How to win in teaching
Here’s a great read that I would like to recommend – and use to make a point about learning and education.
Yesterday on ESPN.com, Wright Thompson posted a magnificent piece called Why Steve Kerr stayed with the Warriors. Yes, it’s about an NBA coach, but like most great stories, it’s also about much more. On the surface, Thompson’s 34,000-word epic details Kerr’s journey, including the assassination of his father, the president of American University of Beirut, in 1984, when Kerr was playing basketball for the University of Arizona.
Looking deeper, the story reveals much about the nature of coaching and how it embraces education and family. That brings me to my takeaway, which I would like now to forward to you.
No matter how hard politicians and business people might try, effective education cannot be standardized or industrialized. No one can legislate a high-quality education. It’s not a consumer product, where you can compare reviews and select the best school or teacher for your child or yourself.
Education happens in the unique relationship between a teacher and a student. For self-starters, the teacher can be something inanimate: a book, a website, a YouTube video. But for most of us, we need someone like Steve Kerr to get to know us and learn how to motivate and steer us to develop.
In Thompson’s story, Kerr recalls meeting with former Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, who asked him how Kerr was going to run his team. When Kerr asked about offensive systems, Carroll responded, “That stuff doesn’t matter.”
“He knew everything about football and nothing about coaching,” Thompson wrote of Carroll’s early days as an NFL head coach. “So he took a huge step down the ladder and got a job as a position coach with the 49ers, mostly so he could be close to the retired legend Bill Walsh, who kept an office in the Niners facility. Carroll spent hours with Walsh and learned that coaching was about values.”
I started as a college journalism professor because the University of Southern California needed people who knew website publishing to teach the online journalism courses the school was adding. Echoing Carroll – who was USC’s football coach at the time – I knew everything about making websites and nothing about teaching students.
I thought I was teaching online journalism. I wasn’t. No one ever teaches any subject in a school, in a university, or on a basketball court. You teach people. And when you do that, then they can learn the subject at hand.
From Carroll, Kerr learned the importance of reaching out to his players, to meet them where they are – physically, emotionally, intellectually. Only then can a teacher learn what a student needs to get to the place where the teacher wants them to go.
You want to improve education? Forget about core curricula, standardized tests, and all the other education “reforms” that have done so much damage to the art and science of education over the years. The number of students who read for pleasure is collapsing. Teaching is not a demand. When you try to make it that, do not be surprised when students shut down, or rebel.
Great education starts with teaching teachers, just like Steve Kerr learned from Pete Carroll. Just like I wished someone had done for me before I was thrown in front of a classroom of undergraduates. Yes, teachers need to know their subject matter – but they need to learn how to connect with and motivate students, too.
After that, teachers need a safe environment and the materials their students will need to learn. You can’t play basketball without a ball and a court.
If there is a formula for great education, it is this. Train teachers. Pay them what they are worth. Support them. And then trust their professional judgment.
That costs money, yes. That also requires school boards and principals with the right judgment to hire the right teachers for their community. But there is no other shortcut to success. Anyone who has followed pro sports knows that owners who micromanage their coaches are the ones whose teams most often end up at the bottom of the league.
Perhaps more politicians, voters, and pundits should keep that in mind when talking about classroom education in their schools.