Coaching for Success
What is coaching?
Coaching is a pragmatic approach for ensuring learning remains at the heart of interactions between students and those stewarding them through their work integrated learning experiences. The nature of the world of work has seen substantial changes with respect to increasingly valued skills for enterprising, problem solving and taking initiative. It is therefore important that work integrated learning (WIL) reflects these changes by focusing on developing students’ skills in navigating uncertainty.
Coaching is valued for its focus on helping students to learn problem solving techniques and confidence so they are better equipped to navigate uncertain situations in the future. Contexts for WIL-focused coaching can be specific, such as completing particular work processes and tasks within a workplace internship or placement model; or a more malleable context such as student teams helping an industry partner solve a problem, or an entrepreneurial student developing an idea for a new business. In all of these contexts there is an opportunity for a WIL partner to enrich the student learning experience by adopting a coaching mindset – lifting conversations from instruction or advice to an interactive experience that requires students to actively think for themselves to provide solutions to the questions they want answered.
In this module, we refer to coaching as using:
'a collaborative, reflective, goal-focused relationship' [1] that provides a 'pragmatic approach to helping people manage their acquisition or improvement of skills' [2] in order to 'accelerate the pace of development and improvement of [student] performance.'[3]
So when we think about coaching in the context of work integrated learning, it's first important to understand what's the relevance of coaching, why would we be thinking of coaching instead of say mentoring or supervision or another mode of conversation that you might have in that setting. I think one of the most important things here is that coaching is all focused towards an individual or helping that individual to navigate a period of uncertainty, helping them understand how they can solve the problem for themselves. But that's quite difficult to do solo so having a partner to help you walk through that process is quite handy and that's really the crux of coaching. In a work integrated learning setting the focus is on the student going through a learning experience and so helping them to develop skills and skills in self-navigating uncertainty and problem solving on their own is a great skill for development and coaching simply helps to support that process.
- (Jones & Bozer, 2018, p768)
- (Jackson, 2005, p46)
- (Lech, van Nieuwerburgh, & Jalloul, 2018, p61)