Coaching in the Classroom by Linda Hopper, PhD (Book Excerpt)

This is about starting a movement—from the grassroots of teaching. We are professionals. We know the students we teach in our schools. We see their needs. We can make a difference. And, trust me, I know there are times when teaching is overwhelming, but incorporating coaching into your classroom will help your students and help you as you learn and practice your own personal growth and development. Coaching in the classroom is the gateway to self-awareness, leading to living healthier, both physically and mentally, for students and teachers. The amount of time you spend with your students over the course of the school year means that you are uniquely positioned to do this.

While many advances in education have been introduced over the years, such as the concept of multiple intelligences, group work, project-based learning, STEM programs, and critical-thinking skills, technology is changing our world ever faster and in profound ways that make it difficult to keep up. How do we prepare students to take on these challenges? The straight answer is we can’t if we continue educating as we have. We need to shift our thinking in how we prepare students for the future.

In the past, students attended school to gain knowledge they could not obtain elsewhere and to prepare them to become productive citizens of society. While it is still necessary to give students a basic foundation of learning, knowledge is readily available to them twenty-four hours a day via the internet. I believe it is time to repurpose education. Clearly, the needs of students have changed dramatically in a hundred years.

The world of today’s student is vastly different from a student growing up in the 1920s. In 1920, automobiles were just being invented, and only the rich could afford them. Today, families may have multiple cars, and we are preparing for driverless and airborne cars. In 1920, the main form of communication over distances was by sending mail via post. Even in the early 1970s, as an exchange student to South America, my only form of communicating with my family was through snail mail, and it took three to four weeks to get there. Today, we communicate instantly with people all around the globe through small portable phones. News that took months to reach people in the early part of the twentieth century is now plastered across the internet in minutes or even as it is happening. It’s tremendously difficult to shield children from what is happening in the world. If all we see in the news is the horror, the sadness, the fear, and the violence, we have to wonder how this affects our students. Does the world appear unsafe to them? Is it causing more anxiety at an age when they are encountering a lot of differing feelings? Not even schools are safe havens anymore; mass shootings are becoming a more common occurrence.

So much has changed, and the challenges of today have multiplied in complexity. The cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all, assembly-line approach to education is woefully inadequate in preparing today’s students for the world. Teaching to standardized testing does little to help students understand their emotions, resolve conflicts, or recognize their strengths. We erode students’ motivation and self-confidence when they do not conform to the expected standard by giving them bad grades. By shifting our focus in education to coach students in moving forward in their personal development and well-being, using our subject matter as the backdrop, we do far more in advancing student self-efficacy and self-confidence than in teaching to the test. Let me be clear: testing provides useful and necessary information to guide our teaching, but students need far more than what we are currently offering. Students are not inspired by testing, especially when it is only used as an evaluative tool for educators and schools or to get into college. Testing should inform our teaching; it should not be the end goal. No wonder students are not returning to school after the pandemic. Their spirits are being stifled without creative exploration—as are teachers’ spirits. By teaching to a test, we destroy love of learning; we don’t feed it.

In a joint study published in Learning and Instruction (April 2020) conducted by Yale University and the University of Leipzig, 75 percent of teens reported negative feelings about school with feeling tired, stressed, and bored as the three most prominent. This proved to be true across all demographic groups. The researchers concluded the following: “Given the psychological and developmental significance of feelings in school, it is noteworthy that high school students now report more severe and chronic experiences of negative feelings in their lives. Compared with those growing up in past decades, adolescents today are more likely to show anxiety, depression, and feel as if they do not have much control over their lives.” Given the amount of time students spend in school and how influential education is on a student’s future, this finding is rather alarming, but it is not surprising. We see the evidence every day as teachers.

A growing topic of concern for many parents, educators, and clergy is to what extent social media and the internet affect the mental health and well-being of our children. While there are many benefits to social media, it can have a detrimental effect on young people. According to a Pew Research report in March 2023, 28 percent of parents were worried or extremely worried that their teen’s use of social media could lead to anxiety or depression.

As teachers, we see on a daily basis how social media and accessibility to technology interfere with students’ studying and sleep time. Social media causes anxiety and depression in a lot of students because it often depicts reflections of life that aren’t true reflections, such as perfect body types and perfect lifestyles. Students aren’t always able to be discerning about what they see on social media. The challenges that social media generates for young people today are not like any we’ve encountered before. Coaching helps students explore ways to meet these challenges with more confidence and resiliency.

Linda Hopper, PhD, is a former business coach, trainer, consultant, and teacher. She relies on over three decades of experience in business, education, coaching, and as a parent to share insights into how the empowerment method of coaching fits into education. She currently travels and provides workshops to help teachers learn more about becoming a teacher/coach in the classroom. To learn more, please visit www.lindahopperphd.com.