Mayo’s Clinic: Helping Students Take Charge—Peer Coaching
08 November 2013
The advantages of peer coaching include helping people realize they can solve their own problems while helping others. It also broadens their awareness of how many people they can call on for assistance.
By Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT
Last month, we discussed helping students take charge of their lives by using a technique called the three-legged conference. This month’s column is about peer coaching, and the rest of the fall will focus on other strategies for helping students learn to take charge of their education and their lives.
Coaching Explained
Coaching is the process of one person helping another person to clarify the coachee’s goals, jointly determining strategies to attain those goals, and providing support for reaching the goals. It differs from consulting since consultants provide advice based on their background knowledge and experience; coaches commit to help their coachees do what is important to the coachees. Coaching differs from therapy since therapists are interested in why, and they focus on the present and the past; coaches are interested in what and how, and they focus on the present and the future.
The challenge in coaching is really listening to the other person and not providing advice or judging what the other person says or wants to do. It is a full commitment to helping the other person in the areas where the other person wants to focus. Many teachers find coaching hard to do since it differs so radically from their normal work as teachers, dispensers of knowledge and evaluators. It is even hard to shift from facilitating learning to coaching; these functions draw on different sets of skills.
Peer coaching is the process of colleagues helping each other; one person coaches the other and then they change roles—not necessarily at the same time—in a fairly equal manner so that each person is a coach and a coachee. The advantages of peer coaching include helping persons realize that they can solve their own problems and help others, as well. It also broadens their awareness of how many people they can call on for mutual assistance.
Students Coaching Each Other
Helping students learn to coach each other and provide peer support can be a powerful way to assist them in taking charge of their education and their professional development. However, many students are not used to serving as coaches, primarily because they are used to giving advice to their friends, and many of them are not very skilled at careful listening. Often they get triggered by what they hear and start to want to talk—an activity that destroys the coaching session and pulls attention away from the person being coached.
To help students learn to coach each other, focus on building their listening skills, their ability to ask open ended questions—where they do not know the answer, but really want to find out what the other person has to say—and their skills in helping another person solve problems. These interpersonal skills are useful in any work situation and any teamwork context; they are critical in coaching. A second way to promote peer coaching is to refuse to solve problems that students can solve themselves. When asked, toss the questions back and invite the individual to figure it out with a peer—a good practice in any culinary situation and a great invitation to coaching. Often, they will start coaching each other even if they do not realize that is what they are doing.
Another way to promote coaching is to role model it by working with students to help them realize and clarify their goals and develop their own strategies to accomplish those goals—whether the goals involve improving study skills, increasing, grades, obtaining an internship or a job, handling bullying, managing their time, working out problems with friends, deciding about projects or organizing their lives.
Remember to be patient—it is a new type of endeavor for you and for them—and stay with it. You might be surprised about how much change can happen when students engage in peer coaching.
Summary
Thank you for reading this column about peer coaching as a strategy for students to take charge of their lives; next month it will be about using journals, another strategy to use. If you have suggestions for other topics or teaching practices you want to share, send them to me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., and I will include them in future Mayo’s Clinics.
Dr. Fred Mayo, CHE, CHT, was most recently a clinical professor at New York University. Principal of Mayo Consulting Services, he continues to teach around the globe, and is a frequent presenter at CAFÉ events nationwide. His latest book, Planning an Applied Research Project in Hospitality, Tourism, and Sports (Wiley, 2013), debuts this autumn.