A Journey Through the First Coaching Session

You may be familiar with using coaching with colleagues, but what happens when you provide a coach for students? While many people still relate coaching to their experience in a sports setting, coaching has the potential to create a powerful learning environment within the classroom. Personalised coaching is proven to:

• Promote engagement and effective learning

• Raise self-awareness and deepen self-reflection

• Help students to self-regulate behaviour

• Create more independence, and

• Accelerate overall progress

92% of young people in receipt of Pupil Premium funding, who participated in our 2022 programmes, showed a measurable improvement in their critical skills. That’s why we’re always excited to kick-start the coaching sessions with students, which we’ve done this past week with students across our sixteen school cohorts.

But what does the first coaching session look like for our students?

For Finding Futures

At the first coaching session, after an initial introduction to the session, each student meets with their coach. The first session for our Finding Futures students is on Confidence. The students come together to discuss what Confidence is and read Confidence statements to see how each student gauges their own level of Confidence.

Students are then guided through the Talent Toolbox which is explained to them by the Programme Manager. The students use the Talent Toolbox to begin thinking about what Confidence means to them, as well as that, students are asked to complete the tracker to review where they are currently at in regards to their own Confidence. Students then go on to set themselves a goal in regards to improving their own Confidence.

The session is then wrapped up!

We work with groups of 12 or 18 students on a coaching day in school, so after the first six students have met with a coach, the next 6 students come and meet with their assigned coaches.

For Rising Futures

It’s important to note they’ve already done a meet and greet with the coaching in our Welcome Sessions, where the programme is introduced to them and they get to meet the Programme Managers and volunteer coaches. At the first coaching session, after an initial introduction to the session, each student meets with their assigned coach online. They are given their Talent Toolbox and the SMART goals system, which they use throughout the programme to track and support their progress. In the first session, the coach gets to know the students and asks questions to better understand them. Supported by their coaches, students give themselves a score between 0 and 4 in each of the four talent areas: communication, confidence, self-awareness or resilience. Then it’s on to setting their first goal in one of these four areas. This is an important stage in which the coach gets to better understand what is important to that young person and how they can help facilitate them to achieve their goals in the upcoming sessions. Before the end of the session, the students agree on a plan of how they might work towards completing their goal before the next coaching session.

For more information on our programmes and to find out how we could support your students, please visit our Programmes page.