Teachers and Coaches and Mentors, Oh My!
A Taxonomy of Educationary Acts*
In my current work, I help people launch and scale new ventures.
If someone asks, I sometimes summarize this reality with the simpler “I teach entrepreneurship and innovation.” When I do, it’s amazing how often people — from many different backgrounds — immediately tell me “Oh, entrepreneurship and innovation can’t be taught!”
(I guess I should be glad to be so helpfully informed that my life’s enterprise at the moment is futile, misguided, or both, especially when I know lots of other colleagues, all over the world, engaged in the same activity: maybe now I can save them too!)
Separately, over time, I have noticed a recurring oddity. Through the years, my various clients, employers, partners, collaborators, and others I have met or observed in the entrepreneurship and innovation world use four different words to describe what appears, on the surface, to be the same activity:
- Teaching,
- Coaching,
- Advising, and
- Mentoring.
Taking these two points together, it occurred to me that, while there clearly exists a widely held — though, in my opinion, false — idea that entrepreneurship and innovation “can’t be taught,” I never hear anybody say entrepreneurs and innovators “can’t be coached,” or “advised,” or “mentored” in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation.
This article is a work-in-progress, part of my ongoing study and research, and is the first of a planned series on the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) education, and the discipline and practice of mentoring. Here, I am focused on parsing and characterizing the related and overlapping, but still distinct, activities of teaching, coaching / advising, and mentoring.
Two quick notes:
- As I have studied and discussed these topics, I have come to think the activities of “coaching” and “advising” are so closely aligned that — for now — I am treating them as one. I reserve the right to separate them in the future, as I learn more!
- Although I work in I&E — and future articles in this series may sometimes focus more narrowly in that area — here, I am exploring these pedagogical terms broadly, in the way they apply and could be used in multiple fields, from science, to sports, business, careers, life, etc. I believe all three educational methods can be helpful in innumerable contexts.
Key characteristics of each activity:
Teaching:
In the traditional view of “teaching,” the teacher begins with knowledge and information which the student lacks. The goal of the teaching process is to deliver that knowledge or information to the student, so the student then also possesses it. Successful teaching might be measured by testing whether the student has, in fact, acquired and retained some or all of the relevant knowledge (though testing students, as a practice, has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years for its uneven efficacy).
Coaching (or Advising):
In a typical “coaching” arrangement, the recipient has a set of goals they are trying to achieve. The coach and the recipient generally share an understanding and agreement about these objectives. The coach has expertise in the relevant field, frequently from either having achieved similar goals and objectives themselves, or having coached others to similar successes, or both. The objective of the coaching interaction or relationship is for the coach to provide advice [hence the rough equivalence I am drawing between “coaching” and “advising”] about what the recipient should do, or needs to do, to achieve their goals. Successful coaching could be measured by the extent to which the coach’s advice gets followed and leads to the desired result.
Mentoring:
In a “mentoring” relationship, the mentee arrives with a set of specific expertise and objectives, but typically lacking experience and clarity about how to achieve their goals. The mentor brings a set of lived experiences and knowledge about similar situations. Together the mentor and mentee examine the mentee’s situation and draw on the mentor’s experience to seek critically relevant considerations for the mentee. Whereas “coaching” centers on what the recipient should do, “mentoring” often focuses on what the mentee should consider. So, an effective mentor determines the mentee’s current state — e.g. their goals and levels of expertise, experience, etc. — and identifies elements from outside the mentee’s experience which are relevant to inform decisions the mentee needs make about their future actions. Successful mentoring leads the mentee to a greater state of empowerment regarding how they will make more informed decisions about their next steps.
The obligatory sports example:
In American business we’re obsessed with using supposedly illustrative examples from sports. Since I’m from the U.S., I will fulfill my stereotype here:
Imagine a basketball player.
- Someone teaches the player the rules of basketball.
- Someone coaches the player on how best to play the game and their position (according to the coach/es opinions), and someone coaches both the player and team on what they need to do to win the game or championship (according to the coach/es opinions).
- A more experienced player — or someone else with experience and perspective different from the player’s — might mentor the player on how to thrive in the sport, accounting for multiple objective and subjective factors based on what the mentor has seen before.
As we reflect on the three educational activities I have categorized, we can see that different modes of instruction are appropriate and suited for specific fields and topics at different times. We also notice that any individual meeting between an instructor and learners might include one, two, or all three models, depending on the details of the situation, the instructor’s abilities, the learners’ needs, and what will be most helpful.
Does it matter?
Why go to the trouble of differentiating and describing these pedagogical categories? Isn’t the only relevant question whether the learners benefit from the instruction, regardless of what we call it?
Well, in one sense, yes; and also — as with the process of instruction in the fields of entrepreneurship and innovation — I believe we can systematically improve the skills of I&E educators. To develop this educator pedagogy (i.e. to “train the trainers”), we will need to codify a set of recommended practices. For these recommended practices (RPs) to make sense, we will need to understand whether and when the situation calls for us to be teaching, coaching, or mentoring, and as instructors, we need to know which activity we are practicing. The RPs for each category will differ; if we’re confused about what we’re doing, we won’t deliver the best outcomes to the learners.
As mentioned above, this work is ongoing, so please share your thoughts and feedback; all comments are welcome. DM me (on any platform) if you have thoughts to share.
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Future posts in this series — many of which I hope and expect to develop in collaboration with colleagues — are likely to include topics like:
- In I&E contexts, when should we be teaching, coaching, or mentoring?
- Whether and / or when is mentoring the most powerful pedagogical practice for I&E?
- What are the different mentoring modes (e.g. “snapshot,” or “journey,” or others), and what characterizes each?
- What are the attitudes, approaches, and recommended practices for different mentoring modes?
- Why is “mentoring” generally considered an unpaid activity? Should it be? If not, how can we change this perception?
- What are the most helpful attitudes for mentees? Should we be instructing them in how to receive mentoring?
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*Feel free to DM me if you think you know why this subtitle is an obscure “inside joke” / reference ;-).
