Materials to introduce coaching to learners: What is coaching?

Learners usually have no clear understanding of coaching and their roles. These materials help are useful to present the approach to interested learners and to explain, what they can expect. Was ist Coaching? (in German).

Open coaching materials to build awareness

Here you’ll find a collection of materials that have proven to be very useful for coaching. They encourage learners to think about more complex issues and help learners to express themselves.

Tools for planning and evaluating: Portfolio

The Dutch Actieplan autonoom leren helps learners to plan their actions and evaluate them.

The German portfolio is a collection of materials, which help learners to reflect on their own learning behaviour. Learners and coaches decide what they want to work at and use a selection of work sheets as a framework. The materials are modelled on layouts on the Internet and smart-phones, which are familiar to the learners. This set contains:

• A learning biography
• Materials that help to set goals
• Identifying resources for learning
• Setting up a learning project

The UK portfolio aims to encourage learners to reflect on learning and becoming an independent learner. The document includes session record forms to help reflect on how the coaching and learning project are developing.

Tools for help with goal setting, strategy selection, planning

Once it's clear that by coaching alone the learner seems not to grasp the basis skills for autonomous learning like goal setting or activity selection, Help Cards can be of help. See the example for English and Dutch/Nederlandse Help Cards for goal selection and the English and Dutch/Nederlandse Help Cards for strategies.
For ideas about how to produce these cards and use them, see Help Cards Instruction (pdf).

Another type of How cards provide the learner with help in carrying out a specific strategy. We produced some cards on the different strategies:

• Reading card (pdf in English) or Leeskaart (pdf in Dutch/Nederlands)
• Vocabulary Card (pdf in English) or Woordenkaart (pdf in Dutch/Nederlands)
• Woordenboekkaart (pdf in Dutch/Nederlands) = Dictionary Card
• Schrijftips (pdf in Dutch/nederlands) = Writing tip

During the process of coaching it can be very helpful to use some assisting materials like a coaching contract, cards with a selection of useful coaching techniques, an overview of the coaching process and a guideline for the first session. These documents are provided in German: Materialien fur das Beratungsprozess and Offene Beragungsmaterialien.