Because educators and students experience a cascade of external and internal pressures and performance goals, educational settings often reflect a command-and-control structure that hinders rather than supports basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and belonging. We seek to transform these conditions, in part, by changing how educators perceive themselves and their relationships with students, parents, and colleagues. Helping educators shift their self-perceptions of their own professional identity and practice provides real benefits for the performance and wellbeing of both educators and students. The goal is to transform the conditions in which most educators work from being primarily top-down or controlling to one that is autonomy-supportive.
We suggest that educators, at times, may play different roles, depending on a variety of intrapersonal and interpersonal needs. By highlighting these roles, we do not mean to suggest that educators should expect to wear even more “hats” inside and outside of the classroom. Many educators already perform these roles and embody their qualities to varying degrees. We wish to acknowledge the good work already taking place and articulate the importance of explicitly integrating these points of view into your own professional identity and practice.
Self-Reflection: Consider the role or roles you commonly perform in your educational setting. Do you always perform the same role, or does your role change depending on the context? How do you think, feel, and act in each role?
The three roles we explore in this lesson are: classroom scientist, classroom leader, and academic life coach.
As a classroom scientist, educators must constantly engage in both introspection, or the examination of one’s own mental and emotional processes, and observation of others. In this capacity, educators hypothesize, gather evidence, and remain open to alternative explanations and outcomes. Each day—indeed, each lesson—represents an opportunity to conduct miniature learning experiments with oneself and one’s students. As many seasoned educators know, experimentation is an essential component of effective teaching.
Most educators are already quite familiar with the role of classroom manager (or classroom leader). However, we invite educators to reimagine what this could look like for themselves within an autonomy-supportive classroom environment.
Academic Life Coach
Finally, coaching is a voluntary, collaborative, goal-directed, and solution-focused endeavor that draws from a variety of learning methods and psychological approaches to empower individuals to pursue their own interests and help them develop their capabilities.
This can be intimidating for new educators who are still gaining confidence in their abilities, as well as veteran educators who were trained primarily in didactic, top-down, or controlling pedagogical styles. Thinking and acting, at times, as an academic life coach does not mean letting one’s students run amok. Rather, it is an acknowledgement of the inherent agency of students, and it can help educators become more comfortable with the fact that they can’t control everything in their classrooms. Nor is that even desirable. Support and influence? Yes. Control? Unlikely.
Given all the responsibilities classroom teachers must juggle, the role of academic life coach, which requires giving more individualized attention to students, also may be enacted by a variety of student support staff, including counselors, paraprofessionals, and family liaisons.
However, classroom teachers can still learn from and incorporate many of the same coaching principles, processes, and practices into their teaching. Learning to be confident, comfortable, and effective in navigating this terrain takes time and effort. But we suggest that knowing when to lean in with more didactic methods and when to hold space for students’ interests and autonomous exploration can have profoundly positive impacts on students and educators alike.
Self-Reflection: Have you ever experienced a coaching relationship before, either as a coach or coachee? What worked well and what didn’t? What qualities do you think a coach needs to be effective?