What’s the best way to deliver coaching in schools?

How can pupils and staff benefit from coaching when budgets are so tight?

Liz Scott is a coach working extensively in education; she’s discovered that pure ‘leadership coaching’ isn’t the answer when working with teenagers. Here are the three key points she learnt from coaching in schools.

Coaching in schools

by Liz Scott

You would think that it would be pretty straight forward when coaching students. You would think that all you need to do is to slightly adapt head teacher coaching to suit a teenager. So when I was asked to coach students I was excited, enthusiastic and very naïve. I thought about ‘Dead Poets Society’ and imaged I would inspire these students to great things using coaching instead of poetry. It wasn’t quite that simple. I rapidly had to modify my technique to suit young people. Here are the three key things I learnt.

1. You need a liberal sprinkling of mentoring.

Realisation dawned rapidly as I sat with my first 15 year old that pure leadership coaching wasn’t the answer.

Students spend such a lot of time at school being told what to do and when to do it. The looseness of pure non-directive coaching wasn’t something they were comfortable with. The students responded best when a structured, mentoring approach was mixed with a non-directive framework.

2. Coaching could produce rapid change

The year 10 students had issues ranging from confidence, communication and organisational-skills.

It was astonishing how quickly they adjusted their habits and behaviours when they saw something from a new perspective. For example, one young lad was incredibly disorganised, he’d forget books, homework and pencils on a daily basis. His teachers were frustrated and he felt they were ‘picking’ on him. After a bit of coaching he realised (for himself) that he needed to do something differently.

As a result of the session he decided he would pack his bag every night before school. When he left I couldn’t believe he would remember this on a daily basis. However, he did. When someone ‘finds their own solution’ through coaching, then things can change quickly,

3. It’s better to train the staff in coaching skills

In an ideal world it would be great for students to have an experienced, qualified coach working with them. However, in reality there isn’t the time or money to do this.

I felt real frustration at the small impact I was able to make with individual students. I could only see a limited number of youngsters and time was tight when I saw them (each session was 20 minutes).

It seems that the real leverage is when the staff are trained in coaching skills and can scatter coaching into their conversations and interactions with the students. This is the area I began to focus on. Instead of me delivering coaching with an ad-hoc number of students I began to work with teachers and TA’s to help them use coaching skills to transform student-relationships, lessons and day to day conversations.

It’s so much better to help the staff learn fundamental coaching skills. When they can do this then the impact can be felt across the school.

Summary

Working in schools is incredibly rewarding. For me the biggest reward is helping the existing staff to adapt their communication using coaching skills. Teachers are already highly skilled in working with young people, so giving them the additional skill of coaching can make a real difference in a school.

About the Author/Further Resources

Liz Scott is part of www.smartcoachingforschools.com. She works with a coach delivering coaching skill training courses in education. Liz also brings coaches together as part of Coaching Connect. You can come to the next Coaching Connect event in October www.coachingconnect.eventbrite.com