Tag Archives: Head Teacher

Just add Youth Coaching

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images-9It’s the beginning of the year, and as we get back into the swing of things a few thoughts might come to mind about how you and your students can get the best out of the year.
It’s known that everyone is doing the best they can, both teacher, students and pupils, working hard to make learning a positive experience, although sometimes this becomes challenging and support is needed. Often we are aware of the challenges, however time can often be a factor.
Sometimes the challenges that are faced by the students and pupils can be over come with their own ideas, and it is those ideas, the ones generated by the students, that have the most passion and determination behind them. When young people are facilitated in the creation of their own solutions, they are more motivated and committed, working harder to achieve their solution.
Even the most challenging of students wants to improve their lives, not always knowing the best way forward, confused with the pressure of the media, peers and even parent’s. This can lead to students finding themselves on the edges of the classroom, outside of the groups with a desire to be involved, but without the skills to interact successfully.
And often, once we find the key for these students, the person they admire as role model, a loved one they want to show how great they can be, or a skill they already have and shine at.  Once we find a way of working with what they are already doing well and facilitate the expansion of this into the rest of their world and thinking, we become the inspiration for positive change. And in that change we support the creation of positive, respectful, motivated young people, with the desire to do their best, leaving behind a positive legacy and role model for others to follow.
So how do we go about creating these changes?
One of the first steps is to ask question and listen deeply to the answers. Young people want their voices to be heard and it is providing that space that can make all the difference. Teachers are often in the best place to take that first step, but time can be the challenge. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, short focused conversations with an individual can make a big difference. Also a whole class can explore the challenges faced by a few with disassociated role play and creative approaches.
You can hire a professional youth coach to work with your young people or train your teachers in the skills of youth coaching, both on short and long courses designed to fit your needs.
If you have any questions about how youth coaching can help you create positive, motivated, inspired young people, then please get in contact.

“What would you choose to do if you had u...

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“What would you choose to do if you had unlimited resources?” was the question asked in the book I’m currently reading; Change your life in 7 days by Paul Mckenna. He says, just before asking the question, to open your thinking, to allow your mind to dream and dream big…well maybe some of those are my words too, but that’s the idea, to dream big.

So dream big I did, in fact it’s a dream that I’ve had before, it’s the one where I open a coaching centre for young people. It’s more than a coaching centre, it’s a place where young people receive coaching, creative, confidence, self esteem, career, communication training. All underpinned with the coaching ethos, to enable them to be the best they can be, doing what they love.

Working in groups and individually with coaches, NLPers, and creative practitioners. The work would explore all the senses, almost like a school…perhaps it is a school, an alternative school where the aim is to learn about self through the arts, creativity, coaching and NLP.

It would be like all the best projects I’ve ever done rolled into one. Visits to the theatre, where we explore the characters and their relationships to each other, seeing how we would play out their roles differently, returning back to the centre where we role play the events. Using a mixture of Forum Theatre, NLP, coaching and artwork.

We would also have creative development days, spending time exploring the minds of great creative thinkers from history, from present and of course the future. Young people have wonderfully creative minds, however tif hat creativity is not put to productive use it can create all sorts of problems. So we would look at how they can use their creativity in positive ways.

There are lots of young entrepreneurs projects, and I’m sure they do wonderful work. We would not only work with the young people and their ideas, we would also enable their ideas to take shape, creating role models for the future. And jobs right now, jobs doing what the young people love.

We would have healthy foods and exercise, team sports and meditation. A space where young people can discover what they are good at, where there skills lay, and a safe supportive place where they can explore their futures.

Of course this would be expensive, but it’s a dream, and while I’m dreaming lets have the very best in technology available, lets have a design space where the young people create the technologies of the future. With music and fashion studios. And at the front a shop where we sell what we create.

This is a wonderful dream, I wonder what your dreams might be? And who is there to help and support making our dreams come true?

Creating Safe Space

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I’m doing some reading this week; Change Your Life In 7 Days by Paul McKenna. I was reading it as part of my NLP and Hypnotherapy studies, and as I’m reading it a few thoughts came to mind.

As always everything I read or come across, I think about how it would work with young people, how I can change, adapt or develop it. I have this belief that whether I’m working with adults, teenagers or young children, the approach and ideas are the same, it’s just the language that changes, and it doesn’t really change, it’s just that you find the access point for whoever it is you are working with, but the content is still the same.

The book starts off by talking about our thinking, and some of us are already aware of the ideas around, what we think we create, and that our thinking creates our experiences. Henry Ford said, ‘Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re probably right’.

So this leaves me thinking about young people’s thinking, and how we enable them to have the thoughts that says they can, how do we create environments that allow them to have positive images about themselves and their abilities.

The first points of call are the parents and the teachers, they are the ones who are in contact with young people most of their formative years. So part of enabling young people to have positive images of themselves, is by enable teachers and parents, giving them the  ability and skills to create the environments where these thoughts can be about what they can do, and how great they can be.

There are ideas that Paul McKenna shares about our thinking of ourselves, he calls it: The Three Selves; and at the heart of our three selves is our authentic self, the real us, the person we are deep down.

The work that I do with young people tells me that the only way you can access the authentic self is when the environment is one where the young people feel safe. So as Parents, Teachers, Mentors, Youth Coaches and Dynamic Youth Coaches, we have to find ways of creating this safe space. And a first step might be to ask the young people we work with, what would make a safe space for you?

I’m keen to hear their responses, so if you work with young people please ask and let me know their answers. In the mean time, perhaps ask yourself what would a safe space look like, feel like, sound like for you to be your authentic self?

Challenges in the Classroom

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As a Youth Coach, I am often asked to work with what some might call “challenging” young people in the classroom. And most of the time these young people just need to be listened to and focused.

So when asked to work with challenging individuals or groups first of all really listen to what they have to say, come from a place where you are trying to understand their point of view. As a youth coach you want to really understand the world of the young people you work with. You might want to find out about their world outside of school too.

When talking with young people about their life it is important to have permission form the adult in charge, or have clear boundaries in place, and if you have any disclosure you report it to the correct person within the school, keeping a written record of the time and date, but not what was said unless you can look it away safely.

And when you do deep listening you are able to find out about what excites and drives the young person, and thats how you get them engaged. By working with what’s already there, you might need to do some reframing with what drives them, get it into a positive frame. But by using your creative skills, listening and engaging, you’ll be able to turn around the situation, creating engaged, focused, positive young people.

When working with a whole class, it’s important to get them to recognise each others skills, see each other in a positive light, this can be done using a skills exchange. The young people write down what they are good at, and post this up around the classroom, then they look at what everybody’s skills are, exploring their own skills need, then bridging the gap.

Often, once a young person is shown that they have worth and value, skills that others desire, are listened to and given the opportunity within a safe environment to explore what their needs might be, then given the skills to express themselves in a positive way, the challenge that once presented itself in the classroom, diminishes. Leaving you with a positive, confident, supportive young person and/or classroom.

So how might you go about working with the challenges in the classroom?

Challenges of a youth coach

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The other day I gave a talk about my work as a Youth Coach;

Inspire, Empower and Develop Young People through Dynamic Youth Coaching

One of the questioned asked was about the challenges I faced with my work. It has to be said that being a Youth Coach can be challenging, however it’s often not the Young People that is the challenge but the organisation. And in order to be a successful Youth Coach you have to manage the organisations you work with as well as the Young People.

Now I’m not saying that working with Young People as a Youth Coach is always easy, no it’s not. It can be very challenging, however the rewards are more than worth it when you see the changes you enable in the lives of the Young People you work with, when you see their self-esteem rise and their confidence grow.

Organisations don’t always understand what and how you do what you do. So it’s important to give them as much information as possible, sometimes this means running mini sessions with the organisers during the planning. Even then you can be surprised by how organisation introduce you and your work, as well as what they expect you to be able to achieve, often in a short amount of time. This means that you have to be clear and manage expectations.

The biggest challenge of course it getting the young people to turn up in the first place, with a school this is more achievable, with youth clubs, colleges and universities it can be harder. You can always have incentives, like cake, or what ever reward system the organisation uses. It’s important to remember that when you enter an organisation, you become part of their system, you can make demands but need to understand where they are coming form, what they need and the changes that are possible.

I often find it useful to have a reward at the end, however if you create enough engagement, the young people will do their best to return to future sessions, work hard and help create the changes.

So my tip is to be as clear as you can, give as much information as needed, including demonstrations. To check with the client/organisation that they have understood your work and your processes. To be clear about expectations and introductions of your work and of yourself. And to remember that you are often coaching the organisation as well as the Young People they have asked you to work with.

Why not share any challenges you’ve had as a Youth Coach or Mentor, it would be great to hear about how you manage them or share some ideas about how they could be managed on the future.

Classroom Olympics

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Picture a class full of 7 and 8 year olds, all looking at you, waiting for you to begin and you’re not really sure what you’re going to talk about…

Last week I ran a session in a school and one of the teachers wanted to explore the idea of creative teaching, asking open ended questions within the classroom, and letting the children decide on the journey.

This is very similar to a group coaching session, so I accepted the challenge and entered the arena.

The class had been exploring the Olympics, and the idea around who would be chosen to carry the torch. We used this as our starting point, exploring the qualities someone might need to be chosen. The class were going along with this, however the engagement was low. Now I know as a coach and creative practitioner, the best way to manage a class is to create engagement, so in order to do this one needs to be creative.

I asked the class to think of something that they, as individuals, were good at, and to keep it secret. In turn each class member would stand up and introduce themselves to the class, stating the skill or quality they had, we would become the Olympic Nations, all having what it takes to carry the torch.

In order to get the class to stay involved and participating, when someone stood up and made their statement, if you agreed you would nod your head, and if you thought that it was also a skill or talent that you had, you would also stand up.

As we began sharing what we were great at, the young people were saying things like, singing and running. Then we moved into more interesting areas like, golf and horse riding, boxing and karate, tap and hip hop. At this point I asked the young people to demonstrate their skills. This created a class full of young people learning new things about each other, sharing new skills, and agreeing positively with each others skills and talents.

The teacher was able to see, for the first time, what some of her class were skilled at, also able to see them living the Olympic spirit, celebrating their own excellence. In a positive and open way. At the end of the class the young people were excited about what they had found out about each other and what they could learn and teach each other in future lessons.

The ship is the metaphor

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Yesterday, after getting caught in the rain of the British Summer, I was sat in the head teachers office talking about the coaching project currently underway in school. We we exploring how some of the teachers had really taken on board the coaching, and were embracing new ways of working.

We were also discussing the teachers that were less….excited about change, which reminds me to read “Who moved my cheese” again.

During this discussion we created a metaphor, I’m sure it’s been used before, in face I know that David Shephard – The Performance Partnership, talks about the ship’s crew and the captain on one of his cd’s.

Anyway, there we were talking away when we began describing the school as a ship, with the head teacher as the captain, the teachers as the crew and the young people as the passengers. The ship has a clear destination, Education Island, and while on the cruise the young people have fun, learn, meet new people, develop as young people, create futures and watch the wonderful world go by, taking part in the adventure from time to time.

Now the crew have the important role of helping to manage this journey, however on this ship the captain, like all captains, oversees the crew, checking in with what they are doing and how they are doing it. Like all good captains, they stick to the rules…most of the time, and follow process, in order to get the ship safely to its destination.

The crew on this great ship, have all signed up because they love going to Education Island, and enjoy the journey with the passengers, however every now and again a member of the crew, decides that the journey is no longer right for them, and thats ok, because from time to time the ship docks for supplies and water, and at this docking point you can simply get off the ship. In an emergency a life boat can be used, or even the emergency helicopter!

So the crew disembark and embark on the great ship school, with the captain at the helm, giving orders, checking the compass, running safety drills and checking the equipment.  It’s up to the captain to make sure that everyone knows their role on the ship, and it’s up to the crew to manage their role and the tasks that come with it. Knowing when to ask for help and support, but also knowing how to make it fun and engaging, not forgetting the learning.

As with all journeys there is learning involved.

And this captain, this new captain, is making some changes, upgrading policies, checking equipment and procedure, running spot checks just to check we all understand the new route to Education Island, giving us the choice to stay onboard, or disembark at the next port, refraining from going back to the old days and making anyone walk the plank…

So if you are the captain of the ship, how do you manage your crew? How do you treat the passengers and those waiting for them on the island? What could you do differently to enable smooth sailing? And how do you manage those rough waters? Because sometimes at sea there are storms.

And lastly, how has this metaphor enabled you to think differently about your role, be that of head teacher, teacher, student, parent, educator, creative or …?