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Coaching others to coach
Coaching others to coach

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3 Coach developers as content curators

In Session 5 you were asked to search the internet to find out about flipped learning. The information you found may, or may not, have come from reliable sources. How would you know?

Described image
Figure 7 How easily can you collect appropriate material and recommend it to others?

With more and more resources now available online, the question is – will the internet change the nature of coach learning and development? And should coach developers curate (i.e. filter, collect and use) online content for their coaches?

You will begin to answer these questions by exploring perspectives from education.

Activity 3 Should education change due to the internet?

Timing: Allow about 20 minutes

Watch this TED talk from Elizabeth Boese a higher education teacher. She suggests education should change in recognition of the fact that in her words ‘the internet is the textbook’. When she talks of ‘just in time learning’ for her students think about:

  1. How would this apply to coaches?
  2. What changes, if any, are appropriate for coach learning and development in light of the internet as a potential source of knowledge?
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Discussion

  1. It would be false to assume that the internet can easily act as a coaching textbook. Many new ideas can be gleaned from skilled used of the internet such as ideas for sessions, training plans and valuable discussions among coaches. However, there is a ‘but’. You construct knowledge by making sense of new ideas with reference to your existing mental models; coaches require some underpinning knowledge to help interpret new information. If you want a fuller explanation of this perspective Neelan and Kirshner’s (2017) evidence informed article is useful: Why Google® can’t replace individual human knowledge. [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)]
  2. You may find the following perspective useful in considering any changes needed in coach learning and development. Bhatt (2015), writing about education generally offers a view which you may recognise from your own use of Google. Some expert coach developers and indeed coaches are ‘digital content curators’. People use these types of sophisticated practices to search, sift, critically evaluate, collect and use online content.
  3. Many coaches’ online practices are about harnessing an abundance of information from a multitude of sources. Curation in this sense is about how learners use existing content to produce new content through engaging in problem-solving and inquiry (Bhatt, 2015). This can include taking sources from other areas and exploring how they might be applied within coach learning and development. In fact, this course is an example of a form of online curation of existing video and text content.

Perhaps some coach developers or organisation in the future may need to coalesce, bring together and curate content to support coach learning and development. Notice ‘some’, not all coach developers. Curation, therefore, becomes a kind of continual stewardship of research, and coaching practice along with recognising others’ material; it requires a self-regulating critical dialogue of what might be recommended to other coaches.