As the 2026 Winter Olympic Games come to a close, the competitions leave behind valuable lessons for both educators and students alike.
This year, the premier international multisport event was hosted in Italy, with over 2,800 athletes from more than 200 nations taking part. Educators have long capitalized on Olympic competitions to convey lessons about resilience, teamwork, and coping with disappointment, among other takeaways.
For example, in the 2020 Tokyo Games, when Simone Biles chose to withdraw from the final individual all-around Gymnastics event, many criticized her for quitting. However, she later returned to compete again at the 2024 Paris Games and won three gold medals and one silver medal, becoming an inspiration, particularly for women and girls, showing her resilience and determination.
Julia Rafal-Baer, the CEO and founder of Women Leading Ed, a nonprofit network of women education leaders, said the lessons from Biles’ experience were relevant in district leadership, too.
“Leaders in education and other fields can learn from Biles,” Rafal wrote in an opinion piece in Education Week. “Her challenges mirror many of those that women in top leadership positions must deal with daily.”
Teachers have used the Olympics to reinforce the idea that everyone needs coaching. Many athletes rewatch their previous Olympic events to understand and learn from their mistakes. Similarly, teachers can record themselves in a classroom and evaluate areas for improvement.
In addition, the Olympic Games are also an opportunity to learn about history, geography, and math. For example, students can create tables of results and graph data points to make predictions for remaining events. Older students can try to estimate the economic impact of the event on the host country.
For the 2012 Summer Olympics, Education Week reported on a set of video resources, created with support from the National Science Foundation, meant to help teachers and students draw connections between the games and science and engineering.
Those resources were designed to help educators connect STEM to events such as swimming and track and field.
In a recent social media post, Education Week asked an online audience how they believed the Olympics could offer skills that students and educators could pick up.
Online commenters put forward a number of ideas. The responses have been edited lightly for length and clarity.
Using the games as inspiration
Reality is that not everyone has the resources or tools for this level of professional sports, but can still strive for excellence.
The participants who reached that level did so because they never gave up, despite everything.
There is a social-emotional aspect to the games
Kindness, resilience, empathy, self-confidence, respect, and discipline.
Confidence not arrogance.
