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Coaches are not teachers, but they teach.

Mainly, they observe, they judge, and they guide.

Coaches are like editors, another slippery invention.

The coaching model is different from the traditional conception of pedagogy, where there’s a presumption that, after a certain point, the student no longer needs instruction

Doctors understand expertise in the same way.

We have to keep developing our capabilities and avoid falling behind.

Expertise is thought to be not a static condition but one that doctors must build and sustain for themselves.

Coaching in pro sports proceeds from a starkly different premise: it considers the teaching model naïve about our human capacity for self-perfection.

“My wife always says that I don’t really know how I play,” he told me. “She is an extra ear.”

The professional singers I spoke to describe their coaches in nearly identical terms. “We refer to them as our ‘outside ears,’ ” the great soprano Renée Fleming told me.

Élite performers, researchers say, must engage in “deliberate practice”—sustained, mindful efforts to develop the full range of abilities that success requires.

So outside ears, and eyes, are important for concert-calibre musicians and Olympic-level athletes

For decades, research has confirmed that the big factor in determining how much students learn is not class size or the extent of standardized testing but the quality of their teachers.

Policymakers have pushed mostly carrot-and-stick remedies: firing underperforming teachers, giving merit pay to high performers, penalizing schools with poor student test scores.

alifornia researchers in the early nineteen-eighties conducted a five-year study of teacher-skill development in eighty schools,

Workshops led teachers to use new skills in the classroom only ten per cent of the time.

But when coaching was introduced—when a colleague watched them try the new skills in their own classroom and provided suggestions—adoption rates passed ninety per cent.

Coached teachers were more effective, and their students did better on tests.

One thing that seems clear, though, is that not all coaches are effective

Researchers from the University of Virginia found that many teachers see no need for coaching.

Novice teachers often struggle with the basic behavioral issues.

Good coaches know how to break down performance into its critical individual components

It holds that, no matter how well prepared people are in their formative years, few can achieve and maintain their best performance on their own.

She told me that she had begun to burn out. “I felt really isolated, too,” she said.

The coaching has definitely changed how satisfying teaching is,” she said.

Yet the stranger thing, it occurred to me, was that no senior colleague had come to observe me in the eight years since I’d established my surgical practice

I’d had no outside ears and eyes.

Since I have taken on a coach, my complication rate has gone down.

Coaching has become a fad in recent years. There are leadership coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, and college-application coaches

The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate

We care about results in sports, and if we care half as much about results in schools and in hospitals we may reach the same conclusion.

But the capabilities of doctors matter every bit as much as the technology.

What ultimately makes the difference is how well people use technology.

We have devoted disastrously little attention to fostering those abilities.

The prospect of coaching forces awkward questions about how we regard failure

But I had let Osteen see my judgment fail; I’d let him see that I may not be who I want to be.

Your performance is not determined by where you stand or where your elbow goes. It’s determined by where you decide to stand, where you decide to put your elbow.

“Most surgery is done in your head,”

we may not be ready to accept—or pay for—a cadre of people who identify the flaws in the professionals upon whom we rely

Coaching done well may be the most effective intervention designed for human performance