The Academic Coach
A number of years ago our leadership team began to question the metaphor of the "teacher-student" and its effectiveness in conveying the appropriate relationship between the instructor and learner. As we worked through variations of these relationships we embraced the "academic coach-player" metaphor.
Not that learning was a game or sport to be played, rather, the relationship was one about building trust, a desire to achieve, working together, and seeing the lessons through to the proverbial "playing fields." The more we massaged the metaphor the more we believed it to genuinely represent the most timely representation of how our students wanted to learn, as well as what we were seeking in our faculty's relationships with the students.
Whereas the teacher-student relationship implied that the instructional burden was solely on the teacher to "teach" and that the student was a passive participant in the experience only needing to be present in order to "learn" from the teacher, the academic coach metaphor carried much more in its message. The coach needed to teach the plays, the rules of the game, the strategies, and the team building necessary for success, but the coach also needed to see the players perform on the field of play. Just knowing how to play was not enough, the academic coach needed to see these academic athletes use those "locker-room lessons" in action.
Additionally, the athletes themselves needed to change their paradigm from an individual win-at-all-costs mentality, to one that was collaborative and supportive of their classmates. The greatest athletes (at least on team sports) did not win at the expense of their teammates, because they solely worked to only improve their individual skills and abilities, the greatest team players raised their teammates while pursuing their own continuous improvement. There were so many wonderful parallels that began to grow out of this metaphor, that before long we were "hook, lined, and sinkered" for good!
Over the course of developing this metaphor further we have come across profoundly wonderful opportunities to explain concepts that had previously been difficult, awkward, or impossible to convey effectively. The best example of this was differentiated instruction. To try to explain to elementary school students (and even older children) why one student was assigned different work than another, while still keeping the need for confidentiality, student self-esteem, and other multitude of reasons as to why differentiated instruction is so critical, the academic coach metaphor explained it with ease... every player on a team plays in a different position. Each position is unique and needs specific instruction in order to excel in that role. In fact, in some cases different players have different rules, even though they are playing the same game. In soccer, for instance, the goalie can touch the ball with his or her hands, but no one else on the team can do the same. From this visual the coach can explain why one student has this assignment to do, while another student has a different assignment all together.
The metaphor can go on and on. Whether its the relationship of the coach and athlete outside of the classroom, or whether it's the deeper carrying of the metaphor into a particular sport in order to highlight the parallels of one subject matter to that sport, this metaphor became our go-to "academic-speak" on campus. No longer did we even call our faculty "teachers". Everyone on campus became a "coach". As the Head of School I took on the role of "Head Coach" and everyone else embraced their particular coaching role on this incredible team!
Finally, in formalizing the campus culture and embracing this vision wholeheartedly we wanted to impress upon the students that this was not a gimmick or temporary fad, and so we researched quotes from past and present in order to show how sports and life have had a parallel path time and time again. The following are the quotes we used on our journey toward building our institutional culture...