School Coaching

"Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world." - Nelson Mandela

What's school coaching?

Here's a definition given by the University of Oxford: "a coach facilitates a confidential, learning conversation, in which a coachee is enabled to identify goals and to generate and consider options and action plans. The coach acts as an impartial "thinking partner", using effective questioning and listening skills, and both encouraging and challenging the coachee in order to develop understanding and commitment to action." (University of Oxford , last accessed at https://pod.admin.ox.ac.uk/coaching-and-mentoring on 29th September 2023).

Whitmore defines coaching as a way of "unlocking people’s potential to maximise their own performance" (2009: 10). In that light, another definition can be found here: "Coaching is understood as a facilitative intervention, aimed at supporting a coachee to take responsibility for adapting their behaviour or ways of thinking in order to achieve better results. Whitmore explicitly states that coaching is about ‘helping [people] to learn, rather than teaching them’ (2009: 10), thus setting ‘coaching’ apart from ‘teaching’. In this sense, coaching can broaden the repertoire of educators by providing a non-directive approach to supporting others to learn for themselves." (Van Nieuwerburgh, C., and Barr, M. (2016). “Coaching in Education”, in Tatiana Bachkirova, Gordon Spence and David Drake (Eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Coaching. Sage. https://au.sagepub.com/en-gb/oce/the-sage-handbook-of-coaching/book245418, last accessed at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/334599996.pdf, on 29th September 2023).

A simpler way to determine what coaching is about would be to improve academic performance and wellbeing (Van Nieuwerburgh, C., and Barr, M.).

Who is school coaching for?

The aim of school coaching is to support students as they enter their journey to become citizens of tomorrow's society. It starts by finding how to overcome challenges. That means how to learn. It is not so much about the grades. It is about learning how to learn. Learning how to think. Learning to believe in yourself, to make yourself proud and go beyond the feeling of "I can't do this".

Why trusting me?

Ever since my journey as a teacher started, I have realised the palette of roles that being a teacher implies. Equally, I've lost count of how many times I've been asked how I could be a teacher, and more specifically why I was teaching in the UK when I could be in France. The answer is simple: in the UK, I feel that being a teacher is so much more than working 9-5. It is about being there for the students as a human being.

During my teaching time in a secondary school in Scotland, there have been so many young people naturally coming to me, and trusting me enough to open up about their problems at school, that I started to wonder what was "wrong" with me. That was only to realise that I could make a difference by being there for them when they needed someone to listen to them. And it has been an honour to be that person and find the right words to guide them as much as possible towards better days.

This is why I took up a course to become a school coach and be there to support young people during their time at school.

What can you do now?

If you are the parent or carer of a teenager who seems to have disengaged with school work or who struggles academically, I would be happy to hear from you and provide my knowledge and care to support you. I look forward to hearing from you.