441. Teaching = Coaching

Posted in engagement, feedback, higher education, learning, pedagogy, professional development, reflective practice, teaching
April 15, 2026

Coaches and teachers work to develop skills by providing structured learning environments, motivational strategies, and individual feedback. In this episode, Christian Fauria and Constanza Bartholomae join us to discuss the similarities among coaching, teaching, and the work of educational developers.

Christian is a former NFL tight end who played 13 seasons and won two Super Bowl Championships with the New England Patriots, and a national champion at the University of Colorado. Following his retirement from football, Christian transitioned into sports media, working as a college football analyst for ESPN and CBS, while co-hosting a radio show on WEEI in Boston. He is now a Professional in Residence at Bryant University in the Communication and Language Studies Department, teaching courses in sports broadcasting and organizational leadership in sports. Constanza is the Interim Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence at Bryant University.

Show Notes

Transcript

John: Coaches and teachers work to develop skills by providing structured learning environments, motivational strategies, and individual feedback. In this episode, we discuss the similarities among coaching, teaching, and the work of educational developers.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guests today are Christian Fauria and Constanza Bartholomae. Christian is a former NFL tight end who played 13 seasons and won two Super Bowl Championships with the New England Patriots, and a national champion at the University of Colorado. Following his retirement from football, Christian transitioned into sports media, working as a college football analyst for ESPN and CBS, while co-hosting a radio show on WEEI in Boston. He is now a Professional in Residence at Bryant University in the Communication and Language Studies Department, teaching courses in sports broadcasting and organizational leadership in sports. Constanza is the Interim Director of the Center of Teaching Excellence at Bryant University. Welcome Christian and welcome back, Constanza.

Christian: Thanks for having us. It’s my first time. I’m excited.

John: It’s great to meet you. Today’s teas are:… Christian, are you drinking any tea?

Christian: I do. I call this my hearty mug. I got a little green tea in there. Nothing but the tea, no sugar, no nothing, no additives. I keep it clean. That’s what I got this morning.

Rebecca: That’s the way to do it.

John: And Constanza?

Constanza: I’ve got my favorite tea. It’s African Nectar from Mighty Leaf. And if you’re someone who doesn’t like tea, or you’re up for an adventure, this is the tea to try. I have convinced many folks who are not tea drinkers, that tea is an option with this particular one.

Christian: Nice.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have a Scottish Breakfast tea today, John.

John: An old favorite.

Rebecca: It is.

John: And I have a Lapsang Souchong today, a smoked tea.

Christian: Ooh, fancy.

John: it is. It smells like there’s a wood fire right next to me, and I’m hoping that’s not the case, because I am in an office building here on campus.

Rebecca: We invited you both here today to discuss the working relationship that you’ve developed at Bryant University. Can you each tell us a little bit about how you began working together?

Christian: Okay, so I’ll make a long, long story short, because this will take about an hour. So like you mentioned in the intro, played in the NFL, worked in media forever, got fired some random day, and then just kind of walked around trying to figure out, like, what was I going to do next? I had no idea what I was going to do, and I decided that I wanted to teach. I never wanted to coach a sport other than my kids, because coaches in the college level and in the pro level, they have no life. I wanted a life, so I decided that, with some input from my wife, I said, Yeah, let’s do that. So what I did is I created a syllabus about broadcasting, things that I thought were important. I sent it out an email to like, 10 different schools here in the Northeast region. The only school that did not reply to me was Harvard, and then all the other nine replied to me, and then I just narrowed it down to Bryant. And I’ve never taught before other than a sport, so I was really kind of lost as far as how I should go about it. I knew what I wanted to say, but I didn’t really know how to form it. I didn’t know how to create it. I didn’t know a grading scale. I was very, very green. And when I found out about the CTE center, I met Constanza, and she was like a beacon of hope for me, because she really just explained things as simple as possible for me to understand them. And not only was she good at the technical side. I thought that she was really good at the emotional and physical side as well, because I had no real belief in myself that I could do it. I know I could say what I wanted to say, but I didn’t really know if I could actually get my message across. And then I hijacked all her time, because that’s what I basically did. I hijacked all her time. I would come in there unannounced. I would ask her at the last minute: “I’m stressing out. My class is in five minutes. What should I do?” She was always available. She was always encouraging, she always motivated me the right way. And for me, it was like she was doing all the same things that my coaches did throughout my 13 year NFL career, my five year college career, and then my high school career. It was this exact same thing. It was just a different message, a different tool that she was using, as far as, instead of, like blocking and catching, it was rubrics and teaching philosophies and structure. So again, to me, she became such a good, valuable asset, and then she just became a good friend. So that’s my approach to how we met and how we started working together.
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Constanza: And on my end, Christian’s department chair said, “I’ve got someone for you to meet. We’ve got this new faculty member. You’re going to love him. And oh, by the way, he used to play for the Patriots.” Now, what his department chair didn’t know? What Christian didn’t know is because I grew up in a family where my dad was European and not into American football, didn’t understand it. And my mom also did not watch sports. I knew nothing about football, like I’ve heard of the Patriots, of course, I live in Massachusetts. I didn’t know who Christian was. I didn’t know how famous he was, what his reputation was. So in comes walking this very energetic and excited human being. And again, I had no idea about anything about who he was or what his subject matter was. And I went home and I said “I had a really cool teaching consult today” to my husband, and he’s like, “Who is it with?” And I was like, “Christian Fauria? And he’s like, “No way. I used to listen to him on the radio on the way home from work.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s cool,” but the more that we interacted, the more I got to know Christian and I was like, “Wow, what a great hire. You’ve got someone who’s so full of life and personality and experience,” and although a lot of times what will happen in the Center for Teaching Excellence is that folks will come in and I don’t necessarily have the same subject matter expertise as they do. I’ve never had, clearly, a career in football or in sports broadcasting. I get to hear about what matters to them, what makes them excited, what they love to learn about. And then we get to talk about, okay, how do we convey this over to your students? And then on top of that, as you both have seen from us talking with Christian he’s just really, really funny and just uplifting and human sunshine. So that was an added benefit. Yeah, for sure,

John: Christian, your experience of coming in without much teaching experience or without much of a background in effective teaching practices is something that’s pretty common for many faculty, but your reaction to it was a little bit different than most faculty. Most faculty just tend to rely on what they had experienced when they were students, and that’s not always the best way of preparing for teaching at the college level. What made you decide to approach the teaching center? Was it a suggestion from the chair, or was this something that you just wanted to find out more about before getting into the class?

Christian: So I had an idea of how I wanted to approach the class, but I graduated college in 1995, so it’d been a long time, and I never really had any professors that I remember making any sort of impact on my life whatsoever. The impact that was made on my life was always from my coaches. So I really wanted to find a way to coach the students or teach the students like I was coached and I didn’t know what I was allowed to do, I didn’t know how far I could go, and that’s why I came to Constanza. I was like, “Listen, this is kind of my idea,” so I really relied on her a lot, to mold my class and to guide me through how I should do things and why I should do these things. Because I really wanted to create, like, first day standards. I wanted to really hammer that home, and I really want to let them know that this is not your ordinary class, like what you’re used to. We’re going to turn that on its head. So yes, that was kind of my approach in the very beginning. Now it’s changed over time, but the initial idea was just that, like, here’s all this information I have. It reminds me of like someone who waits for the last minute to do their taxes, and they got, like, receipts everywhere, and then Constanza’s my accountant. I said, “Here, fix it.” “Okay, how much time do I got?” “20 minutes.” That’s kind of the way I was. And I never left there, I never left her office, scared. I always left her office with not necessarily a pep talk, but just a reassurance that I was doing it the right way, and I shouldn’t listen to the insecurities in my head about what I thought the students were going to think about me or say about me while I was saying it.

Constanza: I think to add on to that, we all need to feel like the work that we are doing matters and is important. And I think that that’s really, if there is a secret sauce to teaching, it’s okay, how do we work with faculty to remind them about why they’re here and why what they’re doing matters, especially in an age where we’re talking a lot about a lack of focus or attention or disengagement. I was listening to Jessica Riddell talk at the AAC&U annual meeting, and she said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the time that we’re in, and I don’t know if necessarily it’s disruption, but a rupture in the educational system, first with the covid pandemic, then with the advent of generative AI, and so there’s a lot of reworking going on in the teaching field right now, trying to really explain, like, what is our teaching philosophy? Why is what we’re doing important?” And so I think that working with faculty in the educational development space, like how I’m able to work with Christian is such an honor, because we really get to help them re- explore their passions and think about how they can translate that over. And one thing that I noticed about Christian right away is, as he said, he cared a lot. I know he’s made comments and said, “How can I do this in 20 minutes?” But actually, we were meeting so much more frequently than that, and he was thinking things through and planning out his whole semester. And so in certain ways, I was like, “Okay, well, we’re in January. Let’s not worry about April for a little bit, but let’s focus on the next few weeks.” I think, in that sense, I knew here’s someone who cares about their students, their outcomes, but also their well being, and that is someone I can really, really work with, because ultimately, at the end of the day, I tell my students, I care about you learning content, but I care more about how you feel in the classroom. And that was Christian. He’s like, “I’ve got the content in my head. I’m ready to go, but how do I make sure that it lands in a way where students are able to accept and interpret it, are able to digest it, and are able to show me that they can demonstrate understanding and meaning from it.” So it was really like the educational development perfect connection, if you will, and reminded me also of why I do what I do. So it had that impact as well.

Christian: Now, that was well said. That’s exactly how I feel about it.

Rebecca: Coaching is really relational. I’ve been observing my daughter, who is ice skating and working with coaches. And the way coaches work with individuals is often different depending on their personality and who they are. So I’m curious how you see the relationships between coaching and teaching, because I know that I’ve been observing successful coaching and thinking about, “Hmm, what is that secret sauce, and how does that translate over to teaching?” And some of it is like this coachability piece, is this willingness to accept some feedback, or wanting to have a good impact on the learner, whoever that learner might be.

Christian: I’ll go first on this one. So there’s an old saying in the sports ranks where the players don’t care about what you know until they know that you care. And I would say that’s exactly the same way, at least that’s my approach to it. And it looks different for every teacher, every coach, and I would say it looks different for every classroom, because there needs to be expectations, there needs to be trust, there needs to be accountability, there needs to be passion, there needs to be knowledge, all that stuff. It’s all the same thing. I’m telling you. It’s no different from coaching and teaching, at least from where I sit, because I’ve seen it now, and I’ve only been there for over a year, and I know that I have to show some sort of appreciation for them showing up, trying. It doesn’t mean I let them pull a fast one on me, because it goes both ways, and so I echo that sentiment to a T. And the old way of doing things in sports overall is gone the way of the typewriter. Nobody is hardcore authoritarian. It’s more transactional now in sports, based on all the different ways athletes go to school say, “I’ll give you money if you do this.” That’s not the way it is in the classroom, but I would call it, and I don’t know if I can curse on this show, there needs to be a high level of a give-a-shit factor, like you have to give a shit about what you’re doing and what you’re saying. And I think it’s very, very obvious to the students, they’re on to you quick, so you can’t pull a fast one over them. And Costanza, that’s kind of the way I feel about it.

Constanza: I think, as teachers, we’re helping students find meaning in whatever subject matter we’re teaching. And Arthur Brooks is coming out with a new book next week titled The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. And so Oprah interviewed him last week, I think, and I listened to the podcast episode, and I was like, “Tell me more. You’re a professor and you’re studying the meaning of life. What is that?” And so for him, his definition of happiness is combined with three things: satisfaction, enjoyment and meaning. And he found in his work that meaning is where folks under 30, especially college-age students, perhaps we’re struggling the most, and so I think our job as instructors is to deliver that sense of meaning in our subject matter and really connect the dots to students now more than ever, in an age of generative AI, where folks can look up information and disinformation very easily, we need to show them the humanness behind it, the application behind it. It’s so important. The same happens in the educational development space and in the coaching space. If someone feels like they do not matter or that you wouldn’t notice them if they were absent in your class, they are far less likely to be engaged. It’s very important in my work that in the space that I’m in, where faculty come in and they are vulnerable, they’re usually talking to me about something that isn’t working. I do get folks come in and say, “This worked great. I’m so excited.” Or occasionally I’ll get someone that’ll say, “I want to upend my classroom. Let’s totally do things differently.” But usually they’re coming to me because they’re struggling with something in the classroom, and it’s really hard to be vulnerable if the person that you’re speaking with doesn’t know you or isn’t willing to be vulnerable with you in turn. So I always talk about my teaching failures, or even just to the degree that I feel comfortable, of course, and even just things that I’m going through in life at the level that I feel comfortable with, because I feel like the faculty that I work with need to get to know me. We need to develop a relationship of trust, and then we can talk about all right. “Well, here are some things that I think might need to be changed.” So that if I’m giving them feedback, even if it might be not exactly what they wanted to hear or might be difficult, they know, okay, the person who’s talking to me on the other end of this conversation cares about me as a human first and as an educator second, and they then feel more comfortable letting me know exactly what’s going on without having to sugarcoat it, or they feel comfortable walking in my door in the first place. So I think, in that sense, if we’re working in teaching centers to coach faculty on strategies that they can then use to coach students. It’s really developing what Peter Felton and Leo Lambert talk about in terms of relationship-rich education that expands beyond the classroom space that really makes a campus community full of that. I also think too, reminding ourselves that just like students who are first year that come onto campus and are new, our faculty who are new are experiencing that too. Christian is a very energetic and outgoing person, but it was his first year on campus. So like, how do we connect our faculty to different folks on campus that they can reach out to if they’re in need of support or their students are? How do we let them know about what’s available to them to make sure that they feel supported and seen? It’s not something that we always talk about, but establishing that for faculty is really, really important in faculty development work. So I think our job really is to connect and to help folks discover or rediscover their own meaning, why they matter, so that they can then, in turn, do that for their students.

Christian: Let me jump in real quick, because I do think this is important. So how do you connect? In the pros, you’re with the same group of guys for eight months, seven days a week, nine hours a day. So it’s easy to make a connection. It’s so much harder to make a real connection in college, teaching kids. So you may see them once a week, twice a week, for two hours a week. Who knows? I would say this, and it’s a pain in the butt, learn their names. Tell them you’re going to learn their names. I try to do it. I challenge, say, “Listen, by the end of the semester, if I don’t know everybody’s first and last name, if I can’t say it correctly, I will get everybody one letter grade higher than what they already have.” So I put my butt on the line because I do think most of them kind of feel like I’m just like a finance major. I’m a whatever major. I do think learning their names, or at least trying to learn their names, in the short period of time that you’re with them, I think makes a huge, huge connection. Right off the bat, I let them know I’m gonna learn everybody’s name, and it’s freaking hard, man, because there’s so many damn kids. We got so much going on, but that’s one of my goals, always.

John: And that is a topic we’ve explored on past episodes of the podcast, and specifically with Michelle Miller, who wrote a book on how to learn names. And we’ll share a link to that in the show notes. It’s a great book, and it’s a short book, too. It is difficult to learn names. You both emphasize the importance of building connection and building trust to set a foundation for everything else that happens in the classroom. What are some of the other ways in which coaching is similar to teaching, or some of the things that you may have learned from coaching that you brought into the classroom in terms of things like increasing student motivation, because we’ve all been concerned about students becoming a bit more disengaged over the last several years.

Constanza: I think, apart from getting to know your students’ names, genuinely learning who they are as individuals, is something that, unless you’re in a classroom full of 300 students… at Bryant, we do not have that. We have the luxury of having smaller class sizes. And there are many ways that you can do that. We’ve talked for years about intro surveys, but I also think too asking deeper questions. In today’s age, we need to ask questions that really ask our students what they’re hoping to gain from class, but also ask them what would make you feel like you belonged in this classroom space, or what type of classroom space has been a really great one for you, and what did that instructor do and why? So that we understand how they are able to best flourish in the classroom space. And I think that this happens in coaching a lot, too. If we ask folks, what’s the best way for you to receive feedback, some people might want you to start with accountability up front. And they might want you to say, “Well, you told me your goal was this, and you haven’t been meeting it.” For me, that would hit me with so much guilt that if somebody coached me in that way, it’s like when my husband says, Constanza, “I know that you were supposed to be working on your dissertation today. Did you do any writing?” And I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t get any writing today. I’m sorry.” Like, if I start off with that, I get really nervous. So I know, for me, that isn’t always the best way to go about it. Sometimes I have days that are anomalies where I want that, but asking students like, “What’s the best way for you to get feedback? …and sticking to that as best as you can.” I do think we need to personalize the educational space more. I think it’s hard, because just like Christian said, we’ve seen the educational space change. We didn’t talk about belonging as much as we do now, even 10 years ago. Now, it’s so crucial. I think the challenge is balancing that, because instructors are humans too, and so, for them, they’re one instructor, maybe in a room of 35 students, times three or four classes. So it’s working with instructors to coach them into okay, how do you build those connections with your students? And how do you do it in a way that isn’t going to cause you to burn out? Perhaps that’s by asking better questions. Perhaps that’s by changing the way that we ask the questions. Perhaps that’s by talking to them about different ways that they can synthesize that information, or working with their teaching center to do that. I think those are the ways that we start to do it today, because students want that. And if students feel like their instructor doesn’t care about them, they are going to be less engaged. And if faculty feel like the teaching center on their campus is not a friendly place, or is not a place where they feel comfortable or safe sharing, they’re not going to go there. And so we need to make sure that we’re really listening to the people that we are working with, whether they be students or faculty or administrators or staff, and speak their language in terms of feedback, in terms of praise. And that’s another thing too. I think in teaching, we’re always looking for ways in which our students are struggling, that we forget sometimes, that we need to also give praise and feedback on what they’re doing right, and why. Because so often we’ll see our high performers and say, “Oh, well, Susie’s fine,” like she’s got this, she did really great on this assessment, and we don’t tell them how they did really great on the assessment. And that can be a form of isolation on campus as well, if those high performers are not feeling seen. And so that’s another thing I think we really need to be thoughtful about, and we also need to be thoughtful about the faculty members that we see spotlighted a lot. They’re still human, checking in with them, seeing how they’re doing, asking what they did over the weekend. Those small things really, really matter, and can help someone feel like they’re connected or disconnected to campus.

Christian: So Constanza, you said something I was literally cracking up. That’s why the connection between the two worlds, I think, is fascinating to me. If I respected and knew that my coach cared about me and was pushing me and was challenging me the right way, and I went out there and I let them down. I felt like crap. I felt like crap because I appreciated the effort that they put into developing me, and it’s those uncomfortable conversations, because, like, I sit there, I walk in there, man, I feel like these kids are fragile… You got to be real careful with what you say to one and how you say it, and you don’t want to say the wrong word or stick your foot in your mouth. I think they want, and I don’t have a better phrase for this, Constanza, maybe we can workshop this… tough teaching. I think they want it. I think they want to be challenged. They want somebody to challenge them. Because that, to me, is like the “Oh,” like, “this was really worth it. This is a great class. I learned a lot,” and that’s what I do. And I can tell the students listen. Some of them don’t care at all. They just want to get through it. But I would say 80% of them are dialed in, and it always makes me feel better when I see them accepting the tough teaching. This was not good enough. You know what our expectations are. Why would you do it this way? You know what the standards are, like I told you the day one, and I keep reiterating it every single day. You’re so much better than that. It’s a little bit of mix of scolding but reaffirming your love for them. I’m on you. I’m talking to you this way because I know you can do better. I know you can, so don’t tell me that I don’t believe in you, because I’m showing it right now. It may not be the way you want it, but that’s the way it’s going to be given to you, because this is the way I think I can get the most out of you, and I’m real open about that. And to Constanza’s point, that’s why I was laughing, because my coaches, whenever they were like this, I was at my best; when they just kind of walked through and didn’t say anything, I didn’t care at all if I messed up, because he was a jerk. So I was fine with it.

John: That reminds me a little bit of the concept of wise feedback that’s been developed by David Yaeger and others, which is, let students know that you’re giving them feedback because you believe that they’re capable of more. In several randomized, controlled studies, it’s been shown that that increases student effort substantially.

Christian: Yeah. And to be honest with you, I was giving them feedback during the class, but I wasn’t when I was grading them, and I remember Costanza saying, “You got to give them feedback.” In my head, I’m like, “Oh, geez, there’s so many kids, like, I’m going to be writing like, a long, two page paper for each kid.” And I really appreciated that, because she was right. I felt so ashamed that I was not giving the feedback that I should have been giving them, because, to your point, it’s important for them to hear what they did wrong, what they continue to work on, and how I know they can do it. I’ve changed since the first day. I think you’re like, “You’re not giving them feedback?” I was like, “Well, I am. I’m just not giving probably enough.”

Constanza: And I think, too, we talk in higher ed a lot about the phrase “compassionate challenge.” And so Christian is able to have difficult conversations with students, or what others might perceive as difficult conversations with students, because he shows them how much he cares. And so when he says things like “Hey, like what happened here?” from someone else who doesn’t have that connection established with their student, that might be the most intimidating question ever. Christian also will say to them, like, “Hey, this is going to be challenging.” What he didn’t tell you is he brought a group of students out to radio row to cover the Super Bowl. And I’m sure he said to them, “This is going to be challenging. You’re going to have to meet people that you’ve never spoken to before.” We know for students that just speaking up in general, in today’s age, in a classroom with an instructor that they’ve gotten to know over the course of this semester can be intimidating. And I was so impressed by the work that the students were putting out and the little clips that I saw on Instagram, in the coverage that I was seeing. And that’s really a moment where, as an educational developer, you take a step back and you’re like, “Wow, this is public evidence of someone who has taken teaching, who has taken coaching… literally taken students out of their element into a brand new experience. And look at them thriving. Look at them doing the thing that, in the classroom maybe was talked about as theoretical. Look at them applying it.” And so I’ve been just really proud to watch Christian’s evolution in terms of the way that he coaches his students and teaches them too.

Rebecca: I’m curious, at what level, both in faculty developer working with a faculty member and also a faculty member working with a student, how much work there is, maybe, to overcome impostor phenomenon. So moving into a new space, a new discipline, even if the subject matter is familiar, how that can kind of play into [LAUGHTER] like either desperately wanting feedback or also some fear, and how students can be the same, maybe in a class with someone famous [LAUGHTER] might be really intimidating, and how to kind of work through some of those kinds of challenges students and faculty face?

Constanza: Yeah, I think first, to go back to what I said earlier, you have to develop a connection with the faculty member that you’re working with as well. In my experience, that is the only way that you can be successful in terms of educational development, because you can give a ton of advice, but if the faculty member doesn’t know that you mean what you say and that you care, and if they don’t know who you are as a human, it doesn’t matter. And so folks might come in and they might be skeptical of you. They might be skeptical of the theories or the teaching center or the work, and then you have to demonstrate to them in a way that isn’t condescending, that’s inviting, “here’s my subject matter expertise.” We forget sometimes that educational developers have that too. We have a whole lot of subject matter expertise, and my colleague, Michelle Munoz in our teaching center is always talking about that, which I love. It’s a good reminder for me too. So before we get into any of that, first we have to sort of human to human talk, and then we can get into coaching. And then we can say, “All right, what’s your plan? Let’s talk about it.” And if it doesn’t go according to plan, I love reminding faculty, the only person who had the playbook was you. So, if you didn’t cover all five things that you wanted to cover, the only person to know that necessarily is you. But also, that is what we need to remind faculty. And also it can be a positive thing. Maybe students got so fascinated about a particular area that you were talking about, you had all of this conversation that time flew by and you didn’t cover everything. Faculty in today’s world are so worried, at least in the work that I do, about covering all of the material. We had a huge snowstorm, and then a blizzard in Rhode Island. And so we had multiple days this semester that either school was canceled or we went remote. And so there was a lot of nervous energy there about, “oh no, I had planned for X many course sessions. The classic snow day happened, and now I have to figure out how to compensate.” And so working with faculty on saying, like, “Hey, it isn’t about covering all the content necessarily. It’s the quality.” And let’s rethink and reframe what that looks like, not just for this week, but for the semester. Because, again, the semester long playbook is yours, and you are the subject matter expert. You determine what students really, really need to know in order to have meaning come out of this class, let’s work together on it. So that’s how I think I would respond to that question.

Christian: Listen, from a teaching standpoint, for me, is: “absolutely what am I doing here? I don’t belong. I don’t know anybody all that stuff. I don’t have a master’s degree, but I know I know what I’m talking about because I’m an expert in my field. I just don’t have a degree for it.” Nobody has been like, “Here’s a trophy. I don’t have a Marconi. I have 20 years in the business,” but, yeah, to me, that’s a Costanza thing. It’s almost like, you are good enough, you are smart enough. You know, it’s one of those things. [LAUGHTER] I’m like, “Yeah, let’s go. There’s no brick wall to run through, there’s just a door, so I have to consume my energy.” So that was real. I’m not gonna lie. Admitting that is hard to do because, like, I just didn’t really feel like I belonged at first, and it took some time and some coaching to feel comfortable in my own skin, for a bunch of like, 19 to 20 year olds.

Rebecca: They’re tough crowd.

Christian: They are a tough crowd. I look at them sometimes and I’m like, they don’t give a crap what I’m saying right now. And I leave there depressed, and I feel like I didn’t do a good job. That’s the worst feeling, to be honest with you, is leaving the classroom going, “Oh man, that sucked. I could have done so much better than that.” But I will say this, I know I’m kind of changing the direction, but even when that happens, I’ll have some students that’ll come up to me, and I swear up and down, this kid was not paying attention, could care less, was not engaged at all. When those guys come up to me, or those girls come up to me and they say, “This is the best class I’ve ever had.” I’m like, “Really? You didn’t say one word.” [LAUGHTER] You didn’t say anything. You acted like I had a big hole in my head. And that, to me, is very rewarding.

Constanza: Yeah, and I think to go back to the point about impostor syndrome, we all feel it. So sharing it… I started teaching in the college space when I was 23 and so like Christian, I tell faculty this, like Christian, I was like, “No, I’m supposed to be on the other side of the desk, I’m just supposed to be learning. I’m not supposed to be teaching. And the first day I taught, the technology didn’t work. I couldn’t get my roster. It was, in all senses, a disaster. And I remember going home and called my dad, and I was like, “Dad, I don’t know how you do this teaching thing. You have to get up in front of people, and they’re staring at you, and everyone depends on you,” and that’s a lot like you said, Rebecca, it’s a tough crowd, and I think too, we’re navigating again like a rupture in higher education, like I mentioned earlier, that Jessica Riddell talks about. And so it’s showing faculty different skills and strategies to reconnect with their audiences in different ways, and they’re learning how to do that. And beginner learning experiences when you’re doing something in a different way can be daunting. And so it’s everything that Christian said. It’s connecting on stories of, okay, well, this didn’t go the way that I expected in the classroom, knowing you’re not alone. I mean, if we could tell tales from the teaching center, which we can talk about things in broad terms, but we’re a non-evaluative, confidential space, but if we had tales from the teaching center, I think a lot of people would say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that so many people were going through the same thing that I was going through. And that’s what we hear on a daily basis in the teaching center. So when folks come to me and say, “I didn’t feel great in that class,” or “the students seem really tired this week,” I can be like, “yeah, there’s a lot going on this week, from what we’ve heard,” and I can reaffirm that for them, but I can also talk to them about my silly moments too, and I’ll also say what I love. My sister is a daycare teacher, and she talks, and she’s like, sometimes things don’t go according to plan in daycare and I’m like, “What do you do?” Like, talk to me about what that looks like, because I only know how to work with adults. I don’t know how to work with toddlers. And she’s like, sometimes we just have to redirect and shake the sillies out. And she, quite literally, will have the students just like, shake it out. And I feel like we need to just shake it out in higher education too.

Christian: I’m doing that. [LAUGHTER]I’m so doing that.

Constanza: Isn’t that adorable. They shake the sillies… [LAUGHTER]

Christian: I bet you, they can probably laugh about it. It probably completely brings them back to their childhood, and it does kind of reset during that time. I’m literally going to do that.

Constanza: I love that, and I will say too, when students get up to present in front of the class, I think that’s probably when they have the most empathy for us, because they realize, “oh, I have to be the focus of attention, and I have to be the content expert right now, and I also need to be not robotic, but engaging.” And those moments, I think, can be helpful in reestablishing connection, not that I think you should just assign students a presentation for no reason. I think that would be very anxiety inducing [LAUGHTER] for most students today. But I think talking about how it might be really daunting for us to be up in front of the class, or letting students know, like, “Hey, I didn’t sleep really well last night. So if I say something and it doesn’t fully make sense, please ask a question,” or just reminding students that we get paid to answer questions, I love saying to faculty, “They actually pay me to answer your questions,” because they’ll be like, “I don’t want to bother you. I know you’re so busy, you’ve got so much going on, I don’t want to take up all your time,” unless you’re Christian. He just said he loves to hijack my time, but like, I get paid to answer questions, come ask questions. We love that in the teaching center, and I know that faculty love it too, because to Christian’s point when someone comes up and asks a question or says, “Wow, that was a really cool lesson.” Oh my gosh, like my heart swells. And I wrote a piece for Inside Higher Ed a while back about keeping a jar of those types of comments, because teaching evaluations, especially, we hold on to that one comment that is slightly negative or totally negative, and we don’t see all the other comments that are like, “this was really eye opening and inspirational,” and “this instructor really cared.” No, we just focus on that one. I think we need to talk about our wins. And if I may, one other thing that I’ll say, I had my husband do this just yesterday, so it’s not just in the educational development space. He works in property management, and he had a woman come in yesterday and her internet was disconnected, and he was like, “I will come stop by during lunch and I’ll help you out.” And she wrote him back and she said, “You made me feel connected to the world again by helping me out.” And I was like, “Michael, you better frame this. I’m not kidding. Like this is the best piece of feedback that you’ve gotten,” because usually folks come to him and they’re like, “I’ve got a problem in my living space,” and it’s really stressful. And he did. He did because he knows I talk about it all the time. I’m like, celebrate your wins, put them as a reminder, so when you have a bad day, you can go back and look at it and be like, “Oh, okay, this is why I matter. This is why I’m here.” We all need that.

John: I’m going to put in a plug for another podcast that came out in the middle of March, about a month or so ago on impostor phenomenon by Sara Kien. We had a really good discussion of that, so I’d encourage people to go back and listen to that if they’d like to learn more about it. In earlier conversations, you both mentioned how surprised you were about the strong similarities between the ways in which skills are developed in sports and the way in which skills are developed in the classroom. How has the experience of sports perhaps informed the way in which you work with students to develop their skills?

Christian: So I would say I have 14 classes with them total in a semester, it’s a lecture class, and there’s not a chance in hell, in 14 classes, I will have them camera ready at a high level to be ready to perform. So what I do is, to develop those skills, we practice it, every day when we get in, we practice certain skills and we practice them again. And part of that would be my game plan. For a game every Monday, when I would come into the facility, my coach would hand me a game plan. Here’s your game plan. Here’s what we’re going to do. Before we even practice, we would do the basic stuff, chopsticks, you know what I mean? Like just to warm up. And the funny thing is, what I’m realizing now is like, I keep telling them, “You guys don’t even understand what I’m doing right now. You’ll understand it in about two months,” because I make them do it over and over and over and over and over again. I said it’ll make sense in the end, and that’s kind of the way I look at it. I think specifically for broadcasting, there needs to be repetition. There needs to be a massive amount of repetition. And there’s a technical side to broadcasting. There’s a physical side to broadcasting, and there’s an emotional side. The first two, I can teach that all day long, easy, like we’ll hammer it home. The emotional side is the more difficult avenue that I’ve seen, getting them comfortable in their own skin. So to that, how do I develop that skill, which is the hardest one to develop, especially for someone who’s not comfortable being in front of people, who’s not comfortable speaking? I’ve created certain… I’ll just call them competitions, either solo or as a group… I’ll divide them into left side versus right side, and constantly putting them in those situations that make sense when they do their final, and then when their final comes around, listen and I tell them, “You’ve done this. We’ve done that. We’ve done this again. We did it over and over again. You guys are ready. The skills are there. The information is there. Now let’s put it into practice.” Constanza was actually… and I hijacked her for one of my classes, for one of the presentations, because I created our own version of Shark Tank, and she was one of the judges. And she was supposed to be real critical and challenge them. I want them to be challenged. And there was two other professors that helped out. So that’s what I would say, developing those skill sets. As far as the stuff that I teach is just constantly, constantly repping it. It has to be wrapped, and it has to be rep in the sports world, with different situations, different scenarios, different games, different endings, different circumstances, tough. “Hey, can I really say this?” “Well, no, but say it this way,” making them a goal again, but then at the same time, making sure that that person knows, because we’re talking about insecurities now, people judging me, making fun of me, like even though they’re probably not, that everybody else in the class needs to know. This is a workshop. This is a dojo, like we’re practicing here. This is not the final event. This is not our Olympic 100 meter relay. Like, this is the dojo. We’re in the dojo now, and this is where you’re allowed to make mistakes. So that’s kind of the approach that I take.

Constanza: Yeah, I think similarly, when I teach Spanish language classes, I say, “look, first, in order to learn, you have to be here, right?” And I explained to my students why it matters, and I get to know them on a personal level, so that if someone isn’t here, you’ll hear my students say, “Yeah, I had to take a picture of an empty chair and text it to my friend Bobby, because they weren’t in class today,” because I’ll say “We missed you. You’re not here.” Like, “hope you’re doing okay. Check in.” I like to let them know. First and foremost, I notice if they’re not there. Second, this goes along with faculty too. Like, if I haven’t seen one of my faculty in a while, I’ll email them and say, “Oh my goodness, we haven’t connected. How are you? What’s going on? What are you teaching this week?” Because I want them to know I’m thinking about them, even if we don’t cross paths in the hallway. In educational development, similarly, if we’re not practicing our teaching skills or staying informed about what different and new pedagogies are, or different approaches, then it becomes really hard to pivot if we need to. And gosh, if COVID taught us anything, it’s that we need to be ready to pivot if something happens. And the blizzard showed us that as well, we suddenly went for a couple of days to remote learning. So we need to know how to be adaptable in a way that our students are able to absorb it. We need to be able to do that for educational development too. So we’ll do things in the teaching center like have one-on-one consults, and we’ll ask for follow ups from faculty if they want to. We hope that they do. And we’ll also not just do one off workshops, but we’ll do a workshop series, because I think you all can relate to the idea that sometimes you go to a workshop, you have tons of great ideas, but there isn’t follow up. And so that repetition that Christian’s talking about, we have a series of events, like a book group or a four-series workshop. Then folks have time to reflect upon what they’ve learned, think about implementation, and come back with questions, checking in with folks to say, “how was the pace of this session,” or “we talked about this approach you were going to take in the classroom, how did it go?” And actually showing that we care as educational developers in a way that is coaching, but also just again, genuine, is so important as well, because sometimes faculty might have tried something and it didn’t go the way that they planned, and they might be embarrassed or shy to come and talk to us and say “this didn’t work out.” So normalizing that as part of the process, and then to feedback like we talked about earlier, letting folks know, “Hey, you’re not the only one who’s experiencing disengagement. This week, we’ve seen an uptick in that” or “Yeah, like there does seem to be a lot of absences the day before spring break. It’s not just your class,” letting them know that it might feel personal, right? Because you’re saying, “oh my gosh, why did three students not show up to my class? I had a really great topic prepared.” “It’s not just you. There’s a trend that we’re seeing here.” I think that is really helpful.

John: One of the things you mentioned a couple of times was the importance of letting faculty know that they’re not alone. And as you said, reading groups or a series of workshops where faculty get to work together repeatedly, allows those things to naturally come out, and it’s so reassuring for faculty when they feel that they’re not the only ones experiencing those challenges.

Constanza: Yeah, and I think that is one of the beautiful things that we do in the teaching center that isn’t necessarily labeled as a service that we offer, but maybe it should be, and maybe that’s a way that we need to reframe the types of consults that we do. Maybe it’s a belonging consult, but everyone is different, right? So for me, I’m just like, “Oh, I’m meeting with Christian today, and we’ll see what we talk about.” And I genuinely get to know him as a human. I get to know what he teaches about. I get to say, “Huh, I have no idea about this. Can you teach me?” But yeah, I do think that one of the unspoken and unwritten rules in educational development is helping faculty engage with their students but also find their niche in the campus and sort of connecting the dots between what’s available for them and what can help enhance their teaching. So when we talk about coaching on the field and we talk about performance, we want athletes to be better, to feel more motivated, to have that drive and energy. We want the same thing for our instructors, too, but we also want them to know that not every single day goes perfectly. Just because we’re subject matter experts doesn’t mean that we have all the answers. And I think when we talk about that feeling of being alone on campus, that also means, if a student is going through something, and you’re a faculty member and you care about… I tell my faculty all the time, we have a lot of student-facing resources on campus. That is when you refer, like you’ve got something going on with a student and they need support that is outside of the scope of being an instructor in the room. That’s why we have care report, so that you can get that student the support that they need. And for faculty, we’re often the only faculty facing office on campus. So letting faculty know, “Oh, by the way, you’ve got somebody here. You’ve got a team here that is here just for you, so that if you’re navigating, let’s say, classroom management, we’re here to consult with you, to talk about what are some ways that you can navigate this. What are some approaches that you can take that are different than perhaps the ones that you’ve been taking?” So yeah, it’s really important not to feel alone, especially in teaching. It’s such a relational field.

Rebecca: One thing that I heard come out in the conversation today is maybe a need for this practice and repetition for fluency, but with variety. And I think repetition kind of implies, by its nature, that it could get boring really quick. So how do you, as a coach, bring in that variety so that it stays engaging?

Christian: Well, I think you just said it. Sports is all about repetition, shooting the same free throw 100 times, blocking the same way over and believe me, it gets boring, and you’re hoping that your coach can get creative. So we’ll just change the drill, and you feel like it’s new, but it’s technically the same thing. It just looks different, but the coach is still getting the same outcome that he wants, but now he’s got you reengaged, and you’re not bitching and complaining about being in the same old thing in week 10. I think that’s the same thing for teaching. It is, how could I create the same lesson plan or try to get the same thing across and they think that it’s actually different? And I try to do that as much as possible. Either I change the topic, I change the theme of it, because, you know, I get bored too. [LAUGHTER] I get bored. So, like, Man, [snap fingers] [LAUGHTER] I gotta snap out of this. Let’s kind of change where everybody sits. I don’t know, like, just do something different. That’s about as simple as I can get with that. Like, I think it’s the repetition is key, and you can’t get rid of it. You can’t ignore it. But I do think creating a different lesson plan that still has the same teeth as how it was originally set up to be, I think is important also.

Constanza: Yeah, and I think the same type of coaching practice happens in educational development too. Number one, not every single strategy or approach or recommendation, I make… Christian will laugh when I say this, but in our first weeks of mentorship, I was like, “Look, you don’t have to listen to me.” And he’s like, “But Constanza, I’m here. I want to listen to you.” And he’d always say that over and over again. And I was like, “Well, no Christian. What I mean by that is, I’m going to give you a variety of options. You choose what feels right for you, for your teaching style, for your teaching approach.” So we have to offer variety, because folks may or may not be comfortable with one solution that we give. We might need to give them a variety so that they say, “Oh, this one feels like it fits for me or for my context,” because, again, as I mentioned at the beginning of this episode, I often am not very familiar with the subject matter that the faculty member is coming in with. So I’m there to talk about the teaching strategies. Number two, there are so many books on educational development, they keep coming out. Why? Because our students and our faculty are changing in terms of their expectations, what they need. So we need to adapt, and there will always be books on educational development, because we’re still learning more about how we learn, and again, the people who are in front of us change. So I think, on that note, too, we need to constantly be offering variety. If I only offered the same three workshops every single year, I would not have attendance, because faculty will say, “Well, I’ve seen that. That’s old. Teach me something new.” So if we want to engage faculty, then we need to give them new approaches. Or if we’re talking about student engagement, which is something that we’ve always been talking about, we need to talk about different ways that they can approach that. So to Christian’s point, yes, it’s the same topic, but it’s a different way of explaining it, or it’s a different idea, or it’s having faculty perhaps present themselves and say, “This has really worked well for me in the classroom. Let me show you how I do it.” We have one instructor who, he came in last summer, and he said, “Constanza, I’m going to upend my class, and I want to talk to you about it.” And I said, “All right, tell me more.” And so he decided to use flipped learning for all of his classes. He started with one, and now this semester, he’s using it for all of them in a really different and unique way. And then he delivered a presentation about it a few weeks ago to talk about the implications of that in the age of AI, which is not how we would have talked about flipped learning even five years ago. So we all need a refresh on our teaching. And the other thing I’ll add to what Christian said is, if you don’t, it gets boring for you too. I know even teaching three sections of the same course back to back, by the third section, I’m like, “Okay, did I say this in this section, or did I say it in the section before?” We need to spice it up for ourselves so that we can have the passion to then share with our students. It’s so important.

John: We always end with the question: “what’s next?”

Christian: Is world domination too aggressive? [LAUGHTER]

John: It seems to be really popular right now.

Christian: Oh, that’s true. [LAUGHTER] True. World domination in the teaching profession, that is what’s next for us. I’m going to speak for Constanza as well, because we feel like we have a really good message, and I think we have a real unique way of sharing and explaining that message. And so what’s next for us, from a partnership, is trying to find unique and creative ways to share what we have learned. And that’s the easiest way I could express it. Constanza, you do the academic version and clean it up for me.

Constanza: I think just to add to what Christian has said, I really, really enjoy working with Christian. It’s not every single day that you get to go home and say, “Yeah, today I work with an NFL two time Super Bowl champion,” and remember, I know nothing about football. So it’s really cool how we came from such different spaces, and yet found so many parallels in the work that we do. I really appreciate the openness that Christian has. It takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable in teaching. We know this, and to talk so openly about “Here’s what I’ve learned in my last year or so of teaching.” And I’m really excited, because I think, to Christian’s point, we’ll be able to help a lot of other instructors just by talking about the work that we’re doing. So I’m really excited that Christian has agreed to work with me in this way, and we’re just so grateful for being able to be here with you both today to talk a little bit about what we’re doing.

John: Well, thank you. It’s been great talking to both of you, and to meet you, Christian and to talk to you again, Constanza, and the message that you have about working together to improve teaching is one, as the director of a teaching center, I’d like to see a whole lot more of because we can all learn from each other and sharing our ideas in a world in which things are evolving so rapidly in higher ed, can be really helpful rather than trying to deal with everything alone.

Rebecca: Finding ways to reframe, using coaching and other frames can be really helpful to spice things up and provide that variety, even if the underlying techniques and things are really the same.

Christian: This last thing, and we’ll cap it, when I talk to coaches, coaches in the NFL and college, when I talk to them about their philosophy on coaching, they all end up saying, you know, we’re just teachers. They say the same thing that we’re saying I’m saying, “Oh…” they go, “No, we’re just teachers,” and they just use a different word for it.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us, and we look forward to sharing this with our audience,

Christian: Yeah, can’t wait to hear it. Appreciate you guys having us on.

Constanza: Thank you both.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing Assistance provided by Madison Lee.

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