Coaching perspectives

The value of pursuing a coaching framework in WIL conversations from a partner perspective, or industry partner perspective is largely that the supervision in particular in units can be quite hands on and you might feel that you always have to be looking over the student's shoulder, or double checking the work that's going on. Depending on the industry that you're in, that might just be a requirement but how much trust do you have in that individual, in that student in that placement to continue working through that problem? By going through a coaching framework early in that student's placement or internship, you start to develop a deeper understanding of the relationship between the student, the work that they're doing and the context of the work. So as we start to develop a trust in their abilities through those tasks, it just reduces a little bit of your own cognitive load and a little bit of the time that might be spent looking over that shoulder of that student and let them actually carry out the work in the workplace with you. So I like to see coaching as an investment in time, a little bit front heavy in terms of investing that time and effort to help work with the student and perhaps help them navigate that uncertainty, but then you as a WIL partner can be more assured that they understand what it is that's actually going through their brain as they make those decisions to complete the work that you've given them.

So what's the utility of coaching for our students in work integrated learning? I think one of the important things to understand here is that the most feedback we get from our industry partners as students leaving our programs enter the workforce is that they would love for our students to be a little more confident in navigating ambiguity and uncertainty and for taking on new problems and for solving those problems on their own. And this is the real opportunity for coaching to provide you with experience and to enrich that learning process through work integrated learning to deal with that uncertainty, to solve those problems with just a little bit more confidence. So coaching is a framework or a conversation style for you to lean into. To accept that you shouldn't always expect the answer to a particular question to be given to you straight away. Instead you might need to expect a WIL partner to answer your question with another question. They would like to perhaps understand how you would approach solving a particular problem. That might be for their benefit to help them see a different perspective on how to solve a particular issue but also to help them understand what your mindset is and your thought processes. That they can provide you advice and guidance and perhaps maybe there's a source of bias that's creeping into your problem solving or perhaps there's a blind spot to the context that you're trying to apply to, to solve this problem and so that's the opportunity - that conversation that allows your WIL partner to understand your thought process so that they can help with your application of knowledge into that context. That deepens the learning experience for you in that work integrated learning experience and hopefully makes you more confident in problem solving in the future.

If you're a unit coordinator or a teaching and learning consultant and you're wondering what is the value of coaching in this context of work integrated learning, I think one of the key things to focus on is that work integrated learning is all about creating a rich learning experience for our students. In that context its then important to ensure that our relationship that our WIL partners have with our students actually supports the learning outcomes that you're trying to design into a particular unit or a particular learning experience that work integrated learning is supporting. Coaching just allows a moment of pause to enter into that relationship between work integrated learning partner and student. So rather than any question being answered with a direct response or a direct answer as to how to solve a particular problem, it asks the student to take a moment to think about how they would like to approach that problem. What's the knowledge they can bring to the table to solve it and hopefully if we think about the content you've been providing the students, it creates a platform to help them more actively think about how that knowledge can be applied into context. That deepens the learning experience and hopefully works towards achieving your learning goals for your unit.