This article discusses the main psychological and pedagogical principles of the approach to the study of the personality of students. The author pays special attention to the fact that before studying the personality of a schoolchild, it is necessary first to study the collective, then the common thing that unites children will become visible, it will become really possible to use the collective to form a specific personality. First of all, the most effective components of collective life, or the main indicators of the upbringing of the team, are studied. To obtain reliable information in the course of a lesson in physical culture and to understand the students, the most important method of collecting information is to observe their behavior. As the author points out, at the first stage of the formation of public opinion, children often combine events, phenomena, facts in their minds according to secondary, and not according to essential features, not according to their internal content, but according to their external manifestation. Moreover, the collective, on the one hand, as it were, embodies the total upbringing of children, and on the other hand, the individual necessarily differs from others in some way, occupying a certain position in the system of intra-collective relations. The purpose of the work was to study the maturity of public opinion, the system of social dependencies between members of the team in the educational process in the implementation of the subject "Physical Education". At the same time, summarizing the author points out that in the study of students in the process of classes, they proceed from a holistic approach to personality. When developing the content of pedagogical diagnostics, first of all, the criteria are clarified – the main indicators by which one can judge one's upbringing in a particular area. The criterion is either the main features of quality, or its constituent elements. Thus, studying the collective, we thereby study the most essential in the spiritual world of the individual, determine the main directions of its general development, the effectiveness of the collective in shaping the inner world of the pupil.