Week 3 - Coach

I talked to my coachee today about his experiences in education. He said he was an A/B kind of student who got by primarily by memorizing and cramming. Because of that, he didn’t retain much of what he learned in his early education. He came to realize, however, that he is a pretty analytical thinker, and that his problem had been that he wasn’t studying the right stuff – the stuff that interested him or appealed to his academic strengths. Now, with a great sense of self-awareness, he is trying to be better about studying the right stuff and doing it the right way. I love that his education may not have taught my coachee much about biology or history, but it taught him a lesson about himself and his styles that will legitimately benefit him in so many of his endeavors.

We also talked about my coachee’s choice to take time off from school. He realized at some point that he thrives outside the classroom and wanted to explore the informal learning that takes place in the real world. As he put it, the educational system is not geared toward self-learning, and that is what he wanted. Through his year off, a year without many responsibilities, he was able to build confidence, and most importantly, open-mindedness, both of which are major attributes needed in his field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA).

I was curious about a possible personal connection that my coachee might have to the kids in his program – he said he did not thrive in the classroom, which is also true of these students. So we began talking about the ways he incorporates his informal education, what he learned about himself in his year off, and what he’s gained from his friendships and relationships, into his teaching. Two main ideas emerged: patience and open-mindedness.

My coachee always thought of himself as a patient individual, especially in comparison to some of the other people in his life who were models of impatience. What he found, however, is that he was more subject to the learned behaviors inherited from these models than he previously thought. His students force him to his limits, and his frustration can get the better of him. He described this experience as “humbling.” The mere fact that he is not at patient as he thought can be a positive thing though. Having admitted that he needs to be more patient, he and I discussed the importance of making a conscious effort outside of work to analyze his limits and his frustrations. In doing so, he hopes to become a more patient teacher, husband, son, and friend.

Additionally, my coachee talked about the open-mindedness he gained from his year off from school. The people he met in that year proved the importance to suspending assumptions. This applied importantly to his work in ABA. It is easy to assume that kids in ABA don’t have much to say. Instead, he makes an effort to ask them questions and to engage in conversation, which is not always common in ABA settings. As he put it, there is more than meets the eye when it comes to these kids. There is also more to ABA than meets the eye. He talked about the perceptions of the field as being cold, generic, and at times robotic. People judge ABA programs based on what they have heard without being open minded to the techniques and unique strategies that may be different from program to program.

I also asked about what drew/draws my coachee to ABA. He talked about his initial distaste for lead teaching (which incidentally is what I do). Now, he said, he is less resistant to lead teaching. I asked him if something in his life had changed that made lead teaching more appealing and he talked about comfort levels. Now that he has watched classes and has analyzed class dynamics, it all just makes a little more sense and is a little more comfortable for him.

In talking about what he has learned from his work/teaching experience, he brought up an interesting and important point about conceptions of intelligence. He said that working in this program has helped him accept his own intelligence, enjoy others’ intelligence, see everyone as bringing something to the table.

Finally, we closed by talking about transformative learning experiences. I was fascinated by his response. The transformative learning did not take place in a classroom or in a work place. It was when he was sitting around with his friends talking about whatever was on their minds. There were only three or four people present, but as he put it, “thoughts were everywhere.” The conversation seemed limitless and opened the eye of everyone involved to new ideas and concepts that did not exist at the beginning of the conversation. There was no end result, no goal or purpose; it was just a conversation that grew and grew and built and built. Academic or business setting and their time constraints and pressure may limit dialogue, and this experience is proof. Maybe too much focus on an end result can prevent dialogue from going where it naturally would. An example from the education world that we talked about had to do with individual education plans (IEP). If you HAVE to get an IEP done, you are almost scared to let everyone get into a dialogue. This creates frustration because we have to answer to people who set limits on us even though they are not part of the conversation. The goal – to get the child on his/her IEP, is exactly what prevents us from doing what’s best for the kid. Maybe if a group of invested parties sat down and just started talking about the child, we would be more likely to achieve a productive dialogue.