Educator as Leader-Coach

My exploration of the educator-student connection continues. I’m convinced that therein lays an opportunity to address downward trends in student success, especially for those of color.  What draws me to this topic goes beyond my immersion into the culture of public education. Coming from the perspective of my own life and work, the student experience hasn’t change much at all.

Teachers are the reason students quit or persevere. (Just as managers are the reason people quit or stick with a difficult job.) What it takes to make it through the gauntlet of education to a life well lived has less to do with the circumstances into which one is born and more with the life skills of emotional intelligence, developed as one matures from child to teen to young adult to adult (and to elder, as I can attest).  All of my study and work in leadership, emotional intelligence, culture, and personal and organizational effectiveness seem to be coming together into an interdependent but simple EQ-based model: Self-awareness, self-control, empathy, and “grit”.

These abilities begin to develop very young through the positive (or negative) influence of family and early teachers. For example, a parent expecting a kid to own the responsibilities of having a pet, keeping an orderly room, and taking turns and sharing with siblings creates an attitude that shows up outside of the home as the kid’s assumptions about accountability at school, and eventually as an adult at work, in life and leadership. But if that kid comes into a classroom with a teacher that fails to recognize and nurture that emotional intelligence as a tool for success, she may become conflicted about its value.

Several years ago, I had the opportunity to audit a fantastic leadership development program titled Leaders as Coaches. Every manager at this business was required to complete this workshop that raised awareness of their role in the professional and personal development of their direct reports. It taught them basic coaching skills; identifying goals and aspirations, linking them to strengths and potential impediments, and keeping their charges focused on the practices and discipline necessary for success. This organization’s leadership believed that with coaching, everyone grows closer to his or her personal best and they needed the best to be the best.

Our exposure to coaching usually begins early. Our arts, PE, and vocational teachers were our first coaches, extoling us that practice makes perfect and hard work pays off. But now most young people in public schools no longer have that opportunity. Those programs are near extinct.  Some core curriculum K-12 teachers try to pick up the responsibility of teaching focus and discipline, but that has to be tough to do within the context of “teaching to the test”. Yet, many try and are sometimes successful. We all remember that one encouraging English or math teacher with whom we connected in a way that made us more self-directed and want to do the work.

Compared to community college and university faculty, K-12 teachers have advantages in filling this need. Their education and ongoing professional development includes pedagogy, the method and practice of teaching. And also important, they’re working with developing human beings of which they expect obedience. College and university professors, unless they are teaching or studying education, are not required to have those skills. And they assume that the people they are teaching are fully developed as human beings and can direct their own learning. I believe this clean break between how education is facilitated is a problem.

Young college students still need the coaching they used to get in music class or on the wrestling mat. In middle and high school, they learned that even though their goals are still a long way out, they could get there in achievable increments with practice because they had teachers as coaches.  But college teachers and university professors are less sensitive to this need and switch to “andragogy” as an approach, assuming the student is self-directed and building on skills and experience that already exist. There is very, very little student-teacher connection.

My high school music teacher would not let me give up on a verse during practice until we both heard some improvement. When I later became first violin in the orchestra, he would halt the whole ensemble when I screwed up, and we’d all have to start over. But that discipline continues to serve me today in so many ways. And the life skills I developed in a high school orchestra were no different than what students in team sports learned on the athletic field or in the gym. When I’m out and about with my friend, Jesse Williams, a retired middle school PE teacher, we occasionally run into former students, now adults with their own children. Decades later, they all say, in some way or another,  “thank you, you helped me see what I was capable of doing.”

That discipline and perseverance flowed into other school and life endeavors. Successful arts, PE and voc-ed students were often pretty good students in their academic classes, too. I believe the steady decline of these programs with teachers that coach is a major contributor to declining student success and the achievement gap between public schools in low-income communities and those in more affluent neighborhoods, where parents raise the money to keep those program around.

The word pedagogy is derived from the Greek word “paid” meaning child, plus “agogos” meaning leading.  Literally, it means to lead the child. The term andragogy replaces “paid” with “andra,” meaning man, which translates as “to lead the man.”  A simple definition of leadership is influencing the effective performance of others. To me, that sounds like the role of educators and coaches, too.

If you’re having an influence on others, you’re either a leader or a coach.  Leader-coaches do best when they connect with and recognize the perspectives of their protégés. Leader-coaches-educators help students find and leverage their gifts to persist beyond obstacles between them and their visions. Educators, secondary and post-secondary, can lay the foundation for a growth mindset that stays with their students for the rest of their lives.  I wish more of us accepted that purpose and responsibility.