About 18 months ago, during the all too brief run of coach Nelson, I wrote a post called ‘On the Value of Coaches as Teachers’. In that piece, I looked at the differences in coaching styles between Eakins, Nelson, and to a limited extent Tom Renney, filtered through my usual analysis of teaching practices and philosophies. As we are now 1 season and 2 months into Coach Todd II’s reign, and given the recent struggles the Oilers have had, I thought it might be time to revisit the coach-as-teacher concept.
One thing I have always tried to accomplish in the classroom is to demonstrate a reasonable level of flexibility. That’s not to say that I subscribe to the ‘every individual student is a special snowflake’ narrative – I don’t and that’s crap! – But demonstrating openness and a willingness to meet students where they’re at, especially for mature students, non-traditional students and first-generation college students, is often critical for their success. You have to give them the tools they need to succeed, but recognize that not every student’s toolbox comes stocked with the same stuff.
In some respects I lean a bit towards the old school, Socratic approach. Yet for the most part, my teaching philosophy and praxis comes from a school of thought called ‘critical pedagogy’. The work of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator and philosopher, is particularly important and influential. I’ve written about him here and think he’s worth revisiting in this context. Freire’s most influential work is Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book I have my Sociology of Education class read every year. I never get tired of these ideas and I find something new every time I re-read it.
I am writing about this book again today because of some of the recent comments I’ve read on other Oilers blogs and twitter feeds. There is a growing sentiment that Todd II is too inflexible in his systems and very poor at in-game adjustments beyond throwing his line combinations into the McBlender. (This is as opposed to the MacBlender, which would have Toby Peterson as our PP QB and other, similarly hilarious and frustrating decisions.) In actual fact, Coach MacT was very good at making in-game and in-series adjustments. 2006 was an incredible run of good coaching, changing systems to match the opposition from series to series, but I digress.
Anyhoo, McLellan’s critics have pointed to his rigid power-play structure, his inability to make adjustments on the fly and some of his more curious line-up decisions as weaknesses. Some have even taken his initials (TMc) and turned them into an acronym for ‘thoroughly mediocre coach’. It’s clever, but I take no credit for it at all. At first, reading these criticisms seemed like a decade of sadness and frustration had caused another round of chicken-little syndrome from the fans. Now I think there might be more to it than that; from the perspective of an outsider, it feels as though there is something missing in the way that Todd II actually approaches coaching and systems play, a disconnect between coaches and players, similar to when teachers don’t realize they’ve missed a step in the lesson-plan.
Something that Eakins and McLellan both shared was that they came in expecting a base level of knowledge from their players. Eakins was the extreme example, given that he assumed a very green defence could execute his extremely convoluted swarm system. McLellan had to rebuild the foundations last year, and did so with basically 2.5 actual NHL defencemen, (I consider Davidson the .5), a raw rookie playing way over his head and guys like Eric Gryba, who I actually quite like, but was often asked to play higher in the order than he should. However with the foundations built, the core defencemen healthy again and additions like Adam Larsson (good, actual NHL player) and Kris Russell (jury is still out, but also an actual NHL player), it seemed as though the team was ready to break out.
Fast forward 20 games, several injuries to actual NHL defencemen, a lack of balanced scoring and a RW depth chart that frightens nobody and once again it looks like the fans can see the sky about to rain. So how does this situation relate to Freire? Well, here goes…
It follows logically from the banking notion of consciousness that the educator’s role is to regulate the way the world “enters into” the students. The teacher’s task is to organize a process, which already occurs spontaneously, to “fill” the students by making deposits of information, which he or she considers to constitute true knowledge. And since people “receive” the world as passive entities, education should make them more passive still, and adapt them to the world. The educated individual is the adapted person, because she or he is better “fit” for the world (Freire, 1970, p. 76).
The TL;DR version of the Freire quote above is basically this: Freire asserts that the teacher’s role is to “fill” the students with the contents of a narrative. It is a conscious attempt to minimize or even annul the students’ creativity to serve the interests of the oppressors. It’s a bit of a stretch to call the coach an oppressor, ok, a major stretch, but bear with me. As fans and people on the Internet, we often discuss what it would take to ‘unlock player x’ (Yak, for example), or describe players as drivers of possession, or in the parlance of Lowetide, ‘river pushers’. We have also lamented the appearance of a loss of creativity from elite players for the sake of buying into systems play.
The theory and practice of banking education serves this end quite efficiently. Verbalistic lessons, reading requirements, the methods for evaluating “knowledge,” the distance between the teacher and the taught, the criteria, for promotion: everything in this ready-to-wear approach serves to obviate thinking (Ibid, p. 76).
The freelancers, rovers and PK Subbans, despite being exceptional, are somehow still marginalized by the insistence of systems over skill sets. Remember what I mentioned earlier about different tools in the toolbox? This traditional education model, what Freire refers to as the ‘Banking Model’ assumes that everyone has the same tools and wants the same tools, rather than appreciating diversity of abilities, skills and creativity.
So what does our friend Paulo want us to do about this problem?
Indeed, problem-posing education, which breaks with the vertical patterns characteristic of banking education, can fulfill its function as the practice of freedom. Through dialogue, the teacher-of-the-students and the students-of-the-teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with students-teachers. The teacher is no longer merely the-one-who-teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. They become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow… Here, no one teaches another, nor is anyone self-taught. People teach each other, mediated by the world, by the cognizable objects, which in banking education are “owned” by the teacher (Ibid, p. 80).
Huh. Problem-posing education, dialogue, mutual agency and responsibility; interesting concepts, but how would this model work in the context of a hockey team? One thing I remember vividly from the Todd I era was the relationship between coach, Yak, and Derek Roy. Todd let Yak play a little more and put him in a position to succeed by having Roy act as a student (player) who also teaches (coaches). Strangely enough, Drew Remenda, whose colour commentary on the SN broadcasts is usually seven shades of terrible, made a very astute observation about on-ice, in-game coaching. Andrej Sekera has recently played with Matt Benning, and has been doing similar in-game work with the young blue-liner that Roy did with Yak. Rej is constantly communicating, teaching him better positioning habits, anticipation and reads, especially in the defensive zone. This is an overwhelmingly positive thing, especially given how quiet the Oilers bench has been in recent years. However without a bit of flexibility from the top, from the actual teacher/coach, I wonder if they will actually turn north?
Earlier in the season, the Oilers looked like they were playing with a combination of systems-based execution and high-flying creativity and skill. It was fun to watch, probably the most fun the team has been in at least 8 years. The wheels fell off a bit, or some might say that percentages caught up to them and that they expected a regression, but none of that really matters now. What does matter is the kind of message the coach will give to his players. Will the message be authority driven or will there be dialogue? Will the players’ voices matter? Outside of the leadership team, do those voices have an outlet? As we are not privy to the locker room conversations, team meetings or practice sessions, we will likely never know what happens. But it seems to me that perhaps a bit more flexibility in systems, tactics and approaches to the game might be in order. A good teacher knows when to change their approach to meet the needs of the students they have. Good coaches ought to know when and how to do the same. I think Todd II is a very good coach, but there is certainly room for the coaches and the players to get better. Perhaps Freire has given us a theoretical roadmap to help get there.
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