Coach Skills Training for College Faculty
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this ATE grant focused on providing acknowledged college faculty mentors with coaching skills. While mentoring skills are most useful when instructing the steps in a process or demonstrating how something is done, it is coaching skills that are actually more successfully applied during ideation or creative processes. In the pilot study, only mentoring skills were employed by the mentors who worked with assigned college teams to take them through the process of writing and submitting a grant for the annual NSF funding cycle. This pilot was followed up by a 3-year funded grant that added coaching skills to the mentor’s skill set. Since grant writing starts with the creative activity of idea generation, the mentor-coaches were encouraged to utilize their new listening and questioning coaching skills to assist the teams. Results from the first year will not be complete until February, 2023 when the funding notices are sent out by NSF. In the meantime, mentor-coaches agreed that the addition of coaching skills were useful, but some had a difficult time in knowing when to use coaching skills and when to rely on mentoring.
Coaching School Administrators and Faculty
As of October, 2022, this initiative between the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) Coaching Ministry and the Evangelical Lutheran Educators Association (ELEA) staff and administrators has just been released. The objective has been to make ELCA coaches available to ELCA administrators and teaching faculty. The first pilot and associated “coaching packages” were released in conjunction with the annual conference of these educators, and was followed up with the distribution of marketing materials. All participants will be tracked and surveyed to gather data on what changes resulted from personal coaching. Initial results will be presented at the spring ELEA conference, held in Seattle, WA in March, 2023.
