The win after winning

For two hours or so this morning, I found myself in a rather unusual classroom. My “students” were teachers—about 500 campus journalism coaches and mentors from across Western Visayas, gathered at the Grand Ballroom A of Iloilo Grand Hotel over the weekend. They came from the different schools divisions of the region’s five provinces for the two-day Coaching the Coaches Training-Workshop of the Department of Education Region VI, operationalized by the Regional Association of School Paper Advisers, Inc. (RASPA), led by my good friend Imelda Sabio. My assignment was familiar territory: column and editorial writing in English and Filipino. The harder part was that I was not really teaching writing. I was helping writers teach writers.

That difference matters. It is one thing to look at a weak paragraph and know how to improve it. It is another to sit beside a 15-year-old and help that young writer discover what is wrong without grabbing the paper and doing the writing yourself. Every journalism coach knows the temptation. Competition is tomorrow. It is already 4:30 in the afternoon. The newspeg is flat, the angle is generic, the argument wanders, and the ending sounds like every “let us work hand in hand for a brighter tomorrow” ending we have read since forever. You know exactly how to fix it. The question is whether you should.

Much of my session revolved around that tension. We want the piece to win. We want the contestant to win. But somewhere beyond trophies, medals, rankings, and delegation photographs is a third victory that may matter more: winning the writer. A coach can rewrite a paragraph in five minutes. Teaching a student to recognize a weak argument may take five sessions. Developing the habit of reading current affairs may take months. Building judgment, confidence, discipline, curiosity, and respect for evidence may take years. Mentoring is slow work disguised as contest preparation.

The early participant feedback, modest as the response pool still is, reassured me that this point landed. Respondents spoke about mentors needing to remain informed because, as one put it, “you cannot give what you don’t have.” They mentioned continuous learning, reflection, checking students’ work, credibility, authenticity, evidence, critical thinking, and different approaches to coaching. More tellingly, they asked for deeper workshops, step-by-step exercises, more examples, fact-checking, and sustained practice. These are preliminary impressions, not yet a definitive evaluation, but they point in a useful direction: coaches themselves want more than another lecture.

I wanted more time, too. Two hours with hundreds of participants can ignite ideas, demonstrate techniques, and perhaps unsettle a few old habits. It cannot turn anyone into a master mentor. If resources permitted, I would rather spend two days with smaller groups: reading actual drafts, diagnosing weaknesses, practicing coaching conversations, checking evidence, revising, failing, trying again, and comparing what happened. Writing is learned partly by writing. Mentoring is learned partly by mentoring. PowerPoint can point toward the gym; it cannot do the push-ups for us.

There are practical limits, of course. Schools operate with finite budgets, crowded calendars, uneven resources, and teachers already carrying several responsibilities. The participants themselves identified coaching time, materials, and financial support as constraints. That is worth remembering whenever we romanticize the heroic school paper adviser who somehow produces champions year after year. Good mentors need commitment, yes, but commitment cannot photocopy materials, create hours in a day, or pay transportation costs. Campus journalism becomes stronger when school administrations understand that mentoring requires time, opportunity, resources, and institutional backing.

Perhaps that is why I keep returning to the idea of a force multiplier. I do not expect one session to transform journalism coaching across Western Visayas. That would be an absurd claim. But perhaps one coach returns to Antique and tries a different way of questioning a student. Another in Capiz begins writing again instead of merely correcting. Someone in Aklan builds an issue-reading habit with the editorial staff. A mentor in Negros Occidental teaches students to ask, “What proves this?” before they make a sweeping claim. Someone in Iloilo stops writing “Revise” in the margin and instead asks, “What are we missing?” Small changes travel surprisingly far when teachers carry them home.

And that, for me, is where campus journalism becomes much larger than campus journalism. We are not merely preparing children to write editorials about the latest issue or columns clever enough to impress judges. We are teaching young people to notice what others overlook, question what everybody casually accepts, verify before believing, distinguish evidence from noise, understand another side, and speak when silence is easier. These habits will matter even if they never touch a school paper again.

Some of these students will become engineers, teachers, nurses, fisherfolk advocates, entrepreneurs, lawyers, public servants, scientists, artists, or parents. Most will never become professional journalists. That is perfectly fine. I would still like them to carry journalism’s better habits wherever they go: curiosity without gullibility, conviction without arrogance, skepticism without cynicism, and the courage to speak and write not only for themselves but also with those whose experiences are too easily ignored. Critical journalism, taught well, is also an education in citizenship.

So yes, coach them to win. Study the rubric. Practice under pressure. Sharpen the newspeg. Strengthen the evidence. Cut the fat. Check the grammar. Celebrate the medal when it comes. But somewhere between the red pen and the awarding ceremony, remember what else is being formed. A winning article may survive one competition. A writer taught to think critically, creatively, constructively, and compassionately may spend a lifetime speaking for what is good, right, just, and worth defending. That may be the win after winning.

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Doc H fondly describes himself as a ”student of and for life” who, like many others, aspires to a life-giving and why-driven world grounded in social justice and the pursuit of happiness. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the institutions he is employed or connected with.