What Is My Coaching Philosophy

My Teaching Philosophy – Planning and Structuring Class

When I think about teaching I think about my coaching philosophy. A coach has tremendous influence on the physical and psychological development of their athletes – young and old. The primary responsibility of the coach is to enable their athlete to attain levels of performance not otherwise achievable: therefore, coaches need to develop skills to motivate athletes and establish the right conditions for learning. Being an effectual coach is more than understanding the technical knowledge of sport but knowing how to build trusting kinesthetic relationships.

In the field of Public Administration, the work of Donald A. Schön seems of particular importance to developing my teaching philosophy

The beginning of the class was ‘heavily structured’ by moving desks to focus on the person at the front and the person at the front doing most of the talking. As anticipated, most students sat at the back and this felt awkward to all (including me as the person at the front). As the class progressed, the structure of the class was changed to an open ‘fishbowl’ pattern to the idea on the whiteboard on “reimagining” philanthropy. The motivation was to mirror the idea of how social systems become capable of transforming themselves and shaping relationships – the dialectical relationship between organizational structures and human agency is an important tenant in critical sociology and as demonstrated in many of the readings, from Bordt’s piece using institutional theory and less obviously to Roelofs’ explication of the mask of

It is difficult to change the established class pattern and student habits. Personally, I am not fond of the question/answer discussion format. To me, this is the opposite of how a doctoral-level class should be structured. It might show how much the leader knows about the subject, but I have a feeling that this structure encourages students to gloss over the readings to answer the question. With that said, I don’t think my approach was any better. My hope was to have students come to class with (1) their own questions regarding the theoretical approaches, concepts and tools used by the various authors and (2) discuss that application of these to our understanding of nonprofit, voluntary, and philanthropy. I am not sure how I could have improved participation in an open-discussion format (as planned in the second half of class): I assumed at a doctoral level this would be