Coach the Coaches: Leading and coaching development teams – theory and practice

This proposal applies for the setup of a new curricular course named «Coach the Coaches». The educational framework aims for teaching master students the basic concepts of coaching. In Addition to this course theses students apply their coaching skills directly in the coaching of bachelor students project teams. This provides the opportunity to practice coaching skills in realistic environments and thus to enable important competencies for a professional career in industry or research. Consequently, the «Coach the Coaches» framework provides both, a best in class coaching for more than 500 students in project based courses and an unique coaching education in theory and practice for 15-25 master and PhD students.

• Interactive lectures, focusing on 3 learning-levels: acquiring knowledge, acquiring
competences, fostering critical thinking
• Acquired knowledge and competences can be directly used and transferred, so
students can learn and improve
• Using new psychological theories and models how to change behavior (e.g. positive
psychology)

• Building up competences instead of only knowledge
• Fostering critical thinking
• Problem- and project-oriented learning

Timing and spacing to the lectures can be improved: more lecture units at the start of
the semester in order to get the coaches started resp. more lecture units (weekly
instead of bi-weekly)

Examples of student comments:
• I would like to thank you for the valuable tips and methods that I can take away from
this lecture.
• The individual coaching was very helpful for me. The individual coaching problems
could be best tackled in this way, much better than in a plenary session. I would like
to have 3 instead of 2 sessions.
• Hospitation was an opportunity to see how other coaches are working. I could see
how coaching could also be done. And, I received constructive feedback how to
improve (in contrast to the team feedback which did not help very much).
• I would like to thank you for the good conversations and the interesting lectures. I
wish you will have the opportunity to prepare and give lectures. I wish you success
and hope for seeing each other again.
• I would like to thank you very much for the help I received. You did influence my
definition of the coaching role in a positive way.

• Practical exercises to deepen the understanding of theories and to foster the
acquisition of competences cannot be underestimated. the students appreciate this
kind of teaching and it increases their reflectivity ability (while talking about the
exercises and analyzing seen/shown behavior)
• Slides shown in the lecture and material handed out for future studies seem to be
best used by the students if they are different. Focusing on experience in the lecture
and deepen the theoretical knowledge outside the lecture.
• Theoretical models are helpful to reflect each other’s behavior and help students to
improve their level of competences. Models can be a sort of best practise in order
how to proceed.