First off, an apology! After making the ad for the session, I listened to the podcast which Karen shared in the group and discovered that the order of actions is slightly different to what’s shown above, as it’s known as the GROW approach to coaching. First you identify your goals, then consider your current reality. From there you start to consider your options (which can be feasible or crazy, the idea is to get as many ideas down as you can) and then you identify the way forward.
Who is coaching for?
We talked a little about the difference between coaching in training and teaching contexts, as well as the challenges of coaching in a group situation. For the most part, our chat focused on coaching English language learners, rather than trainee teachers or others.
Whoever you’re working with, we identified a need to understand the degree of support people want as coaching is directing not leading; therefore, as Niamh Ryan points out in the podcast, it isn’t suitable for people who want to be told what to do.
We all agreed as well that we were initially a little resistant to the term ‘coaching’ and that it perhaps felt like a bit of a marketing ploy to charge more for classes! However, we also felt that in many cases, a lot of our teaching involves an aspect of coaching anyway, in terms of directing learners to resources they can use outside the class, as we felt that if they only have an hour or two of class time, the responsibility lies with them to put in the effort if they want to improve quickly.
The benefits of coaching in a 1-to-1 environment
We thought that it might be easier when working with individuals as you have the time to dedicate to talking to them about their goals, as well as helping them to identify the next steps they can take and providing support in the reflection process too. This might be more challenging in a group context, however we did come up with some possibilities for how it might work which we’ll look at shortly.
Another benefit is that you can develop a more personal relationship with the person. We said that coaching is very much about creating a safe space for coachees to open up about any problems they’re facing and the coach is much more able to ask delving questions to get to the underlying causes of issues, taking the time to form their questions carefully to support their coachee.
How might it work in groups?
We felt it would be tricky to coach everyone effectively in a group situation as each individual has different needs. However, we did suggest some ways of working which might enable us to incude more coaching aspects:
Build in one-to-one tutorial moments as an ongoing part of the course. We may sometimes do tutorials at the end of term; however we felt that these would be more effective as a more routine part of the lesson, as chances are that at the end of term everyone is winding down. Starting with a one-to-one moment following your initial needs analysis as a group, you can pinpoint areas which individuals are looking to work on and then reflect on their progress in a formative way during each term.
Structured reflection tasks. We identified that for learners to fully benefit from coaching, there needs to be a more in-depth reflection on the process of learning. For example, Francesca mentioned that on the pre-sessional courses which she’s worked on, learners are often given criteria to help them self-assess their work, whether it’s their level of participation, the range of vocabulary they used, or other areas.
One of the criteria of assessment in Diploma-level lessons is that “learners are encouraged to evaluate, review and reflect on their learning” and we talked briefly about ways of doing this, such as by using exit tickets or having learners annotate the screen to highlight which activity they enjoyed most (as very basic ways of engaging learners in the reflective process…feels like that could be another Focused Forum topic!).
Some questions learners could perhaps ask themselves at the end of an activity to reflect on it include:
- How did I feel about this activity?
- Did I participate as much as I wanted to?
- What words, phrases or structures did I use which are new to me?
- What prevented me from doing better in the task?
- What would I need to do differently next time?
Adding to the chat around reflection, we felt that it needed to be given more importance in class – though this is obviously a challenge with the time we have with learners to get through everything as it is. We also noted that coaching needs to be consistent and part of a planned, ongoing activity throughout the course. We all worried that we easily start the term full of new ideas and great intetnions, but for these things to work in practice, it needs dedicated planning and time.
We also thought in a group context that it would be wonderful to do some learner training to enable them to coach each other. It would require significant thought and training to be effective, but the results could be something magical.
One final comment about the reflective process was around accountability and we thought that perhaps as a coach, your role is to support people in their reflection, but not judge or evaluate their progress. This again links back to the podcast and the idea that coaching is linked to intrinsic motivation, so also not as suitable for those who value external approval for progress.
Areas for coaching
Confidence was a huge area where we felt that many learners would benefit from coaching, particularly if we can ask them the right questions to help them see their improvement.
Linked to this is the idea of a growth mindset – and a recommendation to watch Carol Dweck’s The Power of Yet if you haven’t already seen it.
Another suggestion was to work with learners’ will power and we all agreed that we’re guilty of choosing to watch an episode on Netflix instead of an ELT webinar which has been on our to do list! Similarly, we can work with our learners to encourage them to use those thirty-minute slots for something useful in their language learning.
We also suggested looking at study skills with them – another area which often isn’t given the importance it deserves as part of a general course.
And obviously we also thought that learners could use some coaching for how to improve certain skills, such as listening, writing or pronunciation. In terms of skills work, we said that this might be where coaching becomes more feasible in a group context – you could have a focus for each couple of weeks and provide the group with resources to help them work on a certain skill, but with a nod to those learners who specifically identified it as an area of interest during your needs analysis and initial tutorial.
And around pronunciation we had a little rant about the distinction between a pronunciation coach and an accent reduction coach 😬
Some interesting follow-up reading and viewing were mentioned:
Some questions to reflect on:
- What elements of coaching would you like to incorporate into your teaching? How?
- At what age could learners start reflecting on the learning process?
- What questions have you asked your learners recently to help them reflect on their learning?
Whilst I was having a tidy-up, I came across this blog post by Elly Setterfield, which talk about setting goals with learners and there’s also a link to an earlier post about setting goals for ourselves too: https://thebestticher.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/goal-setting-with-students/
After our talk, I also started thinking about questions to ask when you first meet students, so that blog post was a good addition.
There’s a conference on coaching coming up at the end of the month: https://skyeng-school.typeform.com/to/sCAyZcfS