Over the course of a 7 hour conversation, one woman changed the course of my marriage, yet she spoke for only 30 minutes.
She was a marriage therapist. But in many ways she felt like a coach.
How did you feel? Was it always that way? Say a little more. With these simple nudges, she drew my gaze beyond the fresco of my marriage and helped me see the brushstrokes and the artists behind the stormy scarlets and blissful blues.
If a one-day therapy session could do so much for my marriage, why couldn’t something similar be done for my students?
Students have always struggled in traditional classrooms due to commitments outside of school, inadequate preparation from prior teachers, heavy workloads, low motivation, and a rigid learning schedule. In the wake of the pandemic, these struggles have become a crisis that has thrown both students and teachers into despair.
We’ve tried to respond with understanding without sacrificing our standards for meaningful learning. We’ve adopted policies that increase the flexibility of due dates. We’ve encouraged different types of assignments (e.g., written vs. oral). We’ve revamped our grading systems.
Ultimately, we’ve just applied Band-Aids.
Students struggling the most will continue to do so despite this flexibility. In order to truly help these students succeed and see beauty in learning, we need to reframe our roles as educators.
We need to become coaches.
Coaches are expert listeners, question askers, and advocates. As teachers, we are experts in our disciplines and skilled at guiding students through concepts. But if students are like aspiring painters, it is not enough to simply provide instruction on how to mix colors and choose a brush (still crucial!). We need to also help them build their own frameworks for getting back to the easel even when they don’t feel inspired to paint or after life gets in the way.
Let’s broaden our perspective and learn more about what it takes to be a great coach.
One small change that I’m already planning to adopt is to ask better open-ended questions in 1-on-1 conversations with students to better understand the root cause of their struggles. The potential impact is immense: I already have many of these conversations in individual meetings or office hours. But I now know that by learning coaching skills, I can do much more than just re-explain concepts and give general study advice. What are you struggling with? What went through your mind when you tried…? Why is that? Tell me more.
Long term, I’m sure that the following resources will be game-changers:
- Corey Wilks’ World-Class Coaching course
- Saundra Yancy McGuire’s book Teach Students How to Learn
My day-long marriage therapy session was not a magic paintbrush: problems still arise, and working through them is still challenging. But the coaching-like guidance that we received that day has reminded us to leave the studio door open: there, a lush landscape remains unfinished, and we can continue with our brushstrokes when we’re ready.
Educators, the benefits of coaching will take time to fully surface, especially as we learn to take on this new role. But every step our students take back towards their palettes will be a stunning stroke on our canvases.
I am grateful to Tobi Emonts-Holley, Chris Cordry, Corey Wilks, Hesam Panahi, Jeremy Nguyen, and Sairam Sundaresan for their wonderful feedback on this piece.