By Rory Weishaar
(May 17, 2023)
In 1983, I was taking an education methods course in college. The professor was a great instructor, but he always made jokes about coaches and PE teachers. It was the usual stereotyping we still hear today: coaches are dumb jocks, coaches make horrible teachers, or PE teachers who coach are usually poor educators because they were hired to coach, first. I loved the professor (he ended up being the chair for my doctoral thesis), but every time he slighted coaches and PE teachers, it upset me.
After learning about best practices for teaching methodologies and seeing examples of what he considered “great methods” for classroom instruction, I decided to call him out in a writing assignment. To be honest, it was so many years ago I don’t remember the exact prompt but I realized it was my opportunity to sort of scold him for those jokes and innuendo. At the same time, I was hoping I didn’t make him so mad that I would flunk the class!
The title of that paper was The Coaching in Teaching. At that time, the best practices for classroom teaching included the instructor addressing the full class about the previous class meeting and its learner outcomes, what was to come in that day’s lesson (the goals to work toward to reach the learner outcomes), and perhaps a warm-up lesson to get us going. Then we would break into small groups to do peer teaching, followed by some individual work so the teacher could move around the room to help students. Finally, the teacher brought the full class back together for a lesson summation, a review of goals and outcomes, and messages about goals for the next class meeting.
In my paper to the professor, I aligned the above methods with the exact things good coaches and PE teachers do and had done for years. They bring the full team/class together to go over what will happen at practice/in class that day, and the goals (outcomes) for which the team/class is striving. Then the team/class is broken into small groups (position groups in sports, perhaps badminton groups for PE where we know peer teaching happens), then during “scrimmage” for sports or gameplay in PE, the coach/teacher makes the rounds to do individualized teaching. That is followed up by the full team/class coming together near the end of practice/class to hear a summary and review of goals and outcomes. Lastly, the coach/teacher informs them about the next practice/class and those goals for reaching learner outcomes.
What was the outcome of my paper The Coaching of Teaching? Well, the professor called me in for a meeting and handed me the paper. There was a large “A-“on the top. (Phew, at least I didn’t flunk!) The professor said, “Great paper, Rory! It would have been an ‘A’ but you had a couple of typos [yes, back then it was the good old typewriter]. Also, I’d like to apologize to you and some of your ‘brethren’ because of my flippant attitude toward coaches and PE teachers. I now realize I may have hurt some feelings of students who want to be coaches and PE teachers. Lesson learned. You are spot-on in the paper. Good teaching methods can be learned from coaches and PE teachers. It is student-centered and active.” We then spoke about what bad coaching and teaching look like. Over time we became good friends through my master’s and doctoral programs. To this day we still contact each other occasionally and he recently mentioned “that one paper I turned in about the coaching in teaching” and how it made him stop stereotyping coaches and PE teachers.
