Peter Greene borrows concepts from sports and business to explain what teachers should be and what reformers want them to be.
He writes about the transactional coach and the transformational coach.
The transactional coach wants to win. He views each of the players for their capacity to contribute to a winning game and season.
The transformational coach tries to bring out the best in every player. The goal is developing every player’s potential, not racking up points on the scoreboard.
He writes:
“Advocates of education reform have, intentionally or not, worked to redefine teachers as transactional coaches. We are supposed to be there just to get that good test score out of each kid. We should use test prep, rewards, threats– whatever works to get the student to make the right marks on the Big Standardized Test so that we can have that easily measured, numerically-coded win. Charter schools have the additional freedom to sort students based on which ones can best complete the transaction and which ones need to be benched. And since the transaction is a fairly simple, we have no shortage of ideas about how to have it broken into short, simple competency-based transactions that can be handled by a computer.
“Transactional coaching is simple, clear and can provide distinct short-term rewards. It is also narrow, shallow, and ultimately subordinates humanity and the value of individuals to an artificial and ultimately meaningless excuse for a life purpose. Transformational coaching is way to see the pursuit of athletic excellence as a means of pursuing human excellence and giving an athlete the tools to pursue whatever goals they might set for themselves. A transformational approach puts humanity at the center, setting goals that recognize higher values than the simple pursuits in front of us. A transactional approach sets up an artificial goal and holds it up as a god to be worshipped and pursued at the expense of any human beings who stand in the way. Can there be any doubt that education should be transformational?”
I don’t often disagree with Peter, but in this case, I think the King of Metaphor is not right. If he refers to a life coach, he makes an important point. If he refers to a sports coach or a business leader, the metaphor fails. The business wants to make a profit, and the CEO has to produce or be fired. In sports, every school or university wants a winning team, and they care more about the results, the scores, than human potential.
Teaching is not sports, not business. It is the profession of developing children into responsible young adults.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Borrowed from Business? Right. And who do you think Business borrowed them from?
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I was both a HS teacher and coach for over 35 years. It isn’t an either or situation. You coach to develop young men or women so that they can be successful and healthy adults.
However you also coach them to get the best out of themselves. Winning and losing are not always based on that because talent plays a part as well. The most successful teams I coached were not the most talented. They won because of their strength of character and their commitment to each other.
May I suggest a great read to help understand. “Coach: Lessons on the Game of Life” by Michael Lewis.
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Teachers are TEACHERS. Silicon Valley blather, utilizing euphemistic terms like “reform”, “coach” and “guide”, and offensive terms like “human capital pipeline”, misdirects, facilitating their takeover of OUR schools.
The synonym for “reformers” is “exploiters”.
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“The transactional coach wants to win. He views each of the players for their capacity to contribute to a winning game and season.”
My son has one of these for math. It isn’t a good fit. We have a powerhouse high school football team a couple of districts over and he actually uses what the football coach there says – quotes him. I think that district puts too much energy into winning football games, personally, but that would also be a minority view- they’re lauded for football.
It’s fine- I’m respectful of their discretion to run their class the way they want (within reason) and this isn’t unreasonable, but it is a bad fit for this particular boy. They track them in my district beginning in 7th grade and he’s in the more advanced math class and he’s not accustomed to seeing math as competitive between him and his classmates. Maybe it’s hugely inspiring for the other 19 in the class- I don’t know.
It’s a difference of opinion, basically. My son will survive and he needs to learn that he can be different, think about this differently, and still get the work done and get what he needs out of the class. I would hate it if it were some official policy or “reform”, though.
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In my opinion, football is not a good model for anything other than football.
.It seems to bring out the absolute worst in people: lying, cheating, extreme aggressiveness (to the point of purposefully trying to injure other players), disregard for the health and safety of players by coaches and others (NFL concussion scandal) and focus on winning and the bottom dollar at any cost.
It’s very much like gladiators in the arena
Even for youth football, the coaches I have seen are focused more on winning than on safety and giving everyone an opportunity to play. I have actually heard players as young as 11 say after a game that they wanted to “hurt’ a player on the opposing team. Where did they get that idea, anyway?
Apart from the inaptness of football, I think emphasis on competition over collaboration in math is a very bad idea in general. Most of the best working mathematicians will tell you that math is a collaborative endeavor. The isolated geniuses who do everything on their own are few and far between.
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Football is also a good model for war.
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Re SD Poet “bring out the absolute worst …” yes, and if you’re Tom Brady you end up with squishy balls.
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for what it’s worth, i see this as less a disagreement between you and Peter, and more as a slight difference in our notions of what a coach actually is…
if we think of all coaches as professional coaches, like Bill Belichick or Steve Kerr, then their goals are pretty simple: win, at any cost. but if we extend our definition to include youth sports coaches as well, then the transactional vs. transformational profiles come more easily into view.
as a youth basketball coach, my goals were more about the individual development of each player, and helping my players find enjoyment and fulfillment in the sport than they were about winning. and i must have been pretty good at this, as my teams rarely won. 😉
i imagine the same is true with occupational coaches and other forms of coaching, as explained in Peter’s piece. a work or life coach should be focused on helping one’s clients achieve their goals–and first, helping each client set their own goals–a pretty worthwhile coaching goal in and of itself.
but if we delimit our understanding of “coaching” to the competitive model as displayed in the NFL, NBA and other pro sports leagues, Diane’s objections obtain.
sorry for the intrusion–i just can’t accept the disagreement between two persons of whom I think so highly. 😉
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I appreciate this discussion, particularly the point about metaphor. I once argued with a guidance counselor about the “student as customer” metaphor, which is inaccurate and counterproductive. “Well, what metaphor should we use?” she said. They’re students and we’re teachers, no metaphor necessary.
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Diane said “Teaching is not sports, not business. It is the profession of developing children into responsible young adults.
I agree. The proliferation of “coach” as a job title is silly, especially when it extends to “life coach.”
Pure marketing hype.
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A baseball coach once said there are three ways to talk to people. You can talk at them, talk to them or talk with them. I prefer to talk with them. If you are the teacher, the students know that. If you respect them as people, they respond as people.
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Such an interesting post. As a primary teacher (K-2 for my entire 24 year career in public schools) I understand Mr. Green’s point as well as Diane’s. I have spent most of that time in a relatively comfortable middle-class community where we, too struggle between these two types of teaching. As a higher performing district, there is definite pressure in striving always higher- to be the best, to increase those test scores. Often we are asked to find and implement short-termed goals/solutions to make a difference right now! Yet the influx of programs, not just to meet Common Core, but to take advantage of professional development opportunities that hadn’t existed in my neck of the woods for more than a decade, has left all of us all with our heads swimming as we try to implement something new every year.
I’m in my second grade classroom right now, an hour before an inservice day with ELA coaches (our second year of coaching) where I know we will discuss (for an hour) this new math program and our challenge of teaching in a way that isn’t settling well with our students. Some of my colleagues are freaked- their students are not liking math for the first time ever! This program with its research-based methods are killing ’em- killing that spark that is usually there- the one we usually have no problem nurturing that entices kids with the desire to challenge themselves and appreciate the stuggle of finding the solution. We feel the pressure to keep sticking it out- so our kids will be ready and able to take those SBAC tests next year in 3rd grade, but we want them to love learning more! For me, there it is- transactional vs. transformational. In the hallways, some meet secretly- whisphering questions, asking who held on to some older materials, wanting to supplement with those activities that were well-loved by previous groups of kids. As I sit in meetings today, I’ll keep rolling this over in my mind. Gotta run and grab my binders…
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I see the “reformer” as a Transylvanian coach, viewing each player for their capacity to contribute blood.
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Yes, a Transylvanian coach for the vampire schools that suck the life out of public education.
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I just hate the kind of sneering tone. Everyone lacks “grit” because of a culture where “everyone gets a trophy”.
I just don’t think it’s true that people my age had much more rigorous and disciplined lives when we were in school. I don’t know what Golden Age of Gritty Americans they’re harkening back to. It feels false to me, like they’re romanticizing their own past.
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The Gritted Age? Wasn’t that the age of the Great Gritsby?
“The Gritted Age”
The “Gritted Age”
Was full of grit
And “Gated Age*”
Is full of it
*age of the Great GatesB
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Chiara: who but a very old and very dead and very Greek guy to provide an illustration of the notion that an idealized recent past is in stark contrast to the ruinous present—
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise.” [Socrates]
Not that long ago a twenty-something told me that his boss, a sixty-something, lamented that things were so different now than from when he was young: all that out of control drinking, for one thing!
Sure, the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s were so so sedate!
🙄
I still remember HS, where some students used to go downtown to give money to homeless people to buy beer and wine for them. I particularly remember a very cheap (someone once set some of it on fire) wine called Thunderbird—I never partook in such activities, but I do have eyes and ears and a memory.
Ignore such claims where possible. A cheap way to justify bad ideas and failed practices.
😎
P.S. SomeDAM Poet:
TAGO!
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WAY back in the dark ages when I played high school football
the mantra was
“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game”.
The coaches were not allowed to send in plays. The referee put his head in the huddle when a new player came in to play. The new player was not allowed to say even one word. The players were supposed to play the game. The coach was to teach them how to play, to educate in the fundamentals of the game. The players themselves learned by doing, an important aspect of education.
How far we have come in the last 60 plus years. I firmly believe it is not in the right direction.
Every since Vince Lombardi said something to the effect that winning was not just the important thing, it was the ONLY thing. we have put that mantra to effect in so many things in our personal lives.
My view: the posted blog shows the difference between education and instruction. That is the direction we have taken in the last half plus century.
Too much to post here but that is fundamental.
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“Teaching is not sports, not business. It is the profession of developing children into responsible young adults.”
While I agree with the first sentence I cannot agree with the second as it it too wide open a phrase to have agreed upon meaning. What we can, and should agree on is what our constitutional mandate informs/instructs us.
For public school teachers, teaching is the art of helping fellow human beings to develop their own sense of being (with all the attendant facts, knowledge, skills, etc. . . ) so that they may enjoy “A general diffusion of knowledge and intelligence [as] being essential to the preservation of the rights and liberties of the people. . . ” while understanding “That all constitutional government is intended to promote the general welfare of the people; that all persons have a natural right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness and the enjoyment of the gains of their own industry; that all persons are created equal and are entitled to equal rights and opportunity under the law; that to give security to these things is the principal office of government, and that when government does not confer this security, it fails in its chief design.” (quotes from the Missouri State Constitution)[my additions]
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I think teaching is an old and noble profession and deserves to be recognized for itself, for what it is. There has been a tendency for almost as long as I have been in the profession to find another name that is somehow more “friendly” or sounds more “cool.” When I was a kid athletes made an upper middle class wage by and large. I remember Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax holding out for $235,000, not each, but between them. They were among the best pitchers in the game, ever. Don Drysdale, for example won games as both a pitcher and a hitter. He homered in the winning run once, and then struck out the side. And Sandy Koufax was every kid in my neighborhood’s hero, we all wanted to pitch side arm. Today athletes not nearly as capable make far more, they are not working class, they are among the economic elites. We have made athletics, and profits, into something we very nearly worship, so everyone wants somehow to be associated with sports and everyone that works with others in any way is a “coach.” Coaching is what it is, and there are areas of overlap with other occupations. Education is not sports, just as it is not a business. There are sports and business principles that work well in education as well as in other things, but they are not the same and there ends are very different. Look at what happened to health care when we let accountants decide whether or not a medical procedure was necessary. We are not out to make a profit, we are not out to win “games” (which is another way the content of the classroom is being compromised by sports, even if only by analogy). I want my students to be successful, I want them to enjoy learning, I want them to see the long term advantages and the personal advantages to being learned and literate. I do not think there has ever been an age where anyone got rich being a teacher (though we are surrounded by people who are making themselves very rich pretending to be coaches of one kind or another, usually in some enterprise that promises easy and quick success). Education has never been profitable in the business sense, that is not its goal. It has always been about something other than winning.
When “fun” is made the heart of the educational enterprise, fun takes precedence over the content of the discipline. I think in many ways “coaches” imitate teachers in that they are trying to teach those they coach something (that may or may not be of value) but teaching is different and more complex. Often we need to find ways to encourage students to do things they do not want to do in return for nothing more than a grade that they may or may not value. We have little leverage in terms of being able to promise great rewards at the end of the process (though, of course, there are rewards for many, they just cannot be guaranteed). I have no objection to teachers wanting to see themselves as coaches if that works for them and it gives them pleasure, but the work we do is more than that and sometimes I think teachers are made to feel inadequate as if the work they do is not really that important and that they are misguided or inept in what they imagine are the ends towards which they work. At the end of the day we are called upon to make sacrifices for other people’s children who are unwilling to make comparable sacrifices for their children (this is certainly not true of all, or even most, but enough to make the job a bit more difficult). Often the only thing we have to engage students and get them to come along with us is the enthusiasm we have for the discipline we teach and if we start down the road of finding other names for what we do because somehow or other what we do does not seem important enough, than I think we are in danger of loosing more than just our passion for what we teach. I have quoted this before from John Ruskin, “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” The business interests behind ed-reform want to make tools of our children and our first duty is to see that that does not happen.
Cordially,
J. D. Wilson, Jr.
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If you view teaching as a matter of exercising writing, reading and thinking muscles, as many educators do, then the coach metaphor is very fitting. The brain is a muscle and it needs work outs. Stand by the mental athlete’s side and urge him on in his arduous mental weightlifting. This is what Common Core is all about. But mental weight lifting is the wrong metaphor. A better one is mental nourishment –feeding the brain important knowledge that will make the mind and soul grow. Thus a better, if still inadequate, metaphor for a teacher is chef.
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Why isn’t teacher the preferred metaphor for coach rather than the other way around?
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IIRC&IPDN, this all goes back to Plato’s catalogue of different styles of socialization, including that new-fangled kinder gentler way we today translate as education.
Transactional training is more or less what they called monitory (“watch and warn”) training, the grueling gritting process that beats the beast into shapes that approximate Value Added Citizens.
Transformational education by way of contrast draws out the virtue innately present in the child and actualizes its true potential in the form of the free adult.
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As Greene notes, the terms are borrowed from business.
Per wiki (emphasis mine):
“Unlike Transformational leadership, leaders using the transactional approach are not looking to change the future, they are looking to merely keep things the same. Leaders using transactional leadership as a model pay attention to followers’ work in order to find faults and deviations. This type of leadership is EFFECTIVE IN CRISIS AND EMERGENCY SITUATIONS, [AND] FOR PROJECTS THAT NEED TO BE CARRIED OUT IN A SPECIFIC WAY…
“Transactional leaders are concerned with processes rather than forward-thinking ideas. These types of leaders focus on CONTINGENT REWARD (also known as contingent positive reinforcement) OR CONTINGENT PENALIZATION (also known as contingent negative reinforcement)…
“With transactional leadership being applied to the lower-level needs and being more managerial in style, it is a foundation for TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP which APPLIES TO HIGHER-LEVEL NEEDS.”
Within this paradigm it seems clear that ed-‘reform’ policies, transactional in nature, are misapplied: claims to change the future of national education through forward-thinking ideas are spurious. The methods they’re imposing are likely at best to maintain the prior status quo. They can only justify them by maintaining a constant state of ‘crisis and emergency’.
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