As the country continues to battle through Covid-19, nearly everything in our lives has now moved inside and online. As schools are now mostly closed, pupils are experiencing a confusing and fractured time in their school lives. Coaching online is a complete change from the in-school sessions that I was so familiar with but remains a great opportunity to make a difference towards a brighter future for pupils across the country.
Here are my top tips on adapting to the move to online coaching:
Be Prepared
- If like me, you have never used ‘Bramble’ before, take some time to familiarise yourself with how it works. This will ensure that during your sessions you can get the most out of the technology.
- Bramble has a brilliant webinar that you can watch in order to familiarise yourself with how things work - it certainly helped me!
- Check your speaker and your camera before the session starts. Also, agree on a signal with your coachee so that you can make each other aware if the signal drops out. I type a message to my coachee on the ‘Bramble’ whiteboard.
Be Resourceful
- Google slides and Google docs are great tools when creating visual and colourful resources. As coaching is now online, making engaging resources is a start in ensuring that the session is focused and fun.
- Convert all resources to PDF format and upload them to Bramble. These resources then become easily collaborative with whiteboard additions. With whiteboard additions, you can ask your coachee to play hangman, or for example, link up words with their definitions – these activities ‘mix-up’ the session.
- Let your coachee hold the ‘virtual pen’ – this effectively encourages resilience and agency and is a great way for your coachee to reach their achievable goals.
- If you create an engaging booklet or a poster, share it! Share your resources with other coaches or your programme officer. Help to build up CoachBright’s archive of fantastic resources that can be used in the future as we continue to strive for social mobility!
- Identify sources online that you believe will help your pupil outside of the coaching session. For example, I noticed that The Royal Shakespeare Company are screening a set of plays and have a brilliant series of YouTube videos. You might discover something similar.
Check-In
- As a coach, you may be the only person that your coachee speaks to during the week. These are challenging times for all – including school pupils who have been thrown out of routine. Remember to ask your coachee things such as ‘what was the highlight of your week?’, ‘How are you getting on with other schoolwork?’, etc.
- As we continue through this challenging time, now it is more important than ever to provide a listening ear and be a hub of support for your coachee. I have found that these small check-in chats have really provided a level of normality to the new virtual coaching sessions.
Make a Plan
- If you have coached before you will be familiar with the coaching set-up of setting achievable goals. Apply this to the virtual platform. I have found it helpful to check-in each week with a reminder of the goal and how they feel about reaching it. I usually pop a reminder on a google slide.
- Agree on plans for the session together and ask your coachee, ‘What do you want to get out of this?’ and ‘How can I help you best?’
I hope that these tips help you in some way. Volunteering your time amid Covid-19 is a really great thing to do and you are genuinely having such a positive impact. Do share your tips and ideas too!
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Blog Post by Jessica Smith, South West Coach