The Teacher as Coach

Testimony of
Saundra Murray Nettles, Ph.D.
College of Education
University of Maryland
before the California State Assembly Education Committee
February 2002

Introduction
I am pleased to have this opportunity to present information on the value of teachers using coaching as an approach to increase students' academic skill and enthusiasm for learning. Many students already benefit from coaching. I will present examples of the venues in the next few paragraphs and then, to define coaching, I summarize my review of select literature on coaching (Nettles, 1992). I conclude with a consideration of what can happen in classrooms when teachers coach.

Coaching is recommended as a way to facilitate teachers' transfer of skills from training to classroom use (see for examples, Donegan, Ostrosky, & Fowler, 2000; Joyce & Showers, 1982; Joyce & Weil, 1986). In community settings, attention has focused on ways to increase the pool of significant, nonparental adults in the lives of children and youth (Galbo,1989). Less visible is the coaching that occurs in everyday activities outside of organized competition. Churches conduct activities that require children to memorize passages from religious and other literary texts and recite the passages before an audience of adults and peers. Church members (such as Sunday or Saturday school teachers) serve as coaches, giving children pointers on public speaking and some nuances of stage production. Librarians may play similar roles in teaching children to tell stories, to find information, and to understand plot and character, and parents and other family members and friends often serve as children's first coaches in athletics and other areas (Bloom, 1985).

Adults from the community often volunteer in schools to coach students in a performance area. In the Science/Math Enrichment Project in Baltimore, for example, retired persons coached students preparing for participation in science fairs (National Executive Service Corps, 1991). In another Baltimore project, Building on the Basics, architects coached students in building a scale replica of a city neighborhood (Englund, 1990).

Anecdotal evidence of the importance of coaches in children's lives appears frequently in the sports pages of local newspapers and in biographical sources. Also, research indicates that adolescents frequently cite coaches as people who play significant roles in their lives (Danziger & Farber, 1990; Galbo, 1989).
Coaching happens in many places, often in activities outside of classrooms. Advocates of educational reform - - among them Mortimer Adler, Theodore Sizer, and Robert Griffin -- call for teachers to use coaching in the classroom as well.

What is Coaching?
Coaching is a term used in different fields or areas of performance, including sports, forensics, music and the arts, management, and teaching. Accordingly, definitions of coaching are diverse and often reflect in tone and content the distinct characteristics of a given field.

For example, the following definition introduces a discussion of coaching in a book on the practice of excellent management in business and other areas of leadership:

Coaching is face-to-face leadership that pulls together people with diverse backgrounds, talents, experiences and interests, encourages them to step up to responsibility and continued achievement, and treats them as full-scale partners and contributors. (Peters & Austin, 1985, p. 384)

Common functions of coaching can be identified across fields. I reviewed studies and descriptions of practice in several areas and came to this conclusion:

Coaching is instruction that places the responsibility for learning in the learner and fosters the development of skill through vigorous use of teaching practices, provision of continuous feedback on performance in settings designed for practice or display of mastery, and provision of companionship and other forms of social support.

I will briefly define the four functions of coaching that appear in the above definition: teaching, assessing performance, structuring the learning environment, and providing social support.

Teaching
Coaching as teaching embraces several well-defined ways to help learners develop skills, including modeling, behavioral or verbal demonstrations that are available or offered for imitation contingency management, the use of rewards or punishments following a behavior feeding back, the provision of information on performance
instruction, telling someone what to do or how to do it (giving directions) or calling for action questioning, requesting a verbal reply cognitive structuring, providing a framework for behavior and thought.

In applying these approaches, the teacher must observe the learner's actual performance; hence, the teacher must provide opportunities for practice and display of mastery and be present to interact with the learner during the performance.

Assessing Performance
To manage contingencies, provide information and feedback, and model correct action, the coach uses a goal or standard that the performer desires or is required to meet. The assessment function of coaching entails both the establishment or identification of targets for performance and the actions needed to determine accurately the performer's existing skills and knowledge.

Structuring the Learning Environment
Some coach actions occur outside the interaction between coach and learner. These actions include manipulating, selecting, or preparing the environment to create an optimal setting for learning.

For example, coaches may initiate and manage the learner's transition to a new coach who will provide a more expert level of instruction. In the study of talent development among pianists, almost half of students' first teachers advised parents that the child needed a better teacher (Sosniak, 1985a). Coaches also determine the materials to be used in learning or the social organization of the environment-- for example of the latter action include changing the learner from group to individual instruction (and vice versa), selecting competitive venues, and increasing or decreasing the number of training sessions.

Providing Social Support
The function of coaching as social support stems from the notion that a personal relationship between coach and learner facilitates the learner's mastery of the skill and sense of competence as a performer. The coach's stake in the relationship begins with the learner's acceptance of a fundamental tenet: the responsibility for learning is the learner's, not the teacher's. This voluntary aspect of learning is a characteristic of coach-athlete relationships as well as teacher-learning relationships in informal settings (Greenfield & Lave, 1982; Griffin, 1988; Templeton, 1991).

Social support is described across domains in remarkably similar terms: counseling, listening, protecting, advising, sharing, creating trust, and empathizing. The supportive function of coaching promotes not only the learner's skill in the performance area, but the learner's personal and psychological growth as well (Butt, 1987). Joyce and Weil (1986), for example, define as follows the function of companionship in coaching among teachers:

The first function of coaching is to provide interchange with another human being over a difficult process. The coaching relationship results in the possibility of mutual reflection, the checking of perceptions, the sharing of frustrations and successes, and the informal thinking through of mutual problems. (Joyce & Weil, 1986, p. 481)

What Can Happen When Teachers Coach?
Griffin (1988) asserts that the lessons about fostering achievement in sport may be applicable in teaching underachievers in school. He identified the following skills of successful athletes from his reading of sports psychologists: setting goals, concentration and relaxation, developing and carrying out plans, self-control/self-management, ability to resolve conflicts, constructively using feedback after failure (the ability to learn from failure), and ability to gauge one's own skills and requirements. In facilitating student acquisition of these skills in academic classrooms Griffin calls for teachers to coach students. He says: "It is important that teachers put some ideals in front of students about what it looks like when a class really works and when a student really goes to school. Sometimes we are so busy conducting our lessons that we do not lay those values out there so that they can become guides and assessment of student actions" (p. 193).

An evaluation of the Promoting Achievement in School Through Sport (PASS) program (McClendon, Nettles, & Wigfield, 2000) suggests some of the ways that classrooms can be transformed when teachers serve as coaches. In this study, we observed PASS and non-PASS classes on six dimensions: depth of knowledge, higher order thinking, social support for academic achievement, academic engagement, and connectedness to the real world. Teachers in PASS classes receive extensive instruction in the functions noted in the previous section. PASS teachers are rated by PASS staff on 1) PASS room ambience, 2) PASS routines, 3) teacher presentation, and 4) PASS support.

In the study, observation forms were developed to record basic classroom dynamics such as class control and were scored according to the Madison framework for authentic instruction (Newmann, Secada, & Wehlage, 1995). Two independent raters scored each classroom on each of the six dimensions. Results revealed that PASS classes scored higher on all six dimensions. Quantitative and qualitative observations suggested that there were specific features, e.g., instructional strategies and social support, embedded within the PASS class that may influence learning in a positive way. For example, our analysis of student grades indicated that African-American students' involvement in PASS classrooms was important in enabling them to sustain and to improve their grades.

Research on educational resilience suggests that school environments are important in fostering academic and socioemotional competence. Benard (1991) describes three essential features: 1) high expectations, 2) caring and support), and 3) opportunities for participation. Good coaching provides all three.
Adler (1982) asserted that students cannot acquire facility in mathematics and language through instruction alone:

Since what is learned here is skill in performance, not knowledge of facts and formulas, the mode of teaching cannot be didactic. It cannot consist in the teacher telling, demonstrating, or lecturing. Instead, it must be akin to the coaching that is done to impart athletic skills. . . . The lack of coaching and drilling by itself account for the present deficiencies of many high school graduates in reading, writing, computing, and in following directions. (Adler, 1982, p. 27)
Coaching may be as beneficial in the classroom as it is on the athletic field.

References
Adler, M. J. (1982). The paideia proposal: An educational manifesto. New York: Macmillan Publishing

Benard, B. (1991). Fostering resiliency in kids: Protective factors in the family, school, and community. Denver, CO: Western Regional Center for Drug-Free Schools and Communities.

Bloom, B. (Ed.). (1985). Developing talent in young people. New York: Ballantine Books.

Butt, D. S. (1897). The psychology of sport: The behavior, motivation, personality and performance of athletes. (2nd ed.). New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold.

Danziger, S. K., & Farber, N. B. (1990). Keeping inner-city youths in school: Critical experiences of young black women. Social Work and Research Abstracts, 26, 32-39.

Donegan, M.M., Ostrosky, M.M., & Fowler, S.A. (2000). Peer coaching: Teachers supporting teachers. Young Exceptional Children, 3, 9-16.

Englund, W. (1990, May 21). At Liberty Elementary, third?graders learn to build on the lessons of the day. The Baltimore Sun, p. 7c.

Galbo, J. J. (1989, April). Nonparental significant adults in adolescents' lives: Literature, overview, theory, and issues. Paper presented at the national biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Kansas City.

Greenfield, P. M., & Lave, J. (1982). Cognitive aspects of informal education. In D. A. Wagner & H. W. Stevenson (Eds.), Cultural perspectives on child development (pp. 181?207). San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Griffin, R. S. (1988). Underachievers in secondary school: Education off the mark. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Joyce, B. R., & Showers, B. (1982). The coaching of teaching. Educational Leadership, 40(1), 4?16.

Joyce, B., & Weil, M. (1986). Models of teaching. (3rd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice?Hall. New York: Ballantine Books.

McClendon, C., Nettles, S.M., & Wigfield, A. (2000). Fostering resilience in high school classrooms: A study of the PASS program (Promoting Achievement in School Through Sport). In M.G. Sanders (Ed.), Schooling students placed at risk: Research, policy, and practice in the education of poor and minority adolescents . Mahway, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.

National Executive Service Corps. (1991). The Baltimore science/math enrichment program. New York.

Nettles, S.M. (1992). Coaching in community settings: A review. (ERIC Document Reproduction

Service No. ED346083). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, Center on Families,

Communities, Schools, and Children's Learning.

Newmann, F., Secada, W., & Wehlage, G. (1995). A guide to authentic instruction and assessment: Vision, standards, and scoring. Madison: Center on Organization and Restructuring of Schools, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin.

Peters, T. & Austin, N. (1985). A passion for excellence: The leadership difference. New York: Warner Books.

Sosniak, L. A. (1985a). Learning to be a concert pianist. In B. Bloom (Ed.), Developing talent in young people (pp. 19?67). New York: Ballantine Books.

Templeton, M. (1991). The role of informal education. In the National Learning Center, How we think and learn (pp. 53?55). Washington, DC: National Council on Vocational Education.