Humble Servant of the People

Coaching Students

Coaching Students

Bob Alexander, PaTTAN Consultant

Often, when we dreamed or imagined being teachers and educators, we envisioned ourselves as profound lecturers delivering draughts of wisdom to eagerly awaiting, cooperative youths who were nourished by our dewdrops of insight. However, once we found ourselves immersed in the real milieu of classroom instruction, we discovered that didactic instruction was only a dram in a much larger bucket. In the reality of today’s 21st century classroom, the delivery of didactic instruction should encompass about 10-15% of classroom instruction. The largest block of classroom instruction (60-70%) should involve coaching, or the development of intellectual skills.

What is coaching then? If factual information is delivered through lecture, then coaching delivers the development of intellectual skills through supervised practice. In essence, students engage in quality teaching and learning by doing. Any athletic coach, from Pop Warner leagues to the professional ranks, is quick to note that supervised practice, repetition, and the occasional blood, sweat, and tears are elements necessary and fundamental to success on the athletic fields. Education is no different. High school football coaches frequently remind players that “You just can’t make it happen when the lights come on Friday night.” The bottom line is this: you play like you practice. Education is no different; and when it comes to assessing students, the true measure of success is determined by the practice, repetition, and feedback that students and teachers engage in together. Coaching, then, is an excellent tool for formative assessment, differentiated instruction, and, really, it is the most crucial component in teaching and learning.

Classroom coaching comes in many forms. One proven way to engage in coaching is through the coached project in the classroom. With an assigned project, students and teachers work together through a project cycle. However, according to Paideia philosophy, “Intellectual coaching becomes much more powerful and relevant when teachers and students collaborate on a formal classroom project or performance.” Mortimer J. Adler also observed that “All genuine learning is active, not passive. It involves the use of the mind, not just the memory. It is a process of discovery, in which the student is the main agent, not the teacher.” Again, we go back to the idea that students, when they are involved in coached activities, are doing. In addition, coached projects allow students to engage in activities for which they have an inherent disposition. This allows for the use of multiple intelligences, and students have opportunities to work in their area sof strength. Two such excellent coaching-based strategies are problem-based learning and project-based learning. In both cases, learning is student driven, and the teacher is the proverbial “guide on the side,” rather than the “sage on the sage.”

In addition, there are many other ways to coach in the English Language Arts classroom. Ultimately, the best coaching involves one-on-one instruction. While some may scoff at the impossibility of such an activity on a consistent basis, most experienced teachers would agree that it is possible to arrange for this type of approach with foresight and attention to instructional planning. Writing conferences are one of the most valuable coaching strategies for true formative assessment of a student’s writing progress. This engagement allows not only for a teacher to identify gaps for specific student strengths and weakness, but also to collectively assess the class as a whole. If specific patterns and errors are identified, the teacher can design a class-wide coaching session to address that particular element. This is also a good time for guided exercises, group debriefing and sharing, and intense chalk/white board work for practice and review. In all these instances, again, the work is student-driven, and students are learning by doing.

Ultimately, there are scores of ways to coach students, and the list is too long for a short article such as this. However, take a few moments to be a reflective practitioner, and examine your own teaching. Analyze your lecture to coaching ratio. Is there an unbalance with a leaning to the lecture side? If so, maybe it is time to do more coaching. If the pendulum swings the other way, then pat yourself on the back, and figure out how you can continue to be a better coach. Either way, true knowledge and focused engagement come from active minds and bodies that are involved in learning by doing. As they say on the football field, “Coach’em up!”

 Sources:

Adler, Mortimer J. The Paideia Program: An Educational Syllabus.

New York: McMillan Publishing Company, 1984.

Adler, Mortimer. "Teaching, Learning, and Their Counterfeits." Articles from Cambridge October (2007) 01/11/2008

<http://www.cambridgestudycenter.com/artilces/Adler3.htm>.

Barrea, Aida. "Mortimer Adler." Kappa Delta Pi: International Honor Society in Education 01/11/2008

<http://www.kdp.org/about/laureates/laureates/mortimeradler.php>.

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