Developing the Student Coach in Schools and Colleges (Online)

Use coaching techniques with your students to boost well-being, as well as academic performance.

How will this course benefit you?

Coaching is a powerful skill for students, especially those who are learning how to be adults as well as coping with many pressures relating to achieving academic or technical success and having positive relationships with their peers, parents and teachers.

Coaching is all about developing self-belief, setting, articulating and working towards clearly defined SMART objectives or goals and identifying individual strengths and gaps in learning.

Using coaching techniques with students will boost well-being, as well as academic performance. Feedback through coaching gives students ownership of their learning and empowers them in their own development. Training students as coaches also has a positive effect on both the students doing the coaching and those they coach.

Research into coaching with students highlights the following benefits:

• Overall confidence in themselves and their ability to improve their learning
• Much better interaction with peers, teachers and others
• Ability to articulate and work towards their own goals and objectives
• An increased sense of empathy and recognising others feelings
• Taking responsibility for their own learning and achievements
• Increased focus and concentration
• Better time-management
• Understanding how open questions lead to a greater ability to reason, analyse and evaluate
• The ability to listen deeply and actively
• Managing anxiety and well-being
• Learn how to embrace failure as a genuine part of the learning process
• Learn to reflect on learning, how they learn and why they are learning
• Improves behaviour and attitudes to learning

What will be covered in this course?

Session 1

An introduction to the positives of learning how to coach in terms of students’ self-belief, time management and ability to be reflective and resilient in the face of academic and personal pressures. This would be an interactive session where students focus on some of the qualities of a coach such as empathy, being self-aware, being observant, knowing how they learn, comfortable with silence, able to reflect on their own strengths, their creativity and their own understanding of themselves.

Session 2

Learning some of the skills of a coach that will really support them in their learning, their ability to focus, to be resilient and reflective and work successfully with their peers, teachers and others. We will focus on,

• Learning how to listen actively
• Understanding the power of the open and probing question and how to use questioning to support learning more deeply
• Focusing on the importance of empathy, respect and trust in the role of coaching and learning
• Creating opportunities to build rapport, challenge where appropriate and holding the focus within a coaching conversation

Session 3

We will create an opportunity for students to practice the skills they have learnt in session 2. Working in twos they can complete a simple coaching model, What now? What next? What else? and share their thoughts in a practice peer coaching session.

Session 4

A final session with a focus on learning and coaching. Asking students, the questions

• What is learning?
• How do we learn?
• Why do we forget so much?

We will briefly look at the theory of cognitive science and cognitive overload and how students need the stimulus to want to learn. The importance of listening, concentration and noticing patterns, change and detail can be important in having the empathy of a coach and also the ability to see and hear things more clearly.

We share the simple and very revealing fact that the working memory can only hold between 4 – 7 pieces of information at any given time. Reflection, recall and repetition are all essential in at least some of those pieces of information entering the long term memory and staying there and learning the power of positive questioning in helping the process along is powerful for students to see the relevance of coaching as part of their repertoire of skills for learning.

As part of this last section, we will use the taxonomy, Describe, Explain, Analyse and Evaluate and an activity that challenges students to think of questions that they can ask to draw themselves and their peers to deepen their ability to answer the questions with higher levels of response such as moving their response from a description to an explanation or understanding the difference between analyse and evaluate.

We will send you away with a tool-kit of ideas for how your students can use the newly found coaching skills to continue to improve their thinking, listening and questioning skills.