This meeting is being recorded. Now I'd like to introduce our presenter. Game is a life design coach at Bowling Green State University, where he is helping to design an innovative coaching and teaching model for students success based on design thinking principles. As a higher educational professional for the past decade, Gabe attended Michigan State University to earn a Masters and student affairs administration and is currently a doctoral student at BG SU. Dave has been involved with check for the last two years, serving on the best practices subcommittee and helping host our check webinar series. This session focuses on the intersection between teaching and coaching, reflection on how to incorporate teaching and coaching practice and exploring different methods to assure learning and coaching. So now I'm going to turn it over to Gave Thanks so much. Gave thanks so much, Wes, I appreciate that. Happy Friday. Happy Falcon Friday, as we like to say at Bowling Green State University. I'm so happy Falcon Friday to everyone from Massachusetts to California and we're everywhere else you all might be from. It's my pleasure to be with everyone this morning. And I'm really excited about this conversation. This has been a idea that's been rumbling around in my brain for the last two years. And so I'm just excited to have this conversation. And so while I'm going to be presenting some different ideas to hopefully making you think about things in a different way between, between teaching and coaching. I may generalize things a little bit, but it's for good. Hopefully. As we get started, I want to preface that the world is between teaching and coaching. I think we would all see some similarities. I think we would all see some differences. And we'll talk about that throughout this conversation. But I wanted to make the disclaimer whether you're a coach, whether you're a professional, whether you are a faculty member, whether your primary role is teaching, I am. No means trying to diminish or minimize the role of anyone in this space. Okay? This really comes from this space because in my role, we actually do both. We teach and coach. When I say that more formally, write teaching in the classroom and coaching outside the classroom. Although we'll unpack some of that a little bit. I would like to just invite everybody throughout this conversation. My goal is to kind of get through some of some of the information that I'd like to share with you and have you think about maybe about 30 minutes. I would love just to interact in a conversation. And so we can pull up chat that is accessible for everybody in this space. So as we go through, feel free to put it in questions or comments. West is gonna help me manage some of that and then we'll get to that at the end. Okay, So this is gonna be great. So teaching as coaching. So first off, I thought about this topic and I was like, it's teaching, coaching is coaching teaching. And I was like, no, that's not quite right. And so I wanted to present this as a simile, right? So teaching as coaching, I think many of us are familiar with coaching. Many of us are familiar with teaching. But what is this? What does this look like? I wanted to break it down a little bit. So just as a little bit of background again for this presentation, you are here, you are here in virtual land, hopefully this time next year we'll be saying you are here in Oklahoma, which I'm so excited about and I know many of you who've been involved to check the last few years are excited about an in-person experience as well. But for now we're here in virtual land. This morning. I honestly, I just want to present three quick things. Identify overlap between teaching and coaching, maybe share a few stories and how I form this philosophy and reflect on how to incorporate teaching in your coaching practice. So I actually want to encourage you all to think about when and how you're teaching, when and how you're coaching. Are they the same? Are they different? They talk to us a little bit about assessment because I think it's so important both for us to help assess student learning for the students and also the institution to show value and evidence of our work. So just as a quick disclaimer, I mentioned my role at VGS, you, Bowling Green State University. It's a mid-sized comprehensive university in Northwest Ohio, about 20 thousand students over the last two or three years, we've been developing this program called Life Design. And the tenants of life design are really using design thinking, creative problem-solving framework to help students design their life in a critical way. To help them find their way. And ideally to teach them design thinking skills in order to help them design on their own, right? My goal is to put myself out of a job. And we do that through two prongs. It is a coaching program. Hence, why, why we're here this morning, alright, so we do employ one-on-one coaching. And we also have a one-credit class that we teach. And so the neat thing is that I get to teach this coming fall. I have four sections of 20 to 30 students. Those students then I get to spend, It's a one credit class, 75 minutes a week. So I get about 1200 minutes with them over the course of this semester in this small group environment. Then I have the privilege and opportunity to coach them. Each of those students then remain on my caseload that I get to coach throughout that semester, but also throughout their whole college experience. And so our goal again is to help them not necessarily stay with me as a coach, right? And I'm not the expert on everything around campus, but my goal and our mission is the first-person this first semester to help connect them to other places on campus. Now this has started as a small pilot again in fall 2020. This was not a reaction to COVID. We were we were planning full speed ahead and then had to pivot a little bit as all of you did. But so these last two years, we've had pilots have about 600 students, up to about 1500 students last year. And then this year we're hoping to land a little bit closer to a thousand students. So it is not just me. We have an amazing Lee, good-looking team here of our life design coaches at VGS, you just wanted to share some of the names and faces because that is so important and it's so important to our students. One of the things we talk about is the importance, especially orientation, for students to know someone by name, for these folks to know students by name. And so although we're not able to accommodate the entire first-year population at VGS you. That is our goal. Our goal is to scale this up to the point that every incoming student would be able to have a life design coach, someone that's there, helping them transition not only to the college environment. Starting during welcome week, starting during that first semester, but also starting day one, help them start thinking about life after college. This is a big approach to help address the issues that higher education has in many institutions have that student that walks across the graduation stage and says Now what? The student that drops out after their third semester and says, Well, that wasn't for me. Now what do I do? We want to impart in empower students with these skills, with these critical thinking skills, with this design thinking skills. To say, wherever they're going in life, they feel more confident, they feel more creative about managing that next transition. Some of you hopefully have heard about design thinking. This is the design thinking process we do utilize Designing Your Life curriculum out of Stanford. So some of you are familiar with that text and maybe have gone through that certification as well. But just for those in the room that might not know, just a quick 30-second layman's explanation design thinking is a creative problem-solving framework. This is, this has been used in industry for decades. Seventies, eighties, Apple, Starbucks, Target, There's many notable examples and I'm actually going to share one in just a moment. But this iterative process helps to navigate the ambiguity. Okay, it's not a linear process. We help students to identify the various stages that they might be in. We help them apply this as Stanford does to the challenging problems in life. We know challenging design problems. The iPhone, for instance, was used for this. But sometimes in life it feels like we have more complicated situations, even the building an iPhone, right? Particularly as we're working with our students, they might feel like this college transition is the hardest thing that they've ever done. Alright, and we might, we might identify with that as well. And empathy, as you see here, is a really important piece. So the quick explanation of this is we help students except the current circumstances that the rand empathize with themselves and with others. This works whether it's outward facing or inward facing, defining problems in life. So really thinking about what is the real problem here. Ideating lots of different solutions which we always encourage them to think about. Who can ideate with, because we always know we come up with different ideas with when we're with others. And that's where this coach and peer coming in in the classroom prototype developed something fast, free, and feasible. We want students to not be held back. We want them to take action and try something, even if it fails. Then test, and then go back to where they need to. Be. A quick story about empathy. This is Doug Dietz. Now, I don't know if any of you are GE fans or just happen to know all the industrial designers out there. But Doug Dietz is an industrial designer for General Electric. And you get a really important project that he worked on for years, worked on a new design for an MRI. Okay. Now, Doug spent years on this project. He had a he had a design team. He spent two years. It was a multi-million dollar project and the results spoke for themselves. It was an amazing design. It looked like it would it would work really well. The most important thing was not only the design of it, but also the fact that it worked a lot better. These, these imaging, the imaging that it provided help health professionals make much more informed decisions. Okay. I'm just I'm just noticing the chat too. Just making sure I didn't I didn't check at the beginning. Can you all see the MRI machine? Is that what you're only looking at right now? Okay. Cool. Just wanted to make sure I realize I didn't do a quick zoom check there visually. So back in the MRI machine, the designers were so proud of this. It was revolutionary. In fact, it had been submitted for many design awards just based on how sleek and how usable it was. Medical technologists were using this in. The results were great. It was much easier as much more seamless. It was better for doctors to be able to check the results. Doug had the opportunity to go to the hospital, the first hospital where this prototype was installed. And they dug, jumped in. He ran up to the hospital. He ran did this room where it was installed. And New Zealand so excited to see all of this work and all this time and all this money pay off. And he walked into the room and there was this baby, right? There was there was this As mentioned in this team. They were so they were so proud of it. Medical technician came in and said, Hey, we have our first customer coming in, right? Our first patient. That's great. Okay. I'll step out of the room. I'll I'll just I'm just gonna witness I'm just going to watch. Doug came out in the hallway and down the hallway he saw not not not an excited customer, not somebody that was excited as he was. He saw a young family coming down the hallway with a small child, a young girl clutching their hands, crying, right, looking like they were dreading this experience. The parents he could overhear this conversation. The parent was saying, it's okay. It's okay, baby, you have to be brave. We've talked about this, you can do it. And they turned into the room where the MRI machine was and Doug looked over this little girl's head just a little bit shorter he was looking and he looked at the room through her eyes, right? You can see what she saw because she clenched up. And he could see this gray, very beige room, very surgical with stickers and dim lighting and very cramped space. And he he was overcome by emotion because he realized that two years in multi-million dollar project was a failure. He felt like it was an utter failure because for the first time in the process he realized, we forgot about empathy. We forgot about thinking who we were working with, who we were designing for. And design thinking is always human-centric and they forgot that. That was a huge step that they forgot. They thought about the doctors, they thought about the insurance companies. They thought about making it cheaper, faster, better. But they didn't think about who is going to be using that MRI machine and what their experience would be. So they went back, he said, this was a failure, but we can do better. They went back because the design thinking process failure doesn't end it. You go back to the beginning. So they went back to empathy. They went to daycares. They did focus groups with three-year-olds and five-year-olds and seven-year-olds and young families and child life specialists and people who really knew kids, pediatric physicians. And they said We can do better. How do we make this experience less scary and something that kids really look forward to? And this is what they came up with. So they came up with the GE adventure series and maybe some of you have seen this. This is one example. So now instead of kids dreading this, they came up to the MRI room and out in the hallway as this particular theme was, this was a river, right? So you see that river coming down, There's a coy pond, those rocks that spilled out in the hallway. So as kids we're coming up into the MRI machine. They had these rocks and they were hot skipping and jumping and they said Mom and Dad, you got to jump on the rocks to it was an experience that they were looking forward to you. They came in here and what? They heard water. They heard this river because MRI machines are very noisy. And so they thought about how can we make that better. They were greeted by all of these senses. They saw this. They could hear it, they could smell. They had this water in. Lavender smell are very relaxing. Then this bed lowers down into the water, right? The kids didn't have to get out a stool and jump up. It came down and it looked like a canoe. And they said, Okay, now you have to lay down now one of the important things about MRI machines, as many of you know, you have to lay really still for the imaging to work, you have to hold really still. So they say, lay down here, don't move because you'll rock the boat right. Up until this point, some of their early scan said up to 80% of little kids had to be sedated in order to hold still. And obviously nobody wants that type of experience for the kids so they can do and they held still and not really magic. Magical thing was, if you hold really still, you can see the fish jump. This type of imaging instrument. You can see the fish up there. That piece actually spins around the patient. So the kids would hold still as a statue and watch that spin around them throughout the whole imaging process. It over the course of a year, they have less than two patients in this hospital that had to be sedated, less than 1% of their patients. They went from 80% to 1%. Which is amazing, right? That's a great result. But more importantly in for Doug because he viewed his previous failure based on the students, based on these kids and their experience. His his biggest success was listening to another family in the hallway. He was talking to the family about their experience in this type of environment is like and this little kid, a six-year-old, was pulling on their mom's arm, right? If any of you have kids, you can imagine this. You're having to try to have a conversation. Hey, come on. I have a six-year-old Mike Griffin. Come on. I'm having a conversation. Kept tugging. Finally, the mom is like, what what is it, sweetie. And the little kid with with full I said, Can we come back tomorrow? Right? Can we do this again? This was a great experience. If you don't like rivers, maybe it's, maybe it's an astronaut, right? Maybe it's an outerspace experience. Maybe it's in San Francisco, right? Seeing the bay in this ocean. I wanted to start with this just thinking about empathy. It's so important to this design thinking process. But obviously in the work that we do and the work that you all do, empathy is so important. And in the midst of thinking about all of these coaching philosophies and frameworks and tools and how are we going to connect to students and how are we going to do this? Maybe it's more simple than we think. Maybe the key to being a good coach and the key to being a good teacher is to continue to center ourselves on empathy. To continue to think about not what is most convenient for me. 30-minute conversations, get the students in and out. Maybe maybe it's not about I get to sit in my office and students come to me. That's, that's easiest, most convenient for me. I got back to banks. But what's best for the students? What's best for this experience? What is best to help them learn and grow in whatever you're coaching model might look like. With that start, I want to orient us to teaching and coaching and get the chat ready to fire up. Because I'm curious from folks, what, what are the, what would you say are the main roles of a teacher? Let's start with teacher. What do teachers do? And I'm using teachers in the broadest sense, although in higher education I am maybe leaning into faculty a little bit. I'm seeing guidance In part knowledge, teach. Thank you Erika. I loved, I loved the simple word, their motivation, inspire, show the horse had a drink. Yes, Charles, I love that. Okay. How about how about coach? What coaches do? What do you do? Brendan pointed out maybe the size 20, maybe 20 students in a class about coach, support, explore, facilitate, motivate, advocate, collaborations of students. Absolutely. I'm hearing, I'm hearing and reading a lot of these. I feel like maybe teaching and coaching is starting to overlap a little bit. I saw a lot of those things in both both conversations. Maybe coaches, more personal, maybe one-on-one, meeting students where they are in order to meet individual needs, right? And surely that is a little easier when you're meeting one-on-one versus what, 20 or 30 or say a 100 students. But what if, what if it's even more alike than we think, right? What if it is even more overlap than what we think? And again, for faculty in the room, not trying to diminish the role of faculty are teaching, merely trying to make a point. I want to, I want to bring us into etymology a little bit. So thinking about the origin of Teach and the origins of coach, because I think that's really important. And although I think societal and cultural and institutional values often dictate what the roles of teaching and coaching are. I do want just for a minute, maybe for a few minutes to think about what is, what, what was the, what was the origins of this? What does this look like in a pure sense, in a philosophical sense, teach, coming from Tech on or the word maybe translates to token. It comes from a German origin, Old English. So they talk about to show, present, to demonstrate, instruct, train. Those makes sense with teaching. We can see that or from the Greek origin dQ to show, to prove Latin speak, tell, say, right. We can see all of those things show up in teaching. Remote coach, coach. Maybe I had to look this up because I was curious if the origins of coach and obviously an English language coaches used for two very different things. We think about a stage coach, an actual coach, which is where the word originated from, right? So this was really interesting. So this originated, it was actually a Hungarian city in the 15th century that developed this coach right? Pulled by a horse and buggy, ride a horse and buggy. And so in this town of touch, right? This town of Koch came this Cauchy or wagon up catch. So it's actually a wagon. And they named it after themselves because why not? If you invent something, you get to name it whatever you want. So catch, catch became this, this word which translated into German, translated the French, and eventually to coach in English. Okay. So coach, this was, this was the original term. I'm sure you all would have would have thought that that's where it started, but here's, here's the fun thing because I'm sure on campus you all are having maybe similar conversations, do we that we are in terms of what about athletics, right? What about athletic coaches? You all are taking our name. Well, if that comes up just to remind them that actually coach was first used as the English slang word in Oxford, in education, is actually used as a slang word for a tutor or someone that literally helps carry the student through an exam, right? It wasn't until later that century that it was actually adapted to the athletic venue. So if this conversation comes up, feel free to pull this up and educate those, those athletic coaches appreciate any athletic, athletic coaches that are in here as well. Speaking of athletic coach. A couple of quick examples is we're thinking about these differences between coaching and teaching. A couple of my favorite coaches who I think are actually better teachers than they are coaches, if any of you have seen Ted Lasso, fictional but amazing, much better teacher than he has a coach. If you haven't seen this, he actually is American football coach who gets hired as an English football coach or soccer because he doesn't know anything about soccer and actually hire him to destroy this Football Club. Soccer Club. He was a much better teacher. He taught the players a lot more than he coached them on soccer. Another one of my favorite coaches, John Wood and UCLA basketball coach. One of the most winningest coaches. But he taught his players not just about basketball, but about life. And one of his famous stories is actually teaching them how to put on their socks. Because sometimes coaches assume that players have certain levels of awareness, right? Sometimes we assume students have certain level of awareness, but he didn't assume anything. He said This is how you put on socks and this is how you put on your shoes so you don't get blisters, you can perform at the highest level. Then what about a teacher that I think is probably a better coach? John Keating from Dead Poets Society. He was in a classroom, but as we've witnessed, he was, he was a far better coach. And in this classic moment, he's, he's coaching a student, even though there are other students around, it didn't matter, it was, it was one-on-one. So three quick assumptions from the skillful teacher. I really enjoyed this book by Stephen Brookfield. He talks about skillful teaching is really about whatever helps students learn, right? Whatever helps the students learn. Skillful teaching adopts a critical reflective stance towards their practice. And most important knowledge skillful teachers need to do good work is constant awareness. That awareness and empathy, which I would wholeheartedly agree with. But what did you say the same about coaching. Coaching about whatever helps students learn in coaching about adopting a critically reflective stance towards their practice, right? Aren't we constantly reflecting on ourselves as coaches, also reflecting on students and student progress in constant awareness of that student. So I wanted to break this down in terms of coaching and teaching similarities according to some of my research and just providing a couple of things to think about. So similarly, coaching and teaching is highly contextual learning, right? Whether it's in the classroom, whether it's outside the classroom, group, individual, right? That's similar. It depends on the type of learning, depends on the context that people, demographics, content, expertise, right? Faculty who are teaching, whose primary motive is teaching is because they are experts in that field, right? Generally coaching and maybe this, maybe this is different. I think you could be a content expert in a particular area, maybe academic skills, or many of us have come into coaching because maybe we're not quite experts, but we're leaning into this idea of coaching more than methodology, size of the group. This is always a frequent thing and I know Brandon brought this up, I would say, is this really that similar than different? Do some of you do group coaching, right? Maybe not hundreds student group coaching, but maybe you do. I wonder if maybe the size of the group is similar. Could be similar. And who says you can't teach one-on-one? I'm showing carries. So again, bringing these word origins up again. So again, show was one of the main word origins of teaching. Carrie was one of the main word origins of coaching. Don't we do both at times. Don't teachers both have to show students demonstrate and also carry some times when students aren't getting assignments done or are struggling with the topic, right? Sometimes you have to carry them with coaching than we do the same, don't sometimes we try to show them things on campus. We tried to show them new things and sometimes we have to carry them. Ability level in, both in the classroom and in coaching. We have students with different ability levels and we have to meet them where they are. Motivation to participate. Just because they're in class, doesn't mean that they loved their experience. Just because they're coaching doesn't mean that they're loving that experience. Whether it's opt-in, whether it's required coaching or whether it's optional. Even with classes that are required. There's still different motivations to participate. And then duration of contact. Contact. A lot of times this is something I've like, well, I spent X number of hours with students in the classroom. It might be a longer period of time. Like for instance, I'm going to spend 1200 minutes with first-year students during the first semester. But what is more important than that amount of time in that short time or the amount or these half-hour increments that I'll have with them over their four years. So it depends how you think about the duration. What about differences? What about differences between teaching and coaching? I'm gonna give you the exact same list. Right? Contextual learning. Maybe that is different depending on what you're coaching, depending on where you're coaching. But all of these things I think differ between not because of the type of ability, the actual coaching and teaching. I think it depends on other factors outside of that. And I think institutionally we have created these differences, right? We have created these differences, but for us who are in coaching, we can, we can think about these. Thank you, Stephanie. Yeah, if folks feel free to feel free to throw in here, obviously I am again, making some generalizations. Power dynamics can significantly differ between coaches and teachers, right? And I would say it also depends on the teacher's right. Some, some teachers demands a different type of power dynamic in-class. Some coaches demanded different power dynamic in class because one-on-one. Depending on how your style of coaching, sometimes that can feel like a bigger power dynamic for students than being in a class of 30. So I think that's a great one. Teacher is assigned grades. Thank you, Whitney. This is great. Yeah. If folks have other things to share. I love all these ideas and I love to interact with this a little bit. And I agree teachers assign grades while coaches do not. Although some coaches, mike. And or if we're assigning grades, what are we assigning grades for assessment of learning? In the big picture? I would argue coaches are also assessing learning. Although maybe for credit, maybe not for credit. There you go, unless it's an ungraded philosophy left that random. Okay, talking about pedagogy real quick. So in the classroom, we're often we think about teaching in terms of pedagogy, lecture format, active learning, experiential, flipped-classroom, community-based learning, inquiry based learning. What if we, what if we thought about some of these things, not just in the classroom, but even how we coach. Because I don't know about you. I think about these in my teaching role. I think about these a lot. In our class. We do put in a active learning very experiential. We use problem-based learning with design thinking is very active. My coaching practice, I generally sit in my office with one student. We sit there and talk. That sounds more like lecture to me, right? So I want to challenge you all as you think about this, as you think about interact, bringing in some of these teaching pedagogies, how do you incorporate these in your practice? And some of that, again, that show and carry when I'm sitting down with a student and I'm talking them through a situation. I'm talking with them. Have you have you gone to the learning comments? We have tutors, they're great. But have I carried students? I say, we've got ten minutes. Let's walk to the learning comments. Let me show you. Let me carry you over there and not literally carry but demonstrate, bring them along. Actually put them in your coach with the ponies and bring them to where they need to go? I tried to do that as often as possible. And again, I totally understand the dynamics of your caseload and the amount of time you have in the amount of space across campus. But I just want you to think, how can you think about taking some teaching pedagogies and incorporating that in your practice. My favorite metaphor of this is a tandem bike. This is what I tried to, tried to incorporate, whether it's teaching or coaching. You think about how are you going to teach somebody how to ride a bike? You give them a book, right? You give them a book. So here's a manual. Learn how to learn how to ride a bike and then go do it. Look up on the university website. We've got a website somewhere that tells you how to how to ride a bike. Just go find that, just Google it. Or do we pull out a byte? Do we pull out a tandem bike and say, hey, let me show you, let me carry you along. Let me give you a tour of campus, right? Hop on back. You've never written a bike, no worries. I've got it. I can balance this. I can steer us. Then when you're ready, you want to drive here? You drive all sit in the back. But I'm not I'm not bailing on you. I'm right here. I'll still show you where to go. But you're getting more confident you can practice this. Alright? And then when they're ready, I just jumped off the bike, right? You just duck enroll and then let them keep going theirselves and maybe they'll give a ride to somebody else. So thinking about that, thinking about pedagogy and coaching practice, I did want to just shout out one specific coaching tool because I know that we're all looking for different things and many of you maybe have read, Coaching Habit and advice trap. Michael bunker, say it, stay in here. And sometimes I love this book. It's really just a really simple book focusing on seven questions. And a lot of times in coaching we talk about questions which is great, which is great. I love to ask questions, but I don't know if you all have interacted. I would highly recommend any of you to practice coaching, right? Hire a coach or have a colleague that you don t know well, tilt you because I did this recently and I interacted with a colleague who was going through the co-active coaching training. Right. And so for those of you who are familiar with co-active, it's completely question based. Coaches do not really provide any input or any guidance. It's just questions. And honestly, after sitting with half-hour with my friend John, after we wrapped up and finished the formal part because he needed that first training. I said John, that kinda sucked. I did not like that. Right? I asked you to coach me. I asked you to do this because you have expertise that I'm curious about. I want to hear about your story. I want to hear about things that you have. I want to hear about what ideas do you have based on we were talking about my dissertation. I want to hear about that. I know what I know and your questions were helpful to a degree. I really wanted him to teach me. I really wanted him to teach me. And so while questions are really good, and again, I'm not trying to upset the philosophy of coaching because I do think it's important to let students design their life, helped them develop their own solutions, helped them to figure that out. But I think we also need to think about our role as a coach, right? The reasons students might want to come back to us as a, that they trust us or they feel comfortable with us, but that we have actually have something valuable to provide for them, right? What's the return on investment for their half-hour of time? We wonder why students sometimes aren't excited about coming back for coaching while I haven't given them anything to be excited about. So look for those times where you have to show students, look for those times you have to carry them and you have to teach. This last part, I also wanted to mention assessment. Obviously many of you are probably grappling with assessment and I wanted to just share a couple of ideas and some of the ways that we're trying to do this on campus. And again, we're only two years in, so we're in very early prototype form, but this is where we're headed because I do think there's a couple of areas that are important in this. And again, our chorda coaching philosophy and that student reflection is key. We always have to have students reflect and think about where they're going. And yes, that is an important part. And I would, I would encourage you to think about triangulating assessment, right? So student direct measures, our students reflecting on their needs and progress? Yes, I would, I would argue that's probably one of the one of the most important things, or maybe the important, most important part of this. Because if students aren't reflecting, if they're not discovering for themselves, it doesn't matter what we're trying to coach them on there. They're not aware of, they're not thinking they're not challenged by it. I don't think we can leave it there. I think there's some shortsightedness when we just think about student perception and student direct measure. Because a lot of times that is guided by student perception. They think I'm doing really great. And maybe they're not. The other piece, Coach Assessment, right? You all and coaches do have some expertise. You all have been training, you have been working in higher education. You have some instincts around students and not to judge students, but to hear what they're saying and say, Hey, I'm hearing you say this, this could be construed as this. How do you how does that sound? That might be a piece of it. Our own input, our professional experience and how we see student progress and growth. Then institutional data, there's so much data out there. And we know that it's there and we're like, Yeah, we probably should use some of this in our coaching practice. This would probably help, but how do we use it? How do we plug it in? What if there's a model where you can use all three of these things and plug this in a quick visual. Students might feel like they're going in a straight line right there. I'm doing great. I might be all the way over here. On this right-hand side, I'm almost there. But from your from your perspective, based on your experiences as a student, based on your experience working at this institution, knowing what major they're in, knowing all of these things that are coming. Susie, I'm not sure you're there. You might be down here. You might have just taken a right-hand turn and you didn't realize that? At least not yet. Maybe it's not our job to tell them, Hey, watch out. Maybe say, you should, you should think about that. What about this? I want to teach you about this thing real quick. Did you realize that this exists? Oh, okay. And then institutional data, right. Maybe institutional data is showing us something that neither you or Suzy are aware of. But to say based on Susie's major and demographics in history at our institution which doesn't prescribe or dictate what Suzy is gonna do. But it could give us a pretty good idea of what could happen. And so to help inform us of what we might need to teach or empower or equip Susie width. Just a quick example for our institution on these three things. So for our student direct measures, we do a pre and post-test for the students coming in first semester, we want to see how effective our curriculum, how effective our coaching is across five pillars which I'll share with you in just a moment. For coaching assessment, we actually are adopting the AAC and U integrative learning value rubric. But some of you may be familiar with, we're using that institutionally as we have HLC accreditation, that's our regional accreditation. A creditor in the Midwest. As we hit that this fall, we're trying to use that institution wide. So we're trying to incorporate this rubric into our curriculum, into our coaching and why use curriculum? We're thinking about curriculum both inside and outside the classroom. For those of you who have multiple components to your coaching program thinking about an integrative approach, then obviously institutional data, enrollment trends, demographics, retention, graduation information. This is really what we're focusing on, right? These are the core tenants of our, of our coaching program, career purpose, Well-being, connections all around the academic experience. It really five focus areas. So I am wrapping up here with my formal comments. This is about 40 minutes. I did want to just give a couple of other thoughts about about our program, about our class, and about our coaching approach. We do utilize this one-credit class B just to 1910, Designing Your Life. Thinking about these, these experiences, learning about design thinking, learning about how to apply it to the college experience and beyond. While also a very holistic approach, helping students think about the choices that they're making, the transition that they're making away from home and how, how, how they are thinking about this ambiguity. One of, one of our big learning outcomes is just helping students be more comfortable and confident with ambiguity. Wayfinding, helping them find their way. Also just wanted to share a couple of quotes. So again, thinking about empathy, let me go back. Thinking about empathy. Right? So for, first, for a particular student write this model was really effective. If it wasn't for my design coach, my life design coach. They made me feel like I was wanted like I belonged. I'm not sure I'd be here without them. Right. So again, personal approach. They were talking a little bit more about that coaching experience. This student made a connection between in the classroom and outside the classroom, right? Between learning and coaching to push themselves out of the comfort zone, but not to the point where it's not true to yourself. Then again, just that the ambiguity a student reflection on, I can't tell you what the future holds. Sorry, this keeps forwarding on its own. It can't tell you what the future will hold. But thanks to like design, I can feel comfortable navigating through the unknown or the ambiguous, right? And isn't, I mean, isn't that what we want for students? And again, I think those are values deep down that we hold between coaching and teaching. Whether it's somebody in the classroom, whether it's a faculty member, don't they want to equip them, whether it's the knowledge that can be applied to life or their discipline. They want them to be able to be successful and rely on that information for future classes, for future career. So in recap, these main three points that I presented over the last half-hour, 3540 minutes. Identifying overlap between teaching and coaching. Think about, think about those people that blur these lines. The John Wooden, the Ted Lasso. Again, hopefully this was a little bit controversial for you to think about. And I know some folks kinda disagreed with me, which I love. But I challenge you to think about those things. Does it, does it matter between teaching and coaching? Or how do you utilize both? Reflect on how to incorporate teaching and coaching practices, right? So those teaching pedagogies, where are those times that you need to show students? Where are those times you need to lean into showing them to teaching them something. One of those times you need to carry them, right? And sometimes carrying does mean asking questions and probing and having them come up with their own solutions. I'm not sure we need to lean away from providing some new information because why why would they why would they continue to come back when we're not giving them anything new? And then exploring different methods to assess learning in coaching. Triangulation was just the, the piece that I wanted you to remember there. But I know that you all have many different ways that you assess learning as well. And that's why I love this type of community. To be able to learn from each other, to be able to give these reminders, to be able to challenge each other. So just, in conclusion, I would just love to continue the conversation. This is, this is my email. If anybody wants to reach out, I'm happy to share slides. Obviously you have this, This video that will be posted somewhere and maybe West can share with us too. I don't know if the slide deck, we'll go with that as well. Because I know some folks might be interested in that. But I would just love to open it up to questions. West, if I'm if I'm correct, I'm doing decent on time. We've got about 15 minutes left. Alright. So we've got about 15 minutes left. So I would love just any any questions, any conversations if folks want to unmute and share or if you want to put in the chat, maybe we could just start off things, things that you found, interesting, things you disagreed with. Just let's just open the floor for anybody based on this conversation. Yeah, please list jump in. I just wanted to ask how your course is. Just open enrollment advertise to the entire student body. Do you focus any advertising on any target demographics? And do you notice that any certain demographics are more likely to enroll like first-gen or something like that. Great question, Liz. Yeah, absolutely. So this has shifted over the last few years. We do have a partial required, we auto enroll some students and that, that population specifically is our deciding student population are undecided students. So again, Designing Your Life has been used in a lot of career environments and has also been used in a lot of undecided. So we're continuing that trends. So we have, we're projecting them about a quarter of our incoming class. Is that right? No less than that, about three to 400 of our students or identify as deciding students. Those students are definitely auto enrolled. So we do a thing at orientation, we explain the program and we let them know, Hey, because of because of these opportunities and we tried to pitch it because you're open-minded, you're exploring. We want to provide this extra layer of benefit to you. And so those students are auto enrolled. And then it's also open to any mode, I should say, most other academic programs. So we say if anybody wants to opt in, there is room and we make sure that we have ruined our sections. I say most any some of our programs be Jessie was known for education. We have a pretty intense education program and many of you as student teaching, right? If they want to graduate in four years, they've gotta jump in into this one credit would actually put them at course overload. We have aviation program, some of those specialized programs that put an overload. We would have the students think about, do you really want to enroll in this and overload? Or any student is also able to meet with a coach one-on-one. They can just go online and access us as coaching. That's always available to anybody if they want to sign up for the one-credit class. We also have upperclassmen. And I saw some folks put some of you mentioned adult learners, and that was actually my previous position. So I actually worked with non-traditional and military population. And so I got to practice this and I actually have a research question brewing of the differences between life design with non traditional and traditional age students. Because from what I've found is it's actually a little challenging to help students who are 18 understand how this can benefit them first semester, right? We're trying to plant seeds and hopefully over the course of time, it will be helpful. But thanks for that question, Liz. Couple of questions. What's the name of this course besides teaching on class, how many students are in coaching caseload? Yes, great question. Of course is be just your 1910. So Designing Your Life. We've had different iterations. Designing your bead USU, designing your college life. We really want to help students focus, although in the classroom we want to help position them. First starting thinking about their college experience. But again, they want, We want them to start thinking about life after college. We want to start planting seeds and to say It's okay not to know what you wanna do, right? That is a really important piece, right? Again, the empathy, if students are freaking out, how am I supposed to know what I'm gonna do at 18? You're not. We want to teach you skills that you can figure out any situation moving forward. How many students are in your caseload? This is one of those things that we're trying to navigate the past to. This is coming into my third year. I've had about a 100 students each fall now. So technically about 300 coming into this fall total. Right. So that number sounds I don't know. It sounds like a lot to me. I'm a little daunted by it. I know that we've had different conversations about appropriate case loads in different things. Let me put it this way. So for the fall, for this course, there is a required component of coaching, which I'm a, I'm a fan of. For some of you who are, who have to self market and find students, you might say, well, if I just had a kind of a stable group of students to start with, that would be great. In this be just in 1910 course, they have two assignments which I guess students can still decide not to do. But those two assigned, two of those assignments are coaching appointments and so I meet with them two different times throughout the course of this semester, about 30 minutes at peace. After that, we have seen drop-off. So this isn't like a perfect coaching program by any means. How, why do students come back, right? And so we do see a drop-off in terms of our coaching appointments of returning students. And so while that true number is 300, for that, for those returning students, I'm having less than 50% of them come back for their coaching appointments. So the caseload kind of manages itself out. But I continue to outreach to all those students and continue to say, Hey, do you need anything, what's going on? And then obviously some of our case management, early alerts, midterm grading, some of those things again, that institutional data that we're gonna be able to try. A couple of other questions. Training philosophy with the faculty members, outside life design coaches, department, great question, Jen. I would say we have not done a great job with this over the last two years. We have had a lot of movement organizationally, this is some of you might be interested in how we've adopted this kind of approach at VGS you, this was a very unique approach because about three or four years ago when designing your life came out, our president actually picked up this book and said, Hmm, he is early in his presidency. Could this work at VGS you right. Could this be a differentiator? We have the privilege and the challenge of this is a top-down but then bottom up approach. So I will say our president and our leadership did a really good job of building some consensus and a lot of work went in. And those early couple of years for focus groups, consultants, different things talking about could this work? And then we've kinda slowly built that up from the ground up. One of our focuses this year is how are we bringing in more faculty, more staff as we become much more stable in this, in this third year. How many coaches do we have employed full-time? We are in the process of getting up to 12, so we are hiring right now. If any of you would like to come work with us watching over the next few years because we'd love to add some other really talented coaches. Filtered decision tree type of thing to help you decide a topic or learning outcome is better served as coaching or teaching. Well, that's a great idea, JT Kendall. No, I do not have a filter decision tree, but if you do, I would love to see that. I think that's a really, a really good idea of how do you determine when you should teach. One you should coach. And again, that's gonna be highly contextual and that's where the relationship of the student helps because it's like, you know, that they, they know this right there. They might be acting like they don't know it, but you know, they've gone through these XYZ experiences and they should be able to recall that. However, we don't want to one of the tenants of life design is don't should on anybody, right? Don't shoot on students. Oh, Lizzie, you should you should know that, right? Well, maybe there's reasons why Lizzy can't, can't remember or can't remember those steps or just hasn't. Digging into that. That's obviously your part of your role. Peer coaches. Greg questionnaire, we piloted that before and this year we actually do have Peer Ambassadors, upperclassmen, peer ambassadors for every one of our sections. I will team teach. Each student will be in two sections. So I will be working with one student for two sections and another student for two sections. But they'll have the opportunity to develop, maybe instruct, do some, do some simple things in the classroom, a little bit of teaching. Maybe do some small groups, different things. And again, kind of carry some of that student to student carrying that coaching of, hey, there's this thing happening on campus tonight. Do you wanna, you wanna go with me? In our pilot, we had limited success in that. Again, they even appear in the classroom. They see, we talked about the power dynamic they see as an instructor. So we're trying to think about how to minimize some of those barriers. Sharon asked, is this mainly for undergrad students? Do you have any graduate students that participate at this point? It is just undergrad students. This is just an undergrad course on the books of our grad students can sign up for coaching that is open to all of our students. And I've actually had the opportunity. We've had a partnership with our Leadership Center this past spring, we did a life design leadership certificate. And it was actually half undergrad and graduate students. And I loved it. It was fantastic. I'm also a graduate student, I'm working on my dissertation and so I have in a kinship to those grad students as well. Comment on the student assessment tools do you use? Yes. So that the value rubric is from AAC and U integrative learning. Aac and U. If you go out and try to find that, I can also include some of those links, maybe in the end of my presentation as well. When I, when I do share that out. That is, it's a pretty straightforward rubric. But the beautiful thing is with AAC and U as a larger organization, there's a lot of institutions that are dabbling in that we're looking forward to be able to benchmark that against some national data to the pre-test, post-test that I developed or that we developed again based on those four pillars. So well-being, Career Connections, purpose, we actually used existing existing inventories that are out there. And Dr. Heather Butler out of California State, Dominguez Hills has actually done a lot of work with that and Designing Your Life. And so we took portions of that. We didn't want to recreate all the questions and all the things from scratch. We wanted to borrow a little validity. So that ends up the pre-test, post-test becomes kind of an interesting mix of all of those things. And so far, at least from our data from last fall, shows some pretty interesting improvements and decreases over the course of the first semester, which we would we would expect to see. Lee, I'm excited about this. I see. Do you think twice a semester is enough we tend to do weekly. I would love to hear more about that. Maybe you could put in the chat. How many I'm curious your caseload see that I feel like a lot of these conversations and upcoming just to how many minutes you have in a day. Because I would argue no, twice a semester is not enough for some students, especially students who who need it, right? Students who are asking for it. Absolutely. There's a couple of students that I meet with every week, so I don't have to limit them at this point based on caseload, but I do not think twice a semester is enough. And particularly for some of you working with at-risk populations. I think it needs to be more. Garry. Great question. Seeing an improvement in your freshman dropout rate. Not yet. We're hopeful. But just to be bluntly, we are historically are deciding student programs. And our College of Arts and Sciences, which is our two biggest groups historically have retained at a lower rate. And so although we're not quite up to our first-year retention rate, we also need to be careful in using our data and comparing it to benchmarks in 20182019 because it's not really fair to compare it to 20202021 data yet. That's how we're approaching it. So, great question there, but we're really optimistic that our first cohort is entering their third year. So we're really optimistic to look at graduation rates and also the influence on graduation. Because one of the things about retention that we've really pushed against is obviously retention and graduation rates, there has to be a return on investment as far as from a financial and economics of scale in higher education, we know that that's true. So yes, we want to influence that. But what about the students that are staying here, although they are being retained? What about their experience? We also want to make sure that students who are staying indoors, who are leaving. I've had lots of conversations with students even after they've left the university. How are they developing? How are they having a better experience? How did they continue to develop and make their college experience and better? So I think that's a really important point too. But again, with that baseline of yes, we're gonna have to show how we're influencing this at a, at a retention and graduation level. How do you manage or adjust student expectations between the classroom and the coaching meeting? Great question, Wes. How do you help understand what they can and cannot expect any other environment? Yes. This is this is a really interesting question that I've, I've struggled with honestly and how to describe this because students coming in generally know what a teacher is, right? At least they think they know what a teacher is. They have the preconceived notions of their teachers in high school, which we very clearly come in at the very beginning and we do reach out between starting next week, I'll be reaching out to those students in my class will have some conversations and it's starting to establish some expectations before they come. But it is interesting of do you present yourself as a teacher? Do you present yourself as an instructor, which is technically how you'll first show up to them first semester, which can be problematic, especially with the power dynamic. Or you first present themselves. Do I present myself as a coach? Which there like you do football, like no, like this is what a coach is trying to explain that in them. I'm going to carry you along your way. So it is problematic and then shifting between coaching and teaching. So again, as I talk about this overlap and I would argue I'm taking a pretty positive bent to that. There is some challenge and there is some maybe negativity or some confusion in that overlap. So honestly from 2022 Last year, I changed this a lot, right? I I leaned much more into coaching because again, we're only an instructor where only the instructor of record for one semester where we're going to be coaching them throughout. So I would rather have them see me as a coach who teaches than a teacher who coaches. Although in my best version of myself, maybe faculty someday, right? I do want to be a teacher who coaches and so we'll see how that goes. Stephanie, managing absenteeism, those students who don't show up for coaching session, sessions, what reach out its work best. Great question. I don't know if you have anything to share there either. I would say we do not have a magic bullet for that. And that's one of the things that we're looking at right now as far as early interventions, what type of outreach is effective? I would say that's definitely an area of our coaching practice that we can improve on. Now one of the things that we're really trying to beef up is those first two weeks of this semester of students who aren't showing up to class because what's happened with some of our retention rates. And again, as I said, it was lower than our first-year institutional average that included all students who were enrolled in the course. Right? Now. As you, oh, maybe you can imagine this course is difficult to fail, right? Or maybe it's easy to fail. You just don't show up or you don't do anything, Right? It's one of those classes. We're not we're not critiquing and somebody talked about grading earlier, right? We're not grading how great their ideas are further future. It's about creativity, it's about effort, It's about reflection, right? So if they, if they do those things, if they interacted those things, great, they're going to pass. You, take all of those students out who did not pass this class and we do an ABC no credit. If you take out those no credit students, our retention rate bumps up 10% were up 10% over the first year course, which again, some of you were saying, well, that's not fair, right? Yes. Those students are in there. Those are the at-risk students who are who are not retaining. But there is something there because if we can if we can track down those students during those first couple of weeks and say what's going on. And that's, that's that early intervention that at least we have that data to show, hey, if you don't pass this class, you're in trouble. So there are some interesting institutional things that we can think about specifically through to 1910. But Stephanie, yeah, I apologize. I don't have any great ways. I am known to. Again, you can imagine my approach with riding on a tandem bike, Although I have brought that to campus before, I do like to be out on campus walking with students. A lot of times I'll walk with students. I think that there's a lot of connections and I'm working on some research between connections, between creativity and walking. So disarming, although I also understand based on my identities and the identities of students, some students don't feel comfortable doing that. I always give students an option, hey, do you want to, you want to sit in my office and chat, or do you wanna go for a walk? 90% of students take me up on the walk as long as it's not raining or snowing. But I think that's a really, a really interesting thought to, and so then they know, they see me around campus. And so at times, I will strategically place myself at classes where they may or may not be coming out of it. Oh, John, how's it going? I haven't seen you for a couple of weeks. I will be known to do that as well, which I don't know. I think there's there's good things and bad things for that. But Nick Yes. Go for a walk. Everybody should go for walk right now. Yeah. Stephanie is asking for any follow-up research recommendations on absenteeism. That'd be great to share that as well. We've got a couple of minutes left, but I think I think we've made our way through most of those questions. I still appreciate this time together again, this was a really fun opportunity for me to kind of try out some of these ideas on you all. So if there's any follow-up conversations, again, I will put my e-mail in the chat just if it's easier for you to grab that their LinkedIn would be great and look forward to interacting with everybody down the road. So thanks everybody. Alright, lets everyone give a round of applause for gay. Thank you so much for that really interesting deep dive into the, the connections between teaching and coaching. And I want to thank everyone for attending today's session. We're grateful that you chose to spend part of your day with us and hope to see you later today or even next year if you have not already done so we encourage you to take a moment to complete an evaluation regarding today's session and I'm going to drop that and the link, that link in the chat in just a second. But otherwise, thanks so much.