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

Three answers, three countries, one open-ended question: “Teaching is similar to what other occupation or activity?”

We asked this question to more than 3,000 people across the United States, England and Australia between May 2025 and March 2026.

Coaching was the front-runner across all three countries. But the similarities partially diverged there.

Respondents in England and Australia more often compared teaching with professional roles such as nursing and social work. U.S. respondents, meanwhile, more often likened teaching to being a parent and religious roles, such as a cleric or pastor.

In the three countries, however, one other idea stood out: Teaching was primarily associated with a caring relationship.

We have previously examined how Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. find common ground on what makes a good teacher, despite the polarization in the country on education and many other issues.

This time, we wanted to know whether people across countries had similar ideas of teachers.

Common ground

In all three countries, respondents most often described teaching as centered in the relationship between teacher and student: a form of coaching, caregiving, parenting and other types of personal support.

Coaching was the most common answer in each country, but its prominence varied.

Coaching was named by 30% of U.S. respondents, compared with 23% in England and 23% in Australia.

The differences became more pronounced when participants named other occupations and activities.

Respondents in England and Australia were more likely to associate teaching with institutional, credentialed and paid professional roles, such as nursing, lecturing and social work.

“Nursing. They care for and look after people whilst they are at their most vulnerable. Teachers do a similar thing by caring and teaching young people some of the skills they will need later in life,” a 39-year-old Australian man told us.

“A lecturer, you are passing on knowledge to people, usually the younger generation,” another 32-year-old man in England said.

Compared with respondents in those countries, U.S. respondents were more likely to describe teaching through caregiving roles, such as parenting, and through religious figures, such as priests, pastors or rabbis.

“Being a parent, you are caring for young minds and shaping them through learning,” a 33-year-old woman in the U.S. told us.

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“As a preacher, he teaches the word of God. How they deliver the word determines how well the people will understand it,” a 23-year-old woman in the U.S. said.

While international comparisons are informative, they do not represent a single view of teaching. Instead, they suggest that respondents in three countries likely drew on somewhat different cultural repertoires when describing the profession.

We were surprised by just how much agreement we found.

Despite differences in schooling models and cultural norms, people in the United States, England and Australia had remarkably similar ideas about how relationships are at the heart of teaching, closely echoing our other work showing that Republicans and Democrats view teachers similarly.

AI is not at the center of people’s thinking

In September 2026, The New York Times conducted an informal survey of 37 education researchers who gave 30 ideas about how to fix schools.

Their list consists primarily of interventions such as more per-pupil funding, banning cellphones and restricting artificial intelligence in the classroom. These ideas appeared far less often in our participants’ explanations of what teaching resembles.

In fact, out of more than 3,000 responses to our survey, AI came up only a handful of times and never as the reason teaching and another occupation were said to be alike.

Given how central AI has become to political and academic debates about the future of education, its near-total absence in these public descriptions of teaching is notable.

At the same time, experts and citizens agree that what separates very good teaching from poor execution is likely the quality of the relationship between educators and children.

We think that serious conversation about student achievement must include clear descriptions of very good teachers: the practices they use to encourage and enable students to learn. Our research shows that teaching should make room for both the transmission of knowledge and the meaningful and caring relationships that make learning possible.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Gustavo E. Fischman, Arizona State University; Eric Haas, California State University, East Bay, and Margarita Pivovarova, Arizona State University

Read more:

• More and more teachers and students are using AI – even though it might do more harm than good
• When it comes to developing policies on AI in K‑12, schools are largely on their own
• Colleges face a choice: Try to shape AI’s impact on learning, or be redefined by it

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.