Those Who Can Coach Can Teach

Abstract Building on the work of John Hattie, Richard Kent, and Tom Newkirk, a think tank collaborative in New York City's high schools works to raise the level of students’ close reading, argumentation, and agency across the curriculum by teaching students to analyze athletic competitions, to compose sports arguments, and to transfer and apply these skills to academic subjects. The study also investigates the kind of feedback and the kind of vision statements that athletic coaches give and considers how to adapt these for academic classes. This study recommends several specific structures for closer collaboration between athletic coaches and academic teachers to increase students’ engagement with higher order analytic skills, to develop shared language for these skills, and to create more opportunities for explicit transfer and higher student achievement.