Welcome to busted pencils, fully led an education talk, educated educators, talking education.
Dr. Johnny Lupinacci here with you today for class in session with producer Jacob in the house.
No, Tim today, Tim is on excused absence.
That's not an unexcused absence.
That's on and
excused absence.
Uh, important work for Tim out in the community today.
Uh, but Jacob and I said, Hey, class goes on.
We've got a, we've got some things to talk about that both Jacob and I have been, you know, texting about chewing the fat on for some time.
Um, we tease it a little bit here on busted pencils from time to time.
We used to have a whole segment on extra curriculars, not being extra, but being essential.
And, uh, we're going to dive a little bit.
more into that today in class in session before we get going, Jacob, how are you doing?
I'm doing good, Johnny.
It's been a pretty good day for, for me here in the radio world.
And, uh, I'm a little disappointed that Tim couldn't be here today because I love it when all three of us get together on these shows, but I'm also a little bit excited because Tim, you know, he's up in his ivory tower.
He does want to talk about sports with you and me.
So while the Tim's away, the mice will play here and I'm excited for it.
Well, don't, don't let Tim fool
you.
He's a big sports guy too.
In fact, big in the, he loves wrestling.
He's big.
He's talked a lot of football with me over the years.
So we won't, uh, we won't count them out of this conversation in the long haul, but Jacob, you, you've teased it for our listener long enough.
Today's class in session, right?
The coach teacher connection.
And this is fresh on my mind pretty much every day.
Um, the heart of my teaching career.
has always been accompanied by coaching and it's been pretty special and pretty important.
I think to me, learning to become a pretty effective teacher, I can say that now, you know, 20 some years into my career, there's been certainly challenging years and challenging moments.
That's always true, still with all my experience, but mainstay throughout all of it has been a close.
coach teacher connection.
And I'll say Jacob, even for me as a student, we talk on busted pencils here about our experiences in schools.
And I think, you know, sports as an essential part of the curriculum, you know, always played a strong role in my education.
You know, oftentimes they're referred to as extracurriculars.
And, and of course, most certainly they, they come after our.
focus on being good learners in the classroom, our reading, writing, and arithmetic stuff.
But that social development that happens in class is key.
And our physical and mental growth outside of say traditional classrooms, you know, for some students really thrives in organized activities, whether that's chess club,
Right?
Whether that's theater, whether that's being part of a choir or any kind of dance team or, you know, baseball, football, soccer, any of the many great sports, uh, or, you know, past times activities that help round out an education for young people.
I think our core to our learning.
And we say that often, Jacob, but I thought today's class in session, we could tease out some of those important connections.
Like really.
More than just mentioning it, especially for the teachers and coaches out there listening or, you know, for students and parents, just kind of thinking about how both these roles, being a teacher and being a coach, you know, are fundamentally about unlocking human potential.
This is really cool, Jacob, like both being a coach and being a teacher, you're present at, you know, the development, the birth, the growth of new ideas, new skills, the application of those things.
can be summed up as being present at the site of unlocked human potential.
I love that.
Like when we think about leading learners, whether that's in our classrooms or whether that's at any activity or our dance studios in the ice rink, you know, I'm a hockey coach, so I'm going to be a little biased with those metaphors connecting to hockey.
But the other thing, Jacob, is that these two worlds often operate
in really distinct cultural circles.
I mean, there's a, there's a pattern here.
So we could say like both teachers and coaches are about unlocking human potential.
That's what we're all about.
But these activities, whether it's like, and I, and I could speak to this as a math teacher, let's say for example, and a hockey coach that those two worlds by and large operate in really different cultural circles.
Sometimes we try to think about like brain stuff and body stuff separate.
And that's
not, yeah, that's not, that's not all that unexpected given in our culture.
We hyper separate mind and body.
We talk about like rational thinking and emotional thinking.
We are like reactions, right?
We talk about, you know, using the mind versus using the body and end these sort of hard dichotomies.
And that's sometimes misleading, but, but contributing to those.
very distinct cultural groups.
We could say like sports and academics.
And that separation culturally can sometimes create barriers or, you know, can be misleading about what I call the coach-teacher connection.
And I love it because I teach teachers.
I also teach coaches.
I'm a teacher.
I'm also a coach.
And one of the great things about being both a coach and a teacher and teaching both coaches and teachers
was a few years ago, I had the realization, why aren't coaches and teachers in the same classrooms together?
Right?
Why aren't we as teachers learning from good coaches?
And why aren't we as good coaches learning from great teachers?
What's going on here?
So what if we learned from each other?
I love a good question, Jacob.
You know, ever since I first saw, you know, like, like, you know, science and action, like, hey, you have a hypothesis and you prove
the hypothesis or the null as a little kid, man, I was like, man, I love a good question.
So my question, Jacob, is what can we learn from each other?
And being in both roles, I've had the better part of the last half a decade to really kind of tease those things out, talk about what is the teacher coach connection and what can teachers learn from coaches and what can coaches learn?
from teachers.
So how about that for a class today, Jacob?
I think that's a pretty darn good topic, Johnny, because like you're saying, the essence of the activity of coaching and teaching, they're basically the same.
the same action, the same activity, but put into different context.
So you're doing the same thing to teach someone math as if you're teaching, you know, an offensive lineman how to get into a stance, how to follow the playbook correctly.
I mean, these things are, it's all about the medium through which you're doing your teaching.
I think you're onto something here, Johnny, that there could be a lot of ways for, I don't know what you want to call it, a bit of a synergy, maybe, but ways for coaches and teachers to learn some of the tricks of the trade from each other.
I think all of us as you know, whether you played sports or a sports fan, I think you can see some of those parallels between the coaches you've seen for your team over the years and some of the teachers you remember having as a kid or a college student and in life.
Absolutely, Jacob.
You know, I think we're vibing on the same frequency here.
And, uh, and one of the exciting things about this is that, um, you know, I've seen some amazing.
conversations between coaches and teachers, uh, because they do operate oftentimes in distinctly different cultural circles, right?
Whether it's like athletes or students and our students bleed into both of those.
And then oftentimes our coaches and teachers share those roles.
So, you know, there are some core similarities though, Jacob, I want to outline for this class and session.
It's not a good class.
If there's not,
you know, a good sort of focus to things.
And, uh, imagine I'm writing up on the white board.
Used to be the chalkboard back in the day.
That was a dusty past for me.
I loved it.
I always had chalk stains on my pants, right?
And then, and had to graduate to wearing either an apron or a lab coat.
So I wasn't wiping my, my chalky hands on the dress pants, but I was, you know, kind of, kind of taking care of my clothes a little bit better.
Uh, and then I graduated to a guest technology changed in the classroom and, uh, there was more marker boards than there were chalk boards.
And I think this is a much cleaner option, but I had to start, I had to stop wiping away, you know, what I wrote down with my hands and then wiping my hands on my pants because marker stains are much harder to get out in the Washington chalk stains.
Right?
But I, you know, I adapted with the technology.
So imagine I'm writing some core similarities up on the board, Jacob, and I'm going to run through them a little bit here for our listeners and for this class and session a day.
The teacher coach connection, both live for unlocking the human potential.
Like that's the moment where I'm excited about that.
That either group, whether it's our classroom or our team, you know, unlocking new potentials.
through our individual efforts towards, you know, teamwork.
But if I can break that down, I'm going to break it down into three core similarities that the two share and are really good at.
When you're a good teacher, this is something you're great at.
And when you're a really good coach, this is also something you're great at.
The first one, Jacob relationship building.
I think you mentioned it when you kind of summarized this topic a bit, but this is relational work, right?
Trust is at the foundation for both teachers and students and coaches and their participants, whether they're athletes or, you know, I might be coaching chess.
I won't necessarily consider my chess team athletes, but I'm going to approach the same way.
They're participants in my team.
Trust is foundational for both.
It's also really important that a good coach and a good teacher understand individual motivations.
We have to know our students.
We have to know our players.
We have to get to know who they are and what drives them.
What are the key factors in unlocking those great human potentials?
And that builds in with relationship building and trust.
The other thing, Jacob, is that great classrooms and awesome teams, whether we say great locker rooms or great presidents on the field or on the sidelines or backstage, whatever it is, we're coaching.
Great coaches put time into relationship building to build trust, right?
To understanding individual motivations and barriers.
They also work really hard to create psychologically safe places for risk taking and failure.
This is all part of the relationship building and great coaches and great teachers both work really hard at this.
That's a shared similarity.
If you have trust and you understand
your students are athletes and you're working hard to maintain physically psychologically safe places for taking risks and failure where Jacob, if you're in a math classroom, right?
And I say, who knows the answer to the second equation, right?
And you're not sure if you got it right, but you're feeling psychologically safe to raise your hand and say, Johnny, I think X equals two, right?
And I say, Jacob, it does not.
Equal to but good effort.
Let's work on this together, right?
If we have a safe place for you to make mistakes, right?
Then we are doing a great job at relationship building and learning thrives when we feel psychologically safe to take risks and even experience failures.
Every great coach I've ever learned from coached with or, you know, or I hear about one of the things they talk about is it's not about winning or losing.
It's about our hard work and our team support.
It's about the risks we take together.
We trust one another.
And sure, we might think losing a game or a match or having a bad performance is a failure, but it's not when we take a risk and we work hard to support one another and we learn from it.
It's in fact, why we do what we do.
Did we have fun?
Did we give our best effort?
Did we learn something?
Did we try hard and support our teammates?
Well, then there's no such thing as failure.
And when the coaches set that example in tone, right, we have winning programs always getting better because they didn't focus on the risk of losing being a bad thing, but being something that we do every time we either step on the field or go on the ice.
The same is true for classrooms.
If we can be wrong in our classroom, we can learn together.
In fact, we can learn that.
The goal isn't perfection.
It's shared learning.
And when we have those kinds of spaces, you talk to great teachers, they talk about wanting to have dialogue and conversation and questions, and they themselves even model making a mistake as part of being human.
But understanding where we go and how we learn from our mistakes, that's unlocking create human potential.
So relationship building, Jacob, that's the first one I threw up on the board here.
Well, if I could say, Johnny, in your relationship section of this coaching teacher thing, the first person who jumps out to my mind as a coach who was just great at that relationship side of things, I think about Phil Jackson as the coach of the 1990s Chicago Bulls.
I mean, that guy, boy, did he know how to understand his players, not just, you know, this isn't just a basketball player.
I'm going to know you as a person.
I'm going to understand where you come from.
I'm going to understand what you need.
And I think the ultimate example of having a relationship with your student and allowing that to help them learn, I think about Phil Jackson with Dennis Rodman, a guy that a lot of people
count it out.
They said, this is, this is that kid in my class who, who's always misbehaving.
I can't teach him.
Yeah.
He'll never learn anything.
He's not cut out to be a student.
Phil Jackson says, I'm going to get to know you.
I'm going to find out how to motivate you.
It doesn't work for everybody.
This motivates you.
What are your rules?
What are your terms?
And look what happens.
Dennis Rodman, pretty darn good basketball player for the Bulls in the nineties.
I think that applies to teaching and coaching super well, having those relationships and understanding your students and players.
You nailed it.
Exactly.
Great coaches
have figured this out.
Gone are the days where the coach is sort of the wizard of us, right?
That, that sort of, that sort of brain behind the scenes.
And I also Jacob attribute a lot of the change in what constitutes great coaching to years of good teaching.
being out there modeled for young athletes who are going on to even professional sports.
When they have had great teachers, they expect that from the people leading them.
And this applies also listener out there.
If you're like a manager or you're leading a sales team or anything, great leaders understand this.
Knowing the needs and what motivates the people working for you and with you is huge.
That relationship is core.
So that's the first one, Jacob, relationship building.
The next one, Jacob, this is key too.
I found this through great teachers talking about, you know, how they're successful in meeting the needs of all their students and talking with great coaches too.
It's the second one I'm throwing up on the board here.
Jacob is meeting people where they are.
This is a core element that is a characteristic of great coaches and great teachers, part of that coach-teacher connection I'm talking about, right?
We don't assess our students just for the sake of evaluating them.
It's to understand where they're at, to know where each of your learners are, to have kind of a baseline or an understanding of where the students at.
Like I might begin a class talking about, you know, Pythagorean's theorem, Jacob, triangles, right?
A squared plus B squared equals C squared.
I may even ask my students, who knows Pythagorean's theorem?
who remembers this or seen this before, you know, have a nice big right triangle up on the board and talk about where it's like hypotenuse and legs, right?
And I sort of get an understanding of where my students are at, right?
Same thing with any great coach, understanding where their athletes or participants are, where we set our expectations helps us understand how to motivate and support growth, right?
So differentiation comes into play with that.
Jacob, when we're expert level at meeting people where they are, we include good assessment.
We also have strong differentiation, right?
Not everybody learns and develops the same way.
I might talk through something and my auditory learners, my listeners, they really get it.
I may draw something up.
On the board, I may show a visual example and my visual learners, I may walk through it or have students demo something, even demonstrating Pythagorean's theorem, physically moving around, measuring things, applying it in the everyday world.
I have to think about whether I'm teaching or coaching, that differentiation is key.
Not everybody learns and develops the same way or at the same pace.
So understanding that we meet people where they are helps us be better teachers and better coaches.
Also, there's an art to this next one, Jacob.
Not only knowing where people are at and differentiating how we provide instruction or support is also balancing a strong balance between challenge and support.
Being able to, you know, invite our participants to what I call the growth zone.
Bring it in close.
Get in the growth zone.
Right.
And we'd say like, if we, if we refer to psychology, Vygotsky would talk about the zone of proximal development and drop some education nerd terms there.
But I like to summarize that as the growth zone.
We bring it into the growth zone where we're challenged to do something that's going to help us grow, develop, unlock our human potential and apply it.
So
We assess to understand where people are at.
We differentiate because if I just scream and yell about something or I just pass out some handouts for students to read or my team members to read the most recent information or read what I'd like them to learn, some may get it, others most certainly will not.
So I need to differentiate.
I also need to balance.
between challenge and support.
I got to invite folks into the growth zone, right?
And we got to push ourselves.
We got to have a good balance of participating in what we love to do when we're really good at.
And then also moving a little bit out into that uncomfortable zone, that zone of proximal development where we're not quite sure if we can do it, but a good coach and a good teacher will invite us there and we'll feel psychologically safe to take that risk and boom.
That's where new things happen.
And they don't always happen right away.
Right, Jacob?
We talked about it in relationship building.
Risk taking also includes sometimes when we experience this failure, not getting it right the first time.
Patience and support and reinforcement to keep practicing and get better.
So those are two things, Jacob.
Relationship building and meeting people where they are.
You got any questions or comments on that second one?
Meeting people where they are before I drop the third?
Well, the thing I'm really TNN on here, Johnny, with this is that I'm starting to see already, just from hearing the first two, how these are not totally separate things.
They actually build on each other and help form this pyramid.
I know you're Mr. Pythagoras and you love your triangles and your pyramids, but having those good relationships with your students and understanding them helps you know where they are, that trust helps them show where they are.
So I really like that aspect of these things.
And it's, it's kind of cool to see how doing, you know, having the right method in one spot leads to these openings and these opportunities in other areas of being a coach and a teacher.
Well, Jacob, think about it.
You're talking to a geometry teacher here, right?
So think about it as an equilateral triangle, right?
Each of these are points of the triangle and we've covered two of them.
Or if we're just more, if we want to separate a little bit from geometry and just
applied life situations.
This is the three legs on a stool, right?
If you have only two of them, you're falling over or you're really, really struggling to balance.
Yeah.
Right.
And so you want them all to be pretty equally strong or the same length, right?
So the third one, Jacob, I'll jump into it.
And you most certainly are correct.
These are interrelated and interdependent.
The third one though, is that what I call the feedback loop.
Hmm.
All right.
So the teacher coach connection similarities between great teaching and great coaching relationship building one, two, meeting people where they are and three, the feedback loop.
Now, let me talk about the feedback loop for a minute here.
What I mean is that a great teacher and a great coach requires constant observation and adjustment, right?
Specifically in the, in the actionable item of.
delivering timely feedback.
So if our students are learning something new, we're able to almost in real time, when possible, right, give them feedback, understand the mistakes they're making, walking them through those mistakes, those feet that that
Real time, almost immediate feedback drives improvement.
Same thing for a great coach.
When they're observing, when they're attentive and they're observant and they're comfortable making adjustments, I could say to my basketball team, Hey, when you go down low and you post up.
facing the basket.
I need you to turn your body a little bit and even better.
If I have video footage of it, you see pro teams with these kinds of luxuries, but the instance someone goes to the sideline, they're handed an iPad.
I promise they're not playing, you know, uh, be jeweled.
There's some game on there, right?
The, the support team, the coaching staff has queued up some real time feedback to say, make this adjustment here when we can see it and have that real time feedback.
We improve.
That drives improvement.
Also, part of the feedback loop, great coaches and great teachers have mastered the art of asking questions versus giving answers.
When you're operating a strong feedback loop, Jacob, you ask questions.
You don't give answers.
You come to the sideline from that same example of that.
You know, basketball player posting up just outside the paint, but their body's facing the wrong direction for the past they're about to get from the outside.
I say, I might ask the question.
You see this?
Where do you need to be?
What position does your body need to be in to make sure you're an optimal, optimal scoring position or you're there for a rebound, right?
I don't give them a direct answer.
I want them thinking.
So great coaches in the feedback loop ask questions.
And Jacob, I know you know that great teachers anchor their instruction in inquiry.
This is one that I say the teachers give the coaches more often is the teacher say when you're asking great questions and your classroom is firing on all cylinders because they're asking questions there.
Although learning is framed in inquiry, that's when our minds are engaged.
Right?
So great teachers know this and share this.
When you're asking questions rather than giving answers, right?
You're unlocking human potential.
I'd argue too, Jacob, you're also strengthening your relationships and you're meeting people where they are.
Cause you're immediately assessing if they know this concept or this thing yet.
So the three big ones, Jacob, relationship building, meeting people where they are and engaging in the feedback loop.
who the teacher coach connection is firing when that's happening.
What do you think about that, Jacob?
Johnny, I'm thinking that I'm seeing the way these things all come together.
And I'm seeing that these connections exist between teaching and coaching.
But I'm kind of wondering if you can tell me what are some of the practical things that coaches and teachers can learn from each other?
I mean, specifically, I'm kind of thinking like, what are the benefits for people like you who do both?
Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you what, uh, it's a luxury to be able to do both.
I kind of hinted at the fact that it was always part of my education to be, you know, involved in sports.
So then coaching and teaching kind of naturally fit together for me as a balance.
But let me just run through, uh, as a, as a teacher, what I learned from coaching
hit me
with it.
All right.
First thing, first biggest lesson I learned was about the performance mindset.
Right.
As coaches, we prepare for usually games, right?
We prepare for the game day.
So as, uh, as a coach, I always had a goal in mind, Hey, we're going to apply these skills that we're doing.
We're going to condition so that, you know, in the fourth quarter or in the third period, right?
That we have endurance that we have, you know, we can think when our bodies are tired, we always are preparing for the game where the season, there's always a real direct application, right?
And I think as a teacher,
That encouraged me.
I learned this from coaches that I could think more about real world applications in my classroom.
Right.
I could say we are learning Pythagorean's theorem because it applies to here, here and here.
And sometimes I have to create those real world applications.
It's building to this project that we're doing together, which is also related to life skills, whether we're involved in carpentry or, you know, measuring something or just wonder how tall something often the distance is.
And we know how far away we are from it.
We kind of figure these things out.
So I'm a big fan of what I learned from coaching is that
It was successful outside of the classroom for me because there always was a clear goal of what we were practicing for, right?
And in the classroom, especially as a math teacher, there wasn't always a clear application that the teacher was sharing.
So that was a big one for me.
I learned from coaches, right?
The other was to practice with purpose.
Great teams.
Every coach will tell you practice with purpose.
You're only as good in the game as you are in practice.
Every drill connects to an actual performance.
So as a coach, I lived and died by this.
If we were intentionally practicing with every drill connecting to actual performances that I expected or hoped to see in games, why wouldn't I apply that in my classroom?
Oh boy, Jacob, how much?
wasted time that I start to realize I have in my classroom, especially a math classroom.
If everything we're not doing isn't with intention towards the objectives that I'm teaching, then what are we doing?
So it was really about the lesson plan and the practice plan kind of becoming one, right?
Everything in your practice plan has intention, right?
Everything in our class plan has intention.
And I share that.
with my athletes and I also share that with my students why we're doing what we're doing and I would often say it's hard to be in math class but it's hard to be in math class because this is a special place and if it's not hard to be here then it's not special and if it's not special it's not worth showing up for working hard at so let's make this special and let's work together and I and I would promise everything we're doing is with intention towards our goals our shared goals of
whether it's the math objective or whether it's our growth as a class, right?
It's that performance mindset.
And, and Jacob, big picture, this applies to life because everyone we coach aren't going to the professionals in the sport that they're playing.
Yeah.
Everyone we're teaching in our math class isn't going to become a math teacher or necessarily going to apply that concept in their career directly.
So we're here to also learn to learn.
And one of those things I will tell everyone, you might not fancy math, but you have to take it, right?
But one of the big takeaways you're going to have from being in this class, just like I would say to anyone participating on the team is that you have a whole life ahead of you.
And everything we do in here helps us develop our performance mindset so that when we leave this classroom,
We are stronger performers at whatever it is we're doing.
We know the ingredients, the success formula to going in and getting better at something and getting a job done.
So that's one thing that I learned as a teacher from coaches.
You want to know something I learned as a coach from teachers?
Johnny, you're reading my mind here.
I did
want to know that.
I'm good at
that.
Yeah.
Good at that.
Okay.
See how I practice my asking questions, not giving directives there.
I
feel coached
up right now.
Cause you let me
do
that.
That was pretty good.
Hey, man, we're going, we played a win here.
I busted pencils, but anyways, Jacob, you know, anticipating that question, what I learned as a coach from teachers or from my classroom and being a teacher, right?
I would say the biggest thing is I guess there's two and they go hand in hand.
There's more.
I got a long list, but there's two that really stand out.
Scaffold your complex skills, right?
Breaking skills into teachable progressions.
Okay.
Teachers do this and coaches often don't, you know, we think we take, take, there, here's a problem in coaching Jacob.
A lot of coaches are really good at the sport.
They choose to coach or a lot of performers are really great performers.
Say I'm a, you know, a first seat violinist and I'm, you know, working with the band, right?
I know.
some pretty complex things that have become regular to me.
And there is a real art to scaffolding that complexity, right?
So that we design curriculum and we look at the long view of development and we break down skills into teachable progressions.
This is in essence what teachers do day in and day out and they know it so well.
So as a teacher,
If I'm thinking like being a great writer, teaching young people to be great readers and writers, I scaffold that over years of curriculum or even over weeks in my classroom into teachable progressions.
If I want someone to write a really great short story, I start talking about introductions.
I start talking about plot and character development.
I teach the parts as they add up to the whole.
coaches.
This is one of the big lessons I learned from teachers.
Teachers do this every day.
We don't always do this as coaches.
We ask our participants to do a pretty complex thing.
Like maybe it's like run a full press, right?
Defense and basketball or, you know, whatever sports metaphor comes to mind, you know, run the umbrella on the power play for the hockey team.
Okay.
That's great.
I can watch my favorite NHL team run the umbrella.
They pretty much all do, right?
But that's actually hinging on some pretty complex skills being very advanced and all the
people running that power play or that system.
So as a coach, I really got to break things down into teachable progressions in order to see success.
And that's something that took me a little while to learn as a coach because I was unlearning a lot of those complex things I assumed regular as a player.
And then as a coach and a teacher, the teacher side of me and my teacher colleagues helped me see the importance of breaking down skills into teachable.
Progressions start stutter there a little bit.
The other part, you got to scaffold
that word.
Yeah.
Start
with the components
and then build it up.
Well, Jacob, and then I'll give you the corner part to that.
I guess it's not the counterpart.
The partner to that is that coaches, teachers are really good at being patient with the process.
Okay.
Right.
And coaches, we got to be patient with the process means you don't have to be, you know, hands off.
You could be firm and disciplinary, you know, not, not, not angry or mean and, you know, consequence driven, but firm and disciplinary, empathetic and firm, but we have to be, we have to develop our patients with the process.
Not everything shows up in performance immediately.
Everybody doesn't start off a great writer in the classroom.
That's why we teach writing.
And the progress you learn to start to put together full sentences and great paragraphs and then work on your transitions.
And then on a full story or a full paper, you learn about the introduction, the body, the conclusion, all the parts.
And there's a process that teachers are pretty patient with.
They understand it.
We don't start off as great readers.
Over years of curriculum and support were developed into being strong readers.
So for every coach out there, a lesson to learn from teachers is patience with the process.
Not everything shows up in performance immediately.
Understanding mastery takes time.
It looks different for everyone.
And my great coach is out there listening.
If you do this, you know it, right?
You've seen it all of the sudden, the magic happens, right?
It's like you've been trying, trying, trying.
You've been getting good, scaffolded support.
You've been getting skills broken down.
You're practicing, you're practicing.
Then it clicks, right?
And we take one step further towards that mastery.
It takes time.
Be patient.
Don't give up on the participants, right?
That's our job as great coaches.
We learn from really great teachers is everyone has that potential.
Break down the skills, support it, right?
Help push.
that person to do better, right?
To do better and to be patient in the process.
Risk taking and experiencing failure isn't failure, right?
In the big picture, it's one step closer to that kind of mastery.
So be patient, right?
And not everything shows up
immediately.
And Johnny, if I could say, I think
from what you're talking about here in these situations, it appears that it happens overnight.
Finally, suddenly there's that moment.
But the truth is you shouldn't get frustrated because there is progress happening all along that way.
It just doesn't show up yet in some of the results.
Every step of the way, all of this, you're learning things, you're being taught things, your skills are developing, and then eventually it makes that moment where it comes together and you can actually start seeing it.
But I would say, just like you're saying,
don't get frustrated with the process, trust the process, understand that that development is taking place.
Going back to like the writing situation, Johnny, it's like you wouldn't judge how well someone's writing skills are developing based on the sales of their first few books.
You wouldn't do that.
It doesn't necessarily correlate.
You can see that.
Oh, actually, I read his first three books.
I didn't do well, but you can tell in book two and book three, he's getting better at what he's doing.
He's he's becoming a better writer.
And then maybe that seventh book actually takes off and people start buying it.
Doesn't mean you weren't developing in the meantime.
That's right.
That's right.
Be patient with the process.
Hard work and team support goes a long way.
It goes a real long way.
And Jacob, hopefully one of my.
intended outcomes of this as well, besides this awesome conversation and great class and session, is that we come back around full circle to that.
I say that I'm promoting here the teacher-coach connection, understanding that there's an artificial divide between academic and athletic development.
Let's hopefully break down that barrier and see that really great things happen.
when we're engaged in both.
Let's work on not separating them out and bringing these worlds together to better understand how we grow together.
Fundamentally, all of this is about becoming better versions of ourselves, whether we're coaches, teachers, or students, or athletes, or all of the above, or any combination of those.
The call to action is to help one another become better versions of ourselves.
And with that, Jacob,
It is now time for our moment of zen.
Small acts when multiplied by millions of people can transform the world.
Thank you pencil busters for listening to today's class in session and you can always grab great podcasts just like this one.
Search busted pencils on Apple podcasts Spotify or of course you can always find us on the civic media website
or at bustedpencils.com.
And don't forget to find us throughout the week every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for homerooms, class, and sessions, and always loads of fun to wrap up the work week on Fridays with Jacob's producer's choice.
And listen up, pencil busters.
You can always catch busted pencils at 3 PM central time across all the civic media network stations for that one hour of your favorite blue collar scholars every Saturday.
Tim and Johnny, hey, keep it.
Busting them pencils!