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The Coach Approach . . . . A Winning Game Plan

Welcome to my pedagogical journey . . . . my journey ends with a  game-changing  pedagogical strategy that you have likely never considered . . . . but here's how it began. I am Eddie Brown (Ph.D. Organic Chemistry) founder of Chem21Labs (2005) and Chemistry Professor at Lee University (1990-2021) in Cleveland, Tennessee USA. I graduated from Lee University, earned my Ph.D. from the University of Tennessee and returned to Lee University (1990) where I taught General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Biochemistry and their associated labs. The first 2 - 3 years I was "honing my craft." The next 12 years were spent trying to find ways to get more of my students to engage in the material and to perform at higher levels academically. The workshops at the university and other professional meetings provided advise and some terrific-sounding slogans . . . .

  • Be the "sage on the stage" to motivationally "wow" them.
  • Be the "guide by the side" to motivate them to "take this journey" with me.
  • Students "don't care how much you know until they know how much you care".
  • "Great teachers inspire."
  • "Attend campus events / intramural games of your students and they will invest more in 'your class'."

To the best of my ability, I tried all the suggestions . . . . but nothing produced the results I wanted. Now, to be fair,  I'm not an "influencer"  . . . . I'm a chemistry teacher. It made me feel better about the situation when other teachers suggested that 25% of students will "get it" no matter what you do and 25% of students will "not get it" no matter what you do . . . . so teach to the middle 50%. Still others said that you can either go "a mile wide and an inch deep" or "an inch wide and a mile deep." My "acceptance" of this academic reality was short-lived . . . . I stubbornly wanted my students' learning to be  a mile wide and a mile deep  AND that most of my students would achieve this level of learning. I decided "there had to be a better way."

In thinking about the slogans above, I realized that the focus was on the teacher . . . . but most teachers I know have mastery of the course content (sage), are willing to help (guide), and truly care about their students' success. I turned my attention toward the student. Perhaps a closer look at today's student, a real-world student, can reveal a way to help more students excel academically. My investigations reveal that a fundamental flaw in the process of educating a class of students is created by the many roles played by the teacher. This "flaw" arises from the student's emotional response to their teacher's roles. Obviously, a teacher's primary role is

  1. ✔✔ the "coach" ✔✔ . . . . helpful, caring, wanting their players to succeed
  2. but on every grade day (homework, quiz, exam), teachers become the "referee" . . . . throwing the flag and assessing penalties

A referee with a red card.




I've seen some teachers put on the "scout's" cap and teach with the idea that their role is to determine if a player will play at the next level . . . not if they can be successful at the current level.

And then there's the "hostage takers" (no athletic equivalent) . . . . they "kidnap" student grades (the class average is a 49) and then have the students come by their office and "negotiate" for the release of some of their grade. But we will leave that and the associated "Stockholm syndrome" for another time.


It should not come as a surprise that learners create "positive emotional connections" with the coaches in their life. Transient "connections" can be made with referees, but whether the connection is positive or negative depends on whether the player agrees with a call. If a referee is perceived as being "against a team or player", the player-referee relationship quickly becomes adversarial . . . .  especially in the player's mind . Many students experience an academically debilitating psychological conflict when the coach and referee coexist as "their teacher".

In today's classrooms, negative "self-talk" is robbing most students from realizing their academic potential. Students blame their "inate deficiencies", their "exam prep", and their instructor/referee for a poor academic performance . . . . all teachers hear the following after a graded assignment:

If coaches can eliminate the players' negative self-talk, they will change the outcome of the game.

  • "I'm not good at Chemistry."
  • "I studied the wrong things."
  • "If I studied 20 more hours, I would not have scored higher on the exam."
  • "Those questions came out of left field."
  • "The exam was too hard.
  • "The grading was too picky."

John Wooden said it best for athletics . . .

"The coach is first of all a teacher."

I propose that great teachers are first of all a coach. Coach or referee . . . . which role do you most enjoy? If you said "coach", keep reading to see how you can be 99% coach (a 99% truly enjoyable experience for you and your students), have an amazing teaching career, and develop the best "academic version" of your students - a WIN WIN! for everyone.

First, let's explore the question . . .  what is education ? My definition is very simple . . . education is the academic movement of a novice (N) toward the expert (E) level. So "N" is transitioning to "E". This raises the question "what can "E" do?" Here's four competencies . . .

  1. experts can quickly and accurately provide a 3-8 second answer for thousands of fact-based questions in their discipline.
  2. experts can describe and explain a complicated series of steps used to reach higher levels of thought . . . . let's call it "complex thinking."
  3. through repeated retrieval, experts maintain facts and complex thinking pathways in long-term memory.
  4. experts practice "critical thinking" - an activity where the expert forcibly interacts new information and ideas with their existing schema. If a connection is made, the new information is added to the expert's schema. If no connection is found, the expert can research published sources to see if another expert has reported a connection. If that fails, the expert can mount a more rigorous investigation to acquire additional knowledge in an effort to expand their schema to encompass this new piece of information.

It seems that the first three competencies require substantial  academic sweat  and the last is a "state of persistent questioning" - an activity that we should encourage once the student's schema contains hundreds (maybe thousands) of easily retrievable items.

A teacher-coach and her students.

Here's what you've been awaiting . . . . the  coach approach . As academic coaches, let's implement a "game plan" where the novice develops the first three expert-level competencies without ANY negative self-talk. The academic "practices and drills" outlined below and their prescribed administration establish this winning game plan. With this plan, students will know that the coach is with them each step of the way - there is no referee.

  1.  Timed-Repetitive Quizzes (TRQs)  are a low-stakes, high-reward drill that develops the first expert competency.
    TRQs build the database. You (the expert) decide how much of your chemical information should be transferred to your students after a year of chemistry . . . . Chem21Labs has created over 4000 sample GChem TRQ Questions for this activity. Each TRQ question can be accurately answered in 3-8 seconds by most novices on the 4th day of testing. Each TRQ assignment contains a pool of related questions and each assignment is placed on a "repeat schedule" that maintains these quick-response facts in the "learned state".

    "You must inspect what you expect"
    Paul J. Meyer – Founder of the Personal Development Industry

    Consider a TRQ assignment that contains 60 question where an image of a molecule is shown to the student and they must choose one of the following: number of electrons (valence, bonding, non-bonding), electronic geometry, molecular geometry, hybridization, bond angles, or polarity. This TRQ assignment has several paths that lead to full credit . . . .
    • novice path - students correctly answer "x" questions (i.e. 75) by taking 10 - 20 TRQ quizzes. This is the path most students travel on the first three days of testing.
    • near expert - student correctly answer "x" out of "y" (i.e. >e;8/10) questions on "z" (i.e. 3) TRQ quizzes in less than "t" (i.e. 60) seconds. Most students travel this learning path on the 3rd and 4th day of testing.
    • expert - students correctly answer "y" out of "y" (i.e. 10/10) questions on a single TRQ quiz in less than "t" (i.e. 60) seconds. Most students travel this learning path on the 5th day of testing and on retesting.

    To ensure students take this activity seriously, TRQ drills should be 20% of the course grade . . . if you don't "come to practice," you won't reach your potential. While 20% sounds like a lot, you must realize that students in April will be retesting on TRQs first introduced in August so that the knowledge is maintained (Competency 3) in long-term memory. Students spend an average of 2-3 hours per week on TRQ drills - at the end of the school year, they can quickly and accurately retrieve thousands of chemical facts from their own database . . . . just like you, the expert. TRQ assignments build a teacher-specified chemical database in the student's memory and transform a novice into learner with an expert-level database of information that can be retrieved quickly and accurately in 3-8 seconds. A thorough description and explanation of TRQs is found here.

  2.  Tutorials and Learning Pathways  are interactive assignments and processes that help students navigate a series of complicated steps.
    Tutorials and learning pathways build primary connections.After the TRQ "conditioning," your players are ready to "learn a play." Repeated use of an interactive learning pathway or tutorial maintains the "play" in long-term memory. For Tutorials, full-credit is awarded once the student successfully completes the steps - students only have to "keep trying." Students spend ~1 hour per week learning "new" plays and rehearsing "old" plays. More about Tutorials and Learning Pathways is found here.

  3.  Homework  Homework builds secondary connections. The TRQs and Tutorials have prepared the student for this stage of learning but that preparation may be derailed by the student's underdeveloped ability to resist the path of least resistance. In the real world, students do not perceive "outside help" on "out of class" work as cheating. By their nature, referees lives in the ideal world where their day is spent investigating infractions and assigning penalties. But, at the end of a real world day, homework grades will still be much higher than Exam grades because students perceive the "goal of a homework assignment" is to get the best grade possible. Instructors assign it as practice for the upcoming game where there's only individual competitions scheduled. More about Homework is found here.

  4.  Quizzes and Exams  Exams certify the database and test all connections. This is place in the educational process where the coach must become the referee. As the academic game day approaches, student stress and anxiety increases and negative self-talk begins. In many cases, this negative self-talk devolves into a self-fulfilling prophecy - a false expectation that leads to its own confirmation. Before the referee in you offers advice on how to "think positive thoughts", you should know that human nature contains a "negativity bias" - we think about negative things more frequently than positive ones and negative events impact us more than positive ones.
    We have to assign homework and give exams . . . . right?
    Yes, of course. The question is "can we assign homework and give exams as a coach and preserve the intended effects of each?" The answer to that question is also Yes . . . . here's how:
    • The coach assigns homework problems where everyone has the exact same problems and students are encouraged to work with each other, a tutor or the coach.
    • To reinforce the purpose of homework, the students are informed that the exam will contain a subset of the homework problems . . . . the exact problems. The student is encouraged to work as long as it takes to master the skills assigned by the coach.

    The coach has just elevated the importance of homework, increased teamwork, sidelined the referee and made the game a "skills test". This is actually a coach's dream . . . . the coach presents EVERY scenario she want her players to encounter, she prepares drills to dominate the situation and then on game day she becomes the referee and evaluates the players execution of the game plan. This momentary role reversal is accepted by the players as a necessary function to evaluate them on actions they have repeatedly practiced.

    For General Chemistry, 40-50 questions per chapter is appropriate . . . for Organic Chemistry, 60-70 questions. So, an Organic exam over 4 chapters will come from a 280-question homework pool. The exam will contain 15-20 questions. When I first implemented this, 80% of the exam questions came from the homework pool (20% were new questions) and the class results were "better, but not satisfying". The results were the eactly the same the next year when I increased the number of homework questions to 90%. My explanation is that at 80% (and 90%) some students still had the negative self-talk of "if I studied more, it would not help because 20% (or 10%) of the exam questions will be so hard that the best grade I can get is a C (or B) in this class." The mistrust students have for the referee persona is so strong that they talk themselves into failure. They assume the absolute worse motivations and actions from the referee . . . even from a 10% referee / 90% coach. I happily report that everything changed when 100% of the exam questions came from the homework. The loudest voice in the player's head was saying "Coach wants me to do a lot of hard work and he or she seems very willing to help me." Now, a student need only answer the question "Will I work as hard as the coach expects?" If the answer is "yes", they will also learn that

    "Hard work beats talent when talent doesn't work hard."
    Tim Notke - High School Basketball Coach

    This approach has two outstanding consequences for your team:
    • when students do "get help", the end result is not the answer, but the ability to get to the answer on the skills test.
    • since students are now encouraged to work together, you have just "Chegg-proofed" your class and saved your students money. Students helping students is the true Dream Team.

    "A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle."
    Father James Keller

    "The strength of the team is each individual member, the strength of each member is the team."
    NBA Coach Phil Jackson


  5.  Lab Report  Labs build sensory connections. At Chem21Labs, labs are "our thing". We love the way labs add sight, smell and sound connections to the novice's growing chemistry schema. To totally eliminate the student self-talk of "I just need the answer to get a good grade . . . . I will learn it later", the Coach should encourage students to work together on learning "how" to perform the lab calculations with their own data and then have a skills test at the beginning of the next lab period where students demonstrate proficiency on a portion of the lab calculations. In addition to auto-grading the student's lab report, the Chem21Labs program can deliver and auto-grade this in-class skills test using randomized lab data - every student gets a different set of data. Inform the students that the skills test counts for 20 - 30% of the lab's overall grade. This point distribution communicates to the student the importance of learning "how" to perform the lab calculations.
Does research support the coach approach? Check out a 27-year longitudinal study of an Organic Chemistry course.

A more detailed account of the Organic ACS Exam Scores from 1990-2017 can be found here. To summarize . . . .

  • Organic ACS results:
    • 1990-2005 (Traditional class - 248 students) - ACS class results: 41 percentile
    • 2005-2017 (Coach Approach - 389 students) - ACS class results: 59.4 percentile
    An increase of 18.4 percentile.
  • The number of A/A- increased from 19.4% (1990-2005) to 44.0% (2005-2017) in the test classes.
  • The number of students scoring above the 90th percentile increased from 13 (1990-2005) to 46 (2005-2017).
  • Attrition in the 2nd semester Organic Chemistry class went from 15% (1990-2005) to 0.8% (2005-2017) in the test classes.

The TRQs, Tutorials and Homework required a significant amount of academic sweat for each student in the class, but the results demonstrate that it was "worth it" for both player and coach.