Do you think teachers are similar to coaches, pastors or something else? It depends on where you live

A cross-national survey of over 3,000 people in the US, England, and Australia found coaching was the top comparison for teaching across all three countries, though cultural differences emerged: US respondents more often likened teaching to parenting and religious roles, while English and Australian respondents compared it to credentialed professions like nursing and social work. Despite these differences, all three countries centered teaching in caring relationships, and AI was nearly absent from respondents' descriptions despite dominating expert discourse on education's future.

Teaching:
• Frame your role explicitly as coaching—guiding students through a method they'll internalize, not just delivering poses—since this resonates universally and matches Ashtanga's guru-parampara lineage structure
• Emphasize the relational container you create in the shala: students come for technique but stay for the caring attention that makes learning possible, which this research shows is what people actually value in teaching
• When students struggle with a pose or plateau, shift from technical correction to coaching questions: 'What are you noticing? What have you tried?' to activate their agency within the relationship
• Use the coaching metaphor in marketing and onboarding: you're not a fitness instructor or a guru-figure but a coach helping students develop their own practice system

Writing seeds:
• Essay contrasting the yoga teacher-as-guru model (religious figure) with teacher-as-coach, arguing functional Ashtanga needs the latter: someone who transmits a method students will outgrow you with, not dependence
• Shala Daily post on why AI won't replace yoga teachers: the research shows people don't think about teaching as information transfer but as caring relationship, which is exactly what practice-as-systems-literacy requires
• Short piece on cultural differences in how students approach authority in the shala: American students may expect more parental guidance while international students treat you as a credentialed professional, and how to navigate both
• Essay titled 'Coaching Presence' exploring how the best teaching happens in relationship, not technique—connecting to your embodiment work and why you can't systemize care but you can create conditions for it

Idea map:
• Validates your practice-as-method approach: coaching is about transmitting a system the student internalizes, not creating dependency, which aligns with systems literacy as the throughline
• The absence of AI in public discourse about teaching supports your embodiment emphasis: people intuitively know learning happens in relationship and presence, not information delivery
• The US tendency to frame teaching as parenting/religious role explains some of the guru-worship problems in American yoga culture—your functional approach pushes back toward the coaching model
• The universal agreement on caring relationships as central to teaching maps directly to your attention work: the shala is a container where students learn to pay attention because you're paying attention to them

Source: https://phys.org/news/2026-10-teachers-similar-pastors.html