This term, the new teaching staff members along with the HR Manager, Bejal Shah and the Marketing Communications Coordinator, Katy Wrench attended Cognitive Coaching®. All of our new teachers aim to complete the 8 day programme within their first year at Halcyon to support our Student Mentoring Programme. Gareth Jones, the Student Wellbeing Support also attended both parts of the 6 day Advanced Cognitive Coaching® course.

Cognitive Coaching® is a structure of mentoring, designed to enable the coachee to be more self-directed and to discover their own answers to the questions they are asking, to work towards very specific and structured goals and aims that they have made themselves. It is not only relevant to a teacher-student relationship, but also a student-student or teacher-teacher relationship both inside and outside the classroom.

The skills and techniques developed through this 8 day programme encourage active listening, paraphrasing, pausing appropriately and asking mediative questions to support the cognitive processes of the coachee. This structure supports learners in defining their own goals, exploring techniques to achieve them and ways to measure that achievement. To reflect on their personal learning and decide what went well to use for next time.

The 6 day Advanced Cognitive Coaching® course continues on from the foundation course. Developing the planning, reflecting and problem resolving conversations and learning a new type of conversation called a calibrating conversation, built on developing thoughts around agreed data. The course looks into the neuroscience and psychology of cognitive coaching, developing a holistic picture of the programme.

This all might seem familiar to some of you! The International Baccalaureate curriculum promotes skills in independent inquiry, critical thinking and decision making when faced with a challenge in a very similar way. It is the core ethos on which Halcyon sits in order to encourage students to be life-ready.