I participated some years ago in the first iteration of a pedagogy seminar for faculty, which was a great experience. It was a chance to talk about teaching where questions about the ethics, philosophy and creativity in teaching were at the center of our conversations. In other contexts—like assessment—those discussions are often pushed to the margins or turned into technical problems that allow for only one right answer.
The seminar also included pairing up the participants so that we could observe each other’s teaching. The conveners gave a lot of thought about how to make that experience feel safe and helpful rather than threatening or interfering. One of the ideas they had was to encourage us to see our partner work as coaching, following advice from Atul Gawande. The idea was that as teachers, faculty tend to think of themselves as training or instructing students who know very little about what they’re learning—a posture that is aggravating or condescending when it is used with someone who is already an experienced professional. Gawande’s thought is that a skilled professional can still hone their skills effectively when observed by someone else who is able to provide knowledgeable insight into that professional’s habits and style. It was a good idea and I think it helped a lot in terms of keeping us from talking down to one another.
I’ve thought about this distinction a lot over the years when I consider the place of varsity athletics in higher education. I generally accept the overall idea that athletics (varsity or otherwise) offers students a distinctive model of how to collaborate that has potential application in other domains of life and work. It is, if you will, a kind of “group project” that doesn’t have some of the artificiality and arbitrariness of some group work in academic subjects. Even in contexts where collaboration is hard-baked into academic study (lab work, for example), the structure of collaboration can be surprisingly mutable and the goals of the collaboration necessarily somewhat open-ended. In most athletics, the goals are concrete: win the game, be the fastest, lift more than the other competitors. Even athletic contests that have a judging component are about winning and this invariably entails the skilled use of the body.
That’s a second thing that students learn through athletics, even non-competitive activities like exercise for fitness: that the skilled use of the body often involves suppressing or suspending certain kinds of conscious thought. When I was still playing tennis actively, there was nothing more guaranteed to throw my game off than if I was thinking too much about a particular stroke or dwelling too much on an earlier point or game. I could have a plan that was conscious during a match—I could be observing the other players, getting a sense of their weaknesses, concentrating on shifting my own play a bit. Not to the point of needing to think about each stroke, each movement, or the movement of my partner, if I was playing doubles. That has to be guided by training, experience, muscle memory, practice.
Athletics isn’t unique in that respect. Musical performance, acting, art that works with physical media in particular, require some ability to favor movement and the materiality of embodiment, to suspend certain kinds of conscious, reflexive thought, and at least sometimes also to do so in simultaneous coordination with others. The evidence of failure in either respect is often visible and concrete—not so much losing a contest, but expressively. A finished work that isn’t right, a concert that sounds wrong, an actor who isn’t on their marks or meshing with others correctly.
All of this does seem to require something like coaching as a pedagogy: a form of expert witnessing focused on individuals and teams as they play and practice, a real-time calling out of mistakes, of moves or techniques to be refined, a coordinated repetition or drilling in a new strategem or sequence.
But this is also where coaching’s problems as a pedagogy have lately been really evident, because it can lead into some really troubled ground distinct from most teaching. Coaching is often more personalized and individualized than teaching (it’s what leads Gawande to recommend it to skilled professionals) and many coaches believe that as a result, they must think about the psychology of the people they’re working with, must understand their motivations and character, must envision themselves as a key who can turn the lock of their athletes or performers.
Maybe? A lot of teaching in higher education follows an implicit public-private divide. The classroom and the course are a “public sphere” where the teacher and the students interact with some degree of formality. The students re-enter their own personal and private worlds when they leave the classroom. If a student feels the need to be seen more deeply and personally, it’s often up to them to go see a professor and talk about themselves. Alternatively, they might use residential life administrators, who do see into more of the personal world of students (increasingly so in the last decade) to be a go-between with the professor. Narratives of charismatic teaching often rely on the breaching of this divide in a positive way—Mr. Chips, John Keating, Mark Thackerey all step beyond the boundaries to know their students personally. Those stories accept that this is a risky move that can backfire. Narratives of dysfunctional, abusive or sexually threatening teaching work over the same ground.
It’s fairly common for coaches to argue that they can’t be bound at all by the same divide, that they have to know the whole person. They travel with their athletes, they talk to them in locker rooms, they work with their emotions and desires. They have to guide their bodies, watch movements in a necessarily intimate way. Many coaches expect their commands to be followed both during practice and competition but also in the private time of athletes and performers.
Decades of scandals have made clear that this kind of pedagogical culture poses a serious risk of sexual and emotional abuse. Leaving that aside, I’m more interested in a different kind of cultural shift in the last decade, however. Increasingly I think student athletes and performers across the country oppose forms of coaching that involve harsh personalized criticism, shaming, commentary on bodies and fitness, yelling, or ritualizations of obedience and command.
I don’t think anybody has ever liked being shouted at, mocked, or subjected to severe disciplining by a coach. I suspect that sort of behavior by coaches in secondary school is responsible for a lot of kids developing an aversion to athletics. But for generations, younger athletes and performers just accepted it as necessary to competition or peak performance. Like a lot of pedagogical practices across education, much of the culture of coaching has never really been subjected to anything like a rigorous evaluation of its effectiveness, or when it has, existing coaches tend to disregard the evidence in favor of what they’re sure works. So when the question of whether intrusion into the personal or private world of athletes is necessary, or whether coaches need to invoke a commanding authority over athletes and if necessary use harsh public criticism and shaming to produce obedience or discipline comes up, as it increasingly does, there will be coaches who argue that this is indeed the only way to do this work effectively, or that this is what some athletes and performers need to achieve their best. A lot of dedicated sports fans believe the same: nothing is more guaranteed to produce a torrent of public abuse towards athletes than when athletes complain of feeling abused or demeaned by coaches. (Particularly when the athletes are Black and the coaches are not, as Howard Bryant noted in his moving July 4th essay this year.)
I think it’s good that the culture is changing. Whether we’re talking classroom pedagogy or coaching, I still think that students, athletes and performers are entitled to a baseline degree of respect, dignity and personal autonomy. I’m glad that student athletes are increasingly not putting up with coaching cultures that trespass on that baseline and are willing to say so in public, regardless of how much crap might be dumped on them for saying so.
The next challenge might be to ask whether the goal of always winning, always giving the best performance, always being at peak, is the deeper issue. Maybe winning is as much about a beautiful serendipity, an alignment of talents, motivations and disposition in the moment. Maybe it’s not a thing to be forced out of people or relentlessly driven towards. Maybe the best performances are special because everything just falls into place one night or one moment. Maybe it’s a mistake to try and make people into machines who always deliver. Maybe certain kinds of efficiencies are so hard and damaging to maintain that they amount to a net inefficiency, to being something that uses people up, that breaks them.
I know that’s how I feel about students in classroom pedagogy—that there’s a lot of room for them to be variably invested in any given exercise or discussion, any given course, or there should be. Raising the stakes to the point that it’s go big or go home, get an A or get weeded-out, is often counterproductive and as much about the ego and self-absorption of the teacher as anything else. So here perhaps the difference between coaching and teaching needs to be much less if we really want to see athletics and performance as a constructive part of the overall experience of higher education. Maybe it really is just about playing the game, playing the instrument, being on stage. About what you learn by being in the flow of a performance, in the company of a team.
Image credit: Photo by Wade Austin Ellis on Unsplash
The challenge is always about aligning the goals and the methods. For sports, there are multiple challenges here: you might express goals about winning but not want to do what is needed (or what the coach thinks is needed), or the structure you're part of (like a team or an athletic scholarship) might have different goals than the individual athlete, or you might want to commit to a larger goal but then find that conflicts with other, shorter-term goals in which part of the reason to have a coach is to push you toward that larger goal.
More broadly, between both teaching and coaching, I think there are two important similar issues. First, often people want the kind of opportunities to learn and improve and be invested in that comes with coaching and teach, but those opportunities are only provided in the context of some goals that they don't necessarily want (like a credentialing apparatus or a team with high outcome goals). A lot of that is just a hard coordination problem -- someone taking your history of Africa course because it sounds cool and they're about to graduate with a chemistry degree will have different goals than someone planning to go to grad school in history, and it can be challenging to support both kinds of goals at once (and the same in sports). Second, the kind of commitment to effort via enrolling in some structured environment that is a big part of what going to college involves necessarily means that sometimes you'll be pushed to do things that you don't want to do right now, and even won't ever want to do, because those things can't be assessed perfectly ahead of time.