Coaching for Success

Cognitive coaching is about helping a person get to where they want to be. It isn't about helping them get to where you think they should be - that's teaching or consulting or parenting or bossing. It's more about listening - active listening.

I'm doing an 8 day course in cognitive coaching - and although I'm only half way through I better understand how to ask questions that help people to help themselves - an ideal skill for Student-Directed Inquiry.

In fact the official description of cognitive coaching is

to produce self-directed persons with cognitive capacity for high performance both independently and as members of a community.

You couldn't get much closer to the aim of this course!

Cognitive coaching is about 3 types of conversation - planning, reflecting and problem-resolving. In those conversations the coach does a lot of active listening and uses a range of strategies to help the person being coached to use their own skills to think through an issue to reach their goal.

The second half of the course begins in June - in the meantime I need to practice what I know. Lucky students! :-)

While cognitive coaching is designed for face-to-face conversations I think I can also use it online - in the comments I write on journals. I have already begun to use my new training when writing comments and I'll be interested to see how the responses compare with those of last year's students.

Growing Body Parts

Body parts are appearing all over the place now... We have had a fake severed hand for an ArtVid project, Bugs hand (on the left) created in Blender (hopefully not going into one) and various legs, heads and torsos across several game development groups.

Skoolaborators are also busy with bodies but mostly just dressing them. Several people have now uploaded their own T-shirt designs for their Second Life avatars.

This week's presentation on mentoring was more of a workshop. Everyone present had a chance to mentor and be mentored... Some people found they learned a great deal about other projects, others learned to be a little more structured when reflecting on their own progress and a few were not sure of the usefulness of the exercise.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by regor2012

The mentoring process is based on GROWTH Coaching and Cognitive Coaching. The latter in particular is designed to assist students with student-directed learning. I did my training in GROWTH coaching a couple of years ago and found the structured approach to reflection very useful - although my workshop was a few hours - not 30 minutes. Nevertheless listening in to conversations around the room I was very happy with the level of reflection I heard.
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