Coaching, Teaching, and Motivation

And why some well-intentioned ideas really rub me the wrong way

Photo by Maurice DT on Unsplash

I’ve been following Timothy Burke’s blogging for a very long time now, across a couple of changes of platforms, though I forget exactly how I first encountered him. He’s consistently one of the most interesting and thoughtful people writing about higher education issues, at least for me, possibly because he’s also deeply ensconced in the world of elite small liberal arts colleges.

So it was a somewhat unusual experience for me when I read his piece from last Friday comparing and contrasting teaching and coaching and really just hated it in a visceral way. To such a degree that I had to stop myself from making an immediate response, which would’ve come out very snarky and nasty, and let it sit over the weekend before trying to compose something.

I’ve re-read it now (embed just below this paragraph), and while my response is less vehement, I still find a lot about it to be deeply wrong. And I think it’s worth unpacking a bit why my initial “Oh, go fuck yourself” was quite as strong as it was.

Academia: Coaching v. Teaching

When I tweeted something about having a strong negative reaction to this, one of the responses I got was along the lines of “Wow, there’s a lot going on here,” and I think that’s a big part of it. There’s a particular slant to it that I think derives from a lot of unstated and possibly unquestioned beliefs. And at the same time, my reaction to it similarly draws on a lot of background things that are maybe not immediately obvious, and thus worth drawing out a little. These are a loose enough collection of stuff that I think it probably makes sense to break them out as a bit more of a list of separate points than trying to craft it into an essay with a more coherent flow to it

— The comparison between teaching and coaching isn’t something I often think about, but when I do, it usually seems like the distinction is mostly one of social class. That is, to exaggerate the stereotypes to a slightly crass degree, teaching is a white-collar profession for former nerds who enjoyed and did well in school, while coaching has a kind of honorary blue-collar status as a profession for ex-jocks who peaked young and want to wear track suits in a professional setting. In reality, the two activities are a lot more similar than people on either side are necessarily comfortable with.

— To the extent that there’s a difference in the practices of the two professions, I think it mostly stems from a historical mistake about how people learn. That is, I think the observation about the difference in stance from early in Burke’s piece is very sharp:

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.

To put it in slightly different terms, I think the key difference is that teaching has traditionally been seen as a largely passive activity for the students, who need to sit quietly and be told things that they don’t already know. Coaching, on the other hand, is more active and participatory, where the athletes can be presumed to already know a bit about how to move, etc., and the focus is on doing things in real time and getting instant feedback that they use to hone their efforts.

In reality, of course, next to no learning happens from simply listening to someone talk, even in the most lecture-based pedagogy: the real learning happens later when the students try to apply what they’ve been told in class. This is the key insight behind a lot of the “active learning” strategies pushed by educational reformers, that ask teachers to be much more in a coach-like role giving real-time feedback.

— This is an area where the difference between my disciplinary background as a physicist and Burke’s as a historian is probably a big driver of our different reactions. I’m coming from a field where large lecture-format classes have always been the norm, and the shift to more participatory active classes is a relatively recent development. History as a field, particularly at the small-college level, shifted to emphasizing smaller discussion-based classes years and years ago, so that doesn’t seem particularly fresh to someone from that background.

— As a result, my sense of the relative movement of the coaching and teaching is almost exactly the opposite of Burke’s. Where he seems to see teaching standing pat and coaching maybe shifting away from a more comprehensive relationship between coaches and players, I feel pushed to be more coach-like. This is both in terms of classroom practice— feeling pressure to make classes more active and participatory, something closer to a practice than a traditional lecture— and broader concerns about student life. There’s a constant stream of material— tweets, blog posts, Inside Higher Ed essays— urging faculty to be cognizant of and sensitive to a long list of factors relating to student identity and well-being. The net effect is to make me feel like I’m supposed to be more aware of my students’ lives outside the classroom than in the past, in ways that often seem forced or otherwise uncomfortable, particularly given the subject matter I’m generally teaching.

— Around here, we start to drift into things I react negatively to that aren’t necessarily Burke’s fault, in that my reactions are colored by either my own past experiences with other people saying similar things, or that seem to run counter to lines of argument pushed by the shadowy amorphous “They” of academic social media that he might not personally subscribe to.

A big example of this is his acknowledgement of what students learn from athletics, which feels a bit grudging, possibly more than he intended. What he wrote is actually a relatively generous form of a conversation I’ve had a lot with colleagues over the years: “If they want to play sports, I guess that’s fine, but it’s not really important.”

That always gets up my nose a bit because playing a sport was an essential part of my school career, and not something I would be willing to trade for slightly better class performance, even at thirty years’ remove. It’s also a line of argument that I don’t think would be as well-received applied to anything other than athletics: I don’t hear the same sorts of complaints about students participating in musical or dramatic performances, for example, and I suspect that some of the faculty who are most negative about athletics as a distraction from academics would have an equal and opposite negative reaction to any suggestion that we curtail the activities of student performing groups.

And, of course, if you carry that basic line of thinking— that student activities are valuable only insofar as they teach skills that turn out to be useful in an academic context— to an extreme, you end up in places that are kind of uncomfortable for the whole idea of liberal arts education, and extremely uncomfortable for the collection of disciplines shorthanded as “the liberal arts.” There’s a kind of implicit utility calculation made in the grudging acceptance of athletics as something that teaches particular skills that is derided as outrageously neoliberal in contexts that pit one academic specialty against another. But I think those arguments are actually not so very different in the end.

— Probably the point that I had the most viscerally negative reaction to, though, was this bit at the end:

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 would not want to dispute that there’s some truth to the “beautiful serendipity” thing— that’s a part of what attracts me to sports, after all, that almsot magical feeling when everything just clicks into place for a ream or a game. There’s really nothing like it, and I agree that it’s not something that can be generated on demand.

But I have a major problem with the suggestion that “the goal of… always giving the best performance, always being at peak” is problematic as a general matter. I find that idea not just wrong, but actively repellent in a way that surprises me a bit. I just can’t quite get my head around the idea of doing something that you think of as meaningful and not trying to give your best performance. If you’re not trying to be at peak, what are you even doing?

This is another thing that I’ve run up against a number of times in various work contexts, and to some extent with my kids, and I think it ultimately comes down to a matter of personal psychology. That is, there are some people who are powerfully motivated by the idea of competition and striving to go beyond their prior limits, and others who are not. I don’t think that the subset of athletes who speak positively of being pushed hard by coaches or teammates to perform at their best are confused or deluded— I take them at their word when they say that they needed that to reach their peak. In large part because I’ve felt the same way at times, to the extent of inventing competitive aspects to individual pursuits as a way of motivating myself. And on the flip side, I find a lot of attempts to motivate people in ways that are meant to be communal and cooperative to be de-motivating, in a way that leads me to check out altogether.

So, I react negatively to the idea of de-emphasizing competition and peak performance as a goal because that feels like it’s not just about correctly identifying particular practices as abusive and illegitimate, but saying that an entire personality type is illegitimate. In a sense, this comes back to the social class thing up top— a way of saying that academia is only for a particular kind of person, who’s motivated in a particular kind of way, and that really rubs me the wrong way.

(There’s also a bit of the “past experience and generalized background” problem here, in that some of the people I interact with who are most vocally anti-competition are also viciously zero-sum whenever any question of resource allocation comes up, in ways that are hard to square with their other rhetoric. There’s a similar dynamic around the idea of people being made to feel uncomfortable— some of the people who are loudest about the need to challenge others are also the quickest to cry foul when challenged themselves. That’s not about this specific piece, though.)

To be clear, I do not mean in any way to deny the equally valid experience of those who find competition stressful and de-motivating. I can’t quite get myself into that mindset, but I recognize it as a genuine personality type in its own right, and that those students and faculty who feel that way should have their preferences respected. But that can’t be through the exclusion of any other personality type and motivation style, or through formally ruling out the things that competitive people need to motivate themselves.

Way back in my Usenet days, I remember someone using a .sig file quote that was something like “It doesn’t really take all kinds. We just have all kinds,” and I think that kind of applies here. We need to accommodate people with a wide range of personal motivation styles, because we’re going to get students and faculty coming in with a wide range of personal motivation styles. The challenge is figuring out how to help people to sort themselves into the right channels, so that everyone can get what they need to live their best lives.

So, anyway, that’s the background to my strong negative response to Burke’s piece, which again was not entirely his fault. The combination of observations that feel a bit off from my perspective, some parallels with arguments that I find weak bordering on hypocritical, and a sense that the whole thing was a kind of delegitimization of a key part of the way I approach the world led to a very viscerally negative response, on the whole.

---

This is probably way too in the weeds for anybody else to care about, but in the event that this seems worthwhile, here’s a button:

And if you want to argue with my reading of the piece or my worldview more generally, the comments will be open: