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Coaching Strategies
As the lab sessions begin, coaches should invite students to role-play situations based on case vignettes given by the instructor or on actual situations that have been encountered by students at places of employment or internship sites.
An essential part of coaching is the consistent involvement of all students. The coach must ensure that students feel they may be called upon to perform individually in the situation or to give feedback to the students involved in the role-play. By directly and randomly calling upon students to demonstrate specific skills or provide feedback to other students who are demonstrating skills, coaches ensure student concentration and participation.
Certain types of behaviors, if they occur regularly, can inhibit the creation of an efficient learning environment. Often students engage in such behaviors out of their own nervousness. Coaches must prevent this from happening too often. Listed below are two frequently observed behaviors that coaches should redirect as quickly as possible as well as strategies for turning these into useful behaviors.
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Students asking questions rather than focusing on role-plays:
Instead of answering the questions, coaches should have students write them down in order to ask the instructor when s/he comes into the lab group. If the issue is really pressing, the coach might answer briefly and suggest that further clarification can be requested when the instructor comes in to observe. It is important to remember that the instructor circulates among all the lab groups and should continue to be an integral part of each student's learning in the groups.
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Students chitchatting about school:
Often, if the coaching group does not begin with a structured exercise, students begin talking about their daily lives, teachers, and homework issues as they would on breaks, during lunch, or while walking across campus. The coach can often use some of this chitchat as material for role-play in a structured interview-- with the students' permission of course. For example, if a coach hears a student saying to another student, "I can't believe that Dr. Jones gave us another assignment that wasn't on the syllabus," the coach could say to that student, "Why don't you play the client and the group will address this issue as counselors using basic attending skills?" Instead of wasting time with idle chitchat, this material becomes an opportunity for all students to practice and learn.
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Appendix A
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