From the Gym Floor to the Classroom: What My Externship Taught Me About Research
When people hear “English teacher” and “fitness facility externship” in the same sentence, they usually expect a story about staying active or trying out new workout equipment. My experience with Competitive Edge Fitness turned out to be something different — and something far more useful for my classroom. It was a crash course in research methodology, and I plan to bring it directly into my curriculum.

One project I worked on with Competitive Edge asked me to research other fitness facilities in the area and identify each one’s specialty, or niche, in a crowded local market. To do that well, I couldn’t just rely on what I could find online. I needed to talk to people. So I developed a set of interview questions and called each gym directly, asking about their programs, their target clientele, and what set them apart from everyone else.

That process pushed me to combine two different kinds of research: the qualitative insight you get from a real conversation, and the quantitative data you gather from comparing facilities side by side. Neither one told the full story on its own. The phone interviews surfaced nuance — tone, priorities, unspoken assumptions — that a spreadsheet never could. But the quantitative comparisons gave that nuance context and let patterns emerge across the whole market. Together, they let me draw conclusions I could actually stand behind.

That’s exactly the kind of research I want my students doing. In our research unit, students often default to a single mode: gathering sources, pulling quotes, and stacking up “evidence” without ever testing it against a real person or a real perspective. My externship reminded me how much richer research becomes when students have to design and conduct an interview — deciding what to ask, how to ask it, and how to make sense of an answer that doesn’t fit neatly into their outline.

So this year, I’m building interview development and execution into my research unit. Students will draft interview questions with the same purpose I brought to my calls with local gyms: not just to fill in a blank, but to genuinely understand a perspective and use it to sharpen their own conclusions. It’s a small shift, but one grounded in real, applied experience — proof that data-driven research isn’t just about finding numbers. It’s about knowing when to pick up the phone.