How to embed coaching in your classroom

Coaching is at the core of everything we do at Yes Futures. We believe that coaching is key in supporting both students and teachers to thrive and fulfil their personal potential.

Missed the webinar? Don’t panic! Below we've shared our highlights from our recent Coaching in Schools webinar and some practical, easy to use tools to introduce coaching into your classroom.

What is coaching, and why is it so important in schools?

Coaching is supporting someone to come to their own decision or action by asking effective questions. Because coaching encourages individuals to make their own decisions, rather than advising them, it helps individuals to develop crucial skills such as independent thinking, responsibility, agency and ownership.

Coaching skills are skills for life. By using coaching techniques in your school, you’ll be equipping your students with the tools needed to respond to challenging situations, which will stay with them long after they have left the classroom.

How can I embed coaching into my classroom?

Luckily, you don’t need to be a trained coach to introduce coaching into your classroom! As coaches support individuals to find their own answers, you don’t need to be an expert to start using a coaching approach – you just need to know some of the key techniques.

Here are a few of our favourite coaching ideas from our webinar:

Make space for regular reflection

Reflection is a central part of coaching. By regularly taking time to reflect, students can become more aware of their strengths, skills they’ve developed, and areas where they could improve.

Try to build in opportunities for your students to reflect on their performance in different situations. For example, after a school trip: did they communicate with someone new? Did they show confidence by trying something new? Reflection exercises can be a good way of helping students to identify things they may not previously have recognised as strengths or achievements, while boosting their confidence as they start to spot the skills they’ve developed.

Shout-out box

A popular part of our residential weekends, the shout-out box is a great way to get students to reflect and identify positive strengths in others.

Ask your students to write down a positive ‘shout-out’ about someone else in their class, and put their slip of paper in the shout-out box. Sort through them, then randomly hand them out to students to read out loud, to celebrate each other’s strengths and achievements. By doing this, students are encouraged to reflect on their own skills, as well as encouraging them to praise others for their successes.

You could use the shout-out box at set times during the week, or keep a box in the classroom for students to drop a ‘shout out’ in at any time.

Peer coaching

Encouraging students to support their peers can inspire them to be more proactive about their own personal development. An effective way to embed coaching into your classroom is by asking your students to use a coaching approach with each other.

Set students a paired task and challenge one of the pair to only ask questions. Can they manage to not give any answers or advice? This can be a fun way to introduce students to the principles of coaching, while boosting students’ confidence as they realise that they can support their classmates to achieve their goals.

What about coaching for teachers?

At Yes Futures, we believe that for teachers to be able to provide wellbeing support to their students, they need space to reflect on their own personal development. That’s why we’re delighted to have partnered with Animas to offer our Creating Space programme to teachers for free! We are no longer accepting applications for Creating Space for April 2022, but keep an eye out for future updates!

Or why not download our free teacher guide to coaching to find out how to embed a teaching approach into your school?