TEACHER-COACH, single job, double role, isn’t it conflicting? Students may not know this, but a teacher’s passion to hone them to be better individuals is inevitable. Their role predestined as role models, parent, counselors, etc. for students is a never ending story.
Coaching can be practiced in association with teaching or can be practiced independent of teaching. In the present school setting, for example, physical education teachers are usually tasked to teach physical education subjects and at the same time tasked to do coaching for sports, which gives the teacher obviously two full time responsibilities.
Physical Education teachers are undoubtedly equipped with a full knowledge of physical education as a professional career. On the other hand coaching is learned from the first year of their teaching job as they familiarize themselves with school physical education and sports activities and as part of their assigned school task.
Teacher-coaches in reality are in a dilemma, because while coaching becomes part of their school task, no college or university offers a major or course in coaching but it is essential that they learn how to coach. The increasing participation of athletes, added sports programs, and women participation and sports program expansion are only few of what teacher-coaches attend too outside their roles as teachers.
Another role teacher-coaches have is to give great emphasis on the human-relations aspect, as they need to be prepared to handle the inevitable complaints and critics as well as earning the trust and relationships they have with their athletes, because handling the individual personalities of players, their parents, and even fans for that matter also presents problems and difficulties, the enormous workload and the roles they perform on top of a full time teaching job alone is exhausting, however, the “reality shock” is that, however conflicting their roles are, theirs is a vital factor for individual development.