Making a case for Coaching

Open letter to the Minister of Education and Inspector General of Police

Honourable Minister and IGP,

Recent media reports indicate that a number of teachers, including a head teacher, have been interdicted over coaching. Indeed, cases, and threats, against coaching have been so numerous in the media that one is tempted to think of the practice as unconditionally bad. Unfortunately, most editorials on the practice are not sufficiently cognisant of the cogency of the circumstances that have necessitated it. This, therefore, is to write in defence so that it will be clear, especially to the sceptics, that coaching is a contemporary educational need — especially at such a time when students’ holidays are here and it is time for coaching.

Bad Law

My initial thoughts are that your anti-coaching attitude is consequent upon the law, criminalising the practice, which is unfortunate because the law is bad— for, contrary to the basic qualities of good laws, it is not necessary, comprehensively definitive, just and, consequently, (effectively) enforceable as I will illustrate shortly.

Coaching is the giving of students extra teaching. This is why I am yet to be convinced on the necessity of a law, and policemen hours, against it. Moreover there are various school typologies: day, boarding, evening, weekend etc. I dare you to draw a line between teaching and extra teaching. In many boarding schools there are night lessons (extras); similarly, well-heeled parents, including officers of your departments, hire teachers to offer extra lessons to their children in the privacy of their homes and the law is quiet. Where then is justice in the same law when it criminalises the act of a day school calling in its students for holiday lessons and that of students choosing to see a teacher at such a time and place that they find appropriate, often with the informed support of the parents?

That coaching is bad is a famed but, unfortunately, rhetorical allegation. In fact, it may be argued that it is good because it: 1) increases guided-study time 2) allows more student-centred instruction, which is dwindling in the institutionalised classroom and 3) accesses many learners the teaching of upscale teachers, including UNEB setters and markers, they otherwise could not have accessed. I am, therefore, afraid that the anti-coaching law is based on myths rather than truths.

Myths and Truth about Coaching

Coaching makes teachers reluctant to teach well in the main stream classes. Irrespective of the true worth of this allegation, even education management novices discern that it suffices to set nonnegotiable performance targets for the teachers.

Coaching gives some students an unfair advantage. So be it, the way some students have text books that others do not have. In education, coaching — at home or otherwise — is a synonym of going the proverbial extra mile, a point on which we ought to be agreed.

Coaching is characteristically spoon-feeding. This is not as problematic as we are being caused to believe, especially because we are not clear on the gap between teaching and spoon feeding and which of the two the schools themselves are doing and with what results. We are, however, clear that whether we teach or coach, it is the same syllabus hence, the end justifies the means.

Products of coaching fail to cope with higher education. Substantiating this necessitates statistics on higher education failure rates that incriminate coaching. Otherwise, having been coaching since nursery did not keep me from earning a good degree.

Coachers are extortionists. One wonders what is wrong with a teacher offering to give (optional) extra lessons to a few students during the holidays at a fee. If it is okay for us to pay to talk to doctors, why not pay to talk to teachers?

Coaching deprives learners rest. Whereas it is agreeable that learners need a break off school work, themselves and their parents are the best judges of when to take this break. You may realise that while you can try to bar teachers from coaching, you cannot stop students who choose to spend the entire evening or holiday buried in their books.

Implicating the system

That coaching is a necessary condition for exhausting the ever widening syllabi is a truism. It is my prayer, therefore, that you either encourage the practice (and possibly allow for registration of coachers in accordance with relevant laws) or introduce a system in which teaching is clearly distinguished from extra teaching and the later is not a condition for success.