Olympians storytelling and visits, was a winner! But since our school visits kept getting booked up in under 15 minutes, we quickly realised the demand is so high that we will never fulfil the amount of requests for visits. This spurred us to findother ways to promote Olympic values and reach more students. We now have over five offerings and these combined have allowed us to reach over 300,000 students in the past 5 years.

Iwill now give a brief overview of each of our 5 offerings. We are very excitedabout each of them but today, I’ve been asked to focus my talk on the OlympicMovement Breaks.

1. Core Olympic Values and Ambassador Program: We now have both a primary and secondary Olympic value curriculum that is coupled with a visit from an Olympic ambassador in-person or online. We currently do over >120 of these visits per year. And teachers love the cross-curricular linkages and diverse learning     modalities included and then Olympian visits are such a highlight. We have recently begun extending ambassador visits to spotlight clubs and community events which have been hugely popular. (Primary, Secondary, Community)
2. Olympic Schools Challenges: These are our virtual physical & cultural challenges that we create and run in the lead up to an Olympic Games. We are currently running the "Road to Paris”, a 4-week challenge that features videos, activities, quizzes, maps, and coloring pages based on 5 current Olympic Stars & Olympic     values and facts. Teachers log their physical activity into our online platform and this is converted into a distance on an interactive map around Ireland and on to Paris where they unlock the videos and resources. Currently, we have over 42k students and 1500 teachers taking part. (Link, highlight reel)
3. Olympians LIVE!: These are nationwide webinars that are held 1-2 times per year. They include interviews with Olympic stars who answer students from students from all over Ireland. We usually pick a topic and theme and do a primary and secondary version. We had over 25k students tune in last year. (Link, highlight)    
4. Dare to Believe PExpo: This is our national secondary school PE project-based competition. We have partnered with a grassroots teacher-led project competition to run this event. We recently hosted thisyear’s event at the National Sports Campus and it attracted over 200 projects and 1500 students. The event featured Dare to Believe Olympians and over 13 different sporting bodies and the project categories included Olympic themes. (Link, Highlights)
5. Olympic Movement Breaks: Olympians, Paralympians, and high-performance athletes across twelve sports including athletics, boxing, breakdancing, gymnastics, para powerlifting, rugby sevens, and swimming, star in a series of twenty short movement breaks videos, ideal for use in the classroom. The videos demonstrate a wide variety of movements that get all students moving in a fun and inclusive way. Teachers can use these anytime so students can take a brain break and     increase physical activity. We had over 125k students, over 5500 teachers from all over the country taking part, our largest activation to date. (Link, Highlight Reel)

Why Olympic Movement Breaks

We heard from many teachers that students need movement breaks during the day when they are distracted, hyper active, or when they are lacking in energy. Our teacher-consultants asked us for video resources to help them find appropriate active breaks that could be done rightin the classroom and help all their students to reset and refocus. We also looked into the promising research that indicates that short active movement breaks are shown to help all students academically, emotionally, and of course physically (source). We’ve also spoken to many parents who’ve told us their child has been prescribed active breaks during the schoolday. We went on a mission to help all students regulate emotionally and physically to get in their learning zones!

Our solution was to create 20 fun, but functional, Olympic Movement Breaks videos. The idea is that teachers and students take up to 5 minutes to follow one of our Olympians and High-Performance athletes demonstrating exercises and activities that can be done by students of all abilities in the classroom. The Olympic Movement Breaks include a variety of different sports including athletics, boxing, rugby 7s, hockey, swimming, gymnastics,break dancing, and para powerlifting! (Appendix B). The Olympic ambassadors shared their expertise and input into each of their movement breaks and each break includes interesting insights and tips from these world-class athletes. In addition, we created a downloadable resource to enhance students' experience using the Olympic Movement Breaks where they can get to know the athletes and learn about each sport, learn facts about Ireland at Olympics, and take somefun quizzes on all the content. (Link to pdf)

How it worked

Teachers that registered on our website get immediate access to the 20 videos, a downloadable chart (appendix A), and bonusresources including bios and quizzes. Every day teachers do a movement breakduring the school day for 4 weeks. Each video has a different exercise from adifferent athlete. We attempted to be inclusive by giving an adapted exercise,using visuals and timers.

Results

At the time of writing, we have had 145,027 students taking part and 5,580 teachers from 31 of our 32 counties. Although we promoted the challenge in November 2023, we still get new teachers registering every day. Immediately after the challenge, we asked teachers to fill out our survey. We had over 350 responses. The feedback from students and parents regarding the Olympic Movement breaks was overwhelmingly positive. Teachers reported that students enjoyed the daily breaks, looked forward to them, and actively engaged in the exercises. They particularly enjoyed learning about different athletes, trying out various challenges, and seeing a wide variety of sports represented. Parents also expressed delight in seeing their children's enthusiasm for the breaks, with some even trying them at home. The breaks were seen as engaging, enjoyable, and beneficial for physical activity and learning about sports and athletes. Overall, there was a strong desire from both students and parents to continue using the movement breaks in the future. Overall, respondents appreciated the initiative and suggested various improvements to enhance its effectiveness and accessibility - increasing the variety and length of video, making them more accessible and diverse. For more results from the survey, please refer to Appendix C below.

Keys to Olympic Movement Breaks success:

●        Partnerships - We were delighted to make the Olympic Movement Breaks to support the Education Department’sActive Break Everyday Challenge run annually in the Winter months, by the Active School Flag Programme. They helped to promote our videos to schools and this was huge for visibility and endorsement. The Minister for Sport and Education also helped us to launch the challenge. (Video)

●       Inspires Non-sporty & Sporty Students - teachers report that the program inspires both sporty and non-sporty students through the cross-curricular approach. Our programs include multiple educational methodologies and units from a variety of subjects including PE, wellbeing, geography, history, English, art, science and more.

●       Whole School Initiatives - Olympic Movement breaks were suitable for the whole school to engage with, which created great fun and excitement. We’ve been told it’s difficult to find something for the whole school to do, so that was really positive to learn.

●       Input from Teachers - We are constantly consulting teachers aboutour programs and making sure we are making something that teachers need and want before we do anything.

●       High-quality resources - We want everything we produce to fit theOlympic brand of excellence. Teachers and students are appreciative of the effort we do to produce quality materials.

●       Free for schools - Everything we do is completely free for schools.We provide high-quality programs and curriculum completely free of charge forall teachers and schools.

●       Diverse roster of ambassadors - Dare to Believe’s 30+ ambassadorscome from all over the country and compete in more than 16 different Olympicand Paralympic sporting events. Ambassadors open students' minds to the idea that there’s a sport for everybody. We have over 50% of female athletes on ourroster. The movement breaks included 13 of these ambassadors.

●       Technology access - schools in Ireland have large whiteboards thatare connected to the internet. Creating the videos we knew teachers would beable to watch them in the classroom.

What’s Next for Dare to Believe

Currently, we are wrapping up the Road to Paris Olympic Schools Challenge with Olympians LIVE! Fun Finale that includes Double World Champion gymnast Rhys McClenagham and a famous Irish children’s illustrator, Fatti Burke. The challenge has been warmly received and includes crafts, mascots, Olympic facts, Olympic oath, friendship activities, growth mindset activities, respect activities, writing postcards, learning some Frenchand making the Eiffel Tower, and lots of movement breaks! The excitement is building in Irish children for the biggest sporting event on the planet.

The Future

We want to keep building the opportunities for our Olympians to be great ambassadors, feel valued members of society beyond their performances and give back to their communities through fulfilling experiences. We want to do our part to promote the role and benefits of sportsin the Global Sustainable Development Goals by promoting good health and wellbeing, quality education, gender equality, reduced inequalities, peace,justice and strong institutes, and partnerships. (Appendix D). And finally, we want to partner with other countries to build a community and network around the world of NOC’s and NOAs to share our resources and facilitate cultural exchanges, promote peace and create fun educational experiences. We welcome your ideas and expertise on how we can do this! Olympic values education is sorelevant today with the advent of AI where we need to equip our children with the values and skills needed to navigate the challenges of sport and life. We are a small team, myself and my incredibly smart and hardworking colleague Roisin Jones who unfortunately couldn’t be here today, and we operate the wholeprogram with help from the OFI staff, several key vendors, teacher consultants and of course our brilliant ambassadors and wonderful students, sponsors in PTSB and IOC solidarity funding. Thank you for your time and attention today and I look forward to answering any questions you might have.

 Appendices:

A. Olympic Movement Breaks Chart-source https://www.daretobelieve.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Olympic_Movement_Breaks_Challenge_Chart.pdf

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B. Full Listing of Olympic Movement Breaks

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C. Olympic Movement Break Surve Results

D. Dare to BelieveSustainable Development Goals

References:

1.     Dareto Believe homepage https://www.daretobelieve.ie/

2.    Dare to Believe Primary Programmehttps://www.daretobelieve.ie/programmes/primary-school/

3.    Dare to Believe Secondary Programmehttps://www.daretobelieve.ie/programmes/secondary-school/

4.    Dare to Believe Olympic School ChallengeRoad to Paris https://olympicschoolschallenge.daretobelieve.ie/

5.    Dare to Believe PExpohttps://www.daretobelieve.ie/programmes/pe-xpo/

6.    Dare to Believe Olympic Movement Breakshttps://www.daretobelieve.ie/olympic-movement-breaks/

7.     Brainbreaks https://www.theottoolbox.com/brain-breaks/

8.     Movement Breaks benefitshttps://www.cambscommunityservices.nhs.uk/Bedfordshire/services/occupational-therapy/ot-leaflets/movement-breaks#:~:text=The%20aim%20of%20the%20movement,hand%20strength%20and%20body%20awareness.