In yesterday’s loss to Seattle, Denver, and all the other teams in the National Football League, and a whole lot of other Americans who work with groups of people, actually won. Why?
Because we saw modeled, by the Seattle team, interactions between the team and especially it’s coach Pete Carroll that describe a new model, a 21st century model, of managing groups of individuals. The Seahawks worked so well together in such a happy way that they crushed Denver.
Why was this? In my opinion, their success can be expressed as due to one simple predominant idea – their coach gave them through his coaching style the idea that they can’t be wrong.
The Seattle players played with joy and happiness. They seemed so free. There didn’t seem to be an ounce of fear on their side of the ball. They clearly weren’t afraid of being pulled out of the game if they made a mistake.
When they came out of the game, each time they were met by a smiling coach who went up to them and said something positive to them. This allowed them to do what they did best, run faster and hit harder than any team I have ever seen in my life as a fan of professional football.
A second aspect of Coach Carroll’s coaching philosophy, as I see it, is that his players do not consider him the most important aspect of their game. For them, it’s not about their coach but about them. They had been given permission, through their coach’s constant encouragement and belief in them, a never faltering encouragement, to simply be themselves and take over the field with their own style of mayhem, one not remotely seen in other NFL teams this year. Coach Carroll encourages his players, but he does not dictate to them. They dictate. Ferociously.
Encouraged in this way, and seemingly thinking that they cannot be wrong, they turned into efficient and elite power athletes the likes of which Denver had not come close to seeing all season. The Broncos, who are built around the presence of one central towering player in Peyton Manning, depended in every way all season on each play on Manning, and much less on each other as a group.
The same thing can be seen in language classrooms that fail. There is overdependence on one person, the teacher, who controls everything. We now see in all the documents published by ACTFL that they advocate a Pete Carroll and not a John Fox kind of coaching philosophy. It’s not all about one person, but about including every single person in the group interacting in a reciprocal and participatory way in the language, and having fun doing it.
When our students feel that they cannot be wrong, and that what they do and say in class counts for something, they show up in ways that we could never have imagined when we used the Manning Model of teaching a language, in which everything revolves around us, the teacher.
In our classrooms we should focus less on how we teach and more on how the students learn. We should focus less on ideas* and more on what the students are experiencing in our classrooms. I believe that Coach Carroll’s coaching philosophy is not about how he coaches but rather on how his player’s can play best, and he is there to help bring about that setting for them on the field. There is a difference.
Thus in yesterday’s Super Bowl another parapet crumbles off the old castle of the idea that kids can be wrong. The old model of education just keeps crumbling, every day, and a new model of encouragement mixed with happiness and the central idea of unconditional positive regard for everyone on the “team” is quickly taking it’s place. The idea of having fun learning is starting to come into play more and more, now because we finally have a way to teach that is actually fun.
Yesterday, when one group of talented athletes met an equally talented group, and crushed them, it was because of the way they had been treated all year by their coach and most probably how their other coaches had been treated by Coach Carroll as well, judging from the hugs and positive regard seen on the sidelines on the Seattle side for the entire game.
*there is only one idea in all that we do in our comprehension based classrooms, and that is that we employ comprehensible in forms that work best for us as individual teaching artists. Of course we focus on technique, but, in order to get to the level displayed by the Seahawks yesterday, we must do more than just focus on how we are teaching, we must also focus on our players in the way Pete Carroll does during a game. That is real personalization.
Related:
https://benslavic.com/blog/its-how-we-feel/
https://benslavic.com/blog/glancing-off-their-hearts-with-jgr/