You're at the Coaching Inn, 3D Coaching's virtual pub where we enjoy conversations with people who engage in the world of coaching. Hello and welcome to this week's edition of The Coaching Inn. I'm your host, Claire Pedrick. And before I introduce today's guests, can I just remind you, do subscribe or follow the podcast on whatever platform you're listening, because then you'll get every new episode as they drop. And they drop every Wednesday and every fourth Saturday.
But you won't need to know that if you've subscribed or followed, you? So welcome to The Coaching Inn for today. Our subject is using coaching with students and in higher education. And today we have an open table and it's my pleasure to introduce our guests who are Claire Revel, Jim Robinson. Sarah Brooks, Sarah Marston and Su Blanch. Welcome to The Coaching In everybody. Hello, hello. So let's just hear from everybody.
What's your interest in how or how are you using coaching in higher education and begin to open up what our thoughts and insights are. So let's start with you, Claire Revel. Hi, for me. It's my first time on a podcast. You're really welcome. Thank you. Yeah, so I'm Claire and I'm a lecturer at Queen Mary University in London.
I'm actually part of the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, but I'm a bit of an anomaly because I'm not actually a computer scientist or an electronic engineer. I have been working with students in things like work-based learning and employability and skills development, that side of things, which is where I'm kind of coming from in the school.
I have a background in one-to-one kind of guidance, careers guidance, which I've been, so I've been working with students in that way for over 20 years. So I've had kind of an interest in kind of one-to-one approaches with students, student-centered approaches.
Over the past seven years, I've done two coaching qualifications, one through Queen Mary, where I'm also an internal coach and also a independently I've done an ICF accredited coaching diploma because I really love coaching, want to do more of it. So in terms of coaching my work, I've introduced quite a lot of reflective practice into some of the teaching that I do, as well as interactions with students on a one-to-one basis.
And I think the more coaching I've done on a kind of one-to-one basis and the training, the more coachy my teachings become. I think it's difficult because of student numbers, so I'll go into more detail about it later. I think that allowing students time to think, all the stuff you talk about, Claire, about not having to know everything, all of that stuff, I think has informed the way I interact with students and the way that I teach. So maybe I'll stop there, let somebody else have a chance.
Well, welcome, Claire. your first podcast. I hope it won't be your last. Jim Robinson, welcome to The Coaching In. Hi Claire. I've never been on a podcast either, so thank you for having me. I'm, it's a slightly different perspective from me. So I'm a governor at my, my daughter's old school, where she's left now, but I'm still there despite trying to escape once you're in, you're in. So I'm in my 10th year of doing that. And I've started using, I'm doing my PCC at Henley.
And I'll finish that in the summer. And I'm using my coaching predominantly with staff at the moment. So slightly different angle. Hopefully I'm not going to get ejected out of the podcast. You're not. So I coach one of the deputy heads and one of the assistant heads at the moment because obviously, well, it's fairly obvious that it's not the sort of thing that's normally funded in schools.
So I'm doing that just to get my experience, but also because I'm a governor, I wanted to help out the school. So that's kind of my interest at the moment. Thank you. Well, welcome to your first podcast, Thank you. Sarah, this is not your first, Sarah Brooks, this is not your first podcast. Welcome back. Hello, hi. Thank you for inviting me back. So I'm a lecturer in organizational behavior at Sheffield University Management School. And I have been coaching since 2004.
So before I was an academic, I was a management consultant. I used to work on change implementation programs. And so I was originally coached, learned how to be a coach in order to support managers and leaders to implement change in the workplace. And I've ended up in academia after doing, after having done a PhD and I use coaching at the moment. I've developed a module. So it's a year long module helping students to think critically about their career choices.
And that is based on a coaching model where we facilitate thinking around 16 different aspects. and help them to work out what's best for them. So quite a different model from a lot of what students are used to. So I have got a lot of insights that I've learned about that and lead into some questions that we can explore later. Fantastic. Thank you, Sarah. I love how everybody's in a different context with a different level of experience and questions and insights. So that's fantastic.
It's going to give us really good food for the thought. Sarah Marston, hello. Hello, thank you for having me again. It's my first podcast and I'm a relatively recently qualified coach. I qualified late last year. I trained with Animas and I was always interested and quite passionate about working with young adults. And I just happened a lot of my practice clients came to me via my goddaughter. who was 25, and also my daughter who is currently at university.
So I kind of ended up with a lot of practice clients in exactly the demographic that I wanted to work with. And hence I was naturally working with students in university. And I feel from a sort of an emotional need, that it would be really helpful for more coaching to be available to students for all the various just hurdles and issues that they face being away from home for the first time, the time management pressures, you know, I'm not going to name them all because we all know them.
So that's kind of where I'm at. As I say, I'm fairly newly qualified and I just be interested to really to learn what everybody else is up to as well today. It's really interesting, isn't it? As you're talking there, Sarah, I'm thinking, because I'm the parent of young adults. And I'm thinking of how the education system really helps them to know. So to know how to fulfil the criteria to get a higher grade and all of those kind of things.
And suddenly what we're talking about in coaching and in the world of work is not knowing and how to engage people's capacity to think in really a very different way. Finally, welcome to The Coaching In, 3D Coaching's very own Sue Blanche. Thank you very much, Cleopatra. And yeah, so I'm Sue Blanche, I'm Managing Partner here at 3D Coaching. And I have been coaching for 17, 18 years. And actually, I'm doing the maths on the basis of just having heard Sarah Marston speak.
about how old my children are who are at university and it really struck me when you were talking Sarah about the emotional requirement really for coaching and yeah that just sort of pinged for me I have to say it's not the focus that I'm coming into with this right now I am here because I do some work with some organizations, some higher education organizations, particularly around action learning sets.
So working with maybe lecturers, sometimes supervisors about enabling their abilities to help coach in some ways the students that are coming to them. And it's been really fascinating. to see some of the shifts and how the way that we work in action learning sets, many to one coaching has been enabling a bit of a different thinking style with them. And I think I'll stop talking now. Thank you. Thank you. What an absolute beautiful melting pot of different kinds of experience and skills and.
insights. As you heard different people talking about different ways in which they're using coaching, my question is what insights did you have from that? What questions does that raise for you and how do you want to build on what you've heard others say? I was very interested in what Sarah was talking about because I, as I mentioned when I was talking with kind of scaling coaching approaches. We have kind of 500 students in some of our cohorts.
And I'm really interested in how we might introduce modules or learning that involves more of that kind of reflection. And yeah, I mean, I know there's some, there are in my university, one of our business department actually has a module where they teach one of your students coaching skills. So that's a woo, which would be great. But again, it's like, How do you do that in a curriculum that is focused on a particular subject? It's kind of getting in the way.
It's always difficult to kind of add these things in. I'm, and I've recently, I've only recently taken over on a lecturer role and I've taken over responsibility for our projects as a project coordinator. And we've got, so the final year projects, a big piece of independent work that students have to do.
And a lot of them, even though it's kind of building up to that point, when they get there and they're left on their own to kind of do this independent, really kind of core piece of work, what I've noticed so far in a few months that I've been observing those kind of meetings with students is some of them struggle to ask questions.
They're not incapable of doing the work, they're very capable of doing the academic work, but they're holding back from asking questions, they're not going to their supervisors, they think they're daft and all this sort of thing, I'm gonna ask a stupid question. So yeah, that's quite a lot actually as well. So yeah, I'm just interested in how we might incorporate more of that into the curriculum.
And maybe Sarah, because Sarah's from a business school, maybe that's easier, but maybe Sarah, I'm wrong there, but yeah, how would we do that effectively? So it was a bit of a stream of consciousness. guys. Sarah's nodding madly. Not madly, just generously nodding. There's two Sarahs, it's me isn't it? Sarah Brooks is generously nodding. So it's interesting Claire because we have really big numbers as well so we're in the multiple hundreds of...
I'm just wondering if it might be a bit useful if I just explain briefly how I came up with the idea because... I feel like you've asked the question and I'm like, I don't know how I could advise other people to do it because it was a very organic route to how we ended up with what I've got at the moment. So if I just explain a little bit about that. So it goes back to, know, me as a lecturer, lecturers have teaching responsibilities and research responsibilities.
I'm my area of research is voice and silence. So how do we articulate who we are, what's important to us? How do we find our authentic voice? And what became very apparent to me is that when students start university and they start thinking about their career, they have very little ways of thinking about it. So traditionally they would go to a career service and they would say kind of, are my options? This is what I like doing. This is what I'm good at.
And then ultimately, you know, what students want to know is how am I going to earn loads of money, you know, and have the glamorous kind of lifestyle. And I wanted to allow students or everybody, because this is the whole essence of my coaching business, which is about powerful dreaming. So how do you dream big and create a life for yourself, which gives you everything that you want? And so I created this critical thinking tool, which helps them think about these 16 different areas.
And essentially the 16 different areas are who am I? So what am I good at? What do I like doing? What am I interested in? Who is going to pay me to just do exactly what I want to do? Because working on the philosophy that if I do exactly what's me and who I am, I can't ever get it wrong. I will be brilliant at it. And then there's some questions at the top and the bottom that help kind of clarify their thinking, which is about under which conditions do I work best?
And then which organizations are likely to provide me with an environment which allows me to thrive? And so that's... That was my idea and I came up with that based on my coaching business and my coaching philosophy. And so it was a really organic process and we've been running it for four years. So we're just coming to the end of the four years now and we've got some undergraduates who have been through the whole cycle. So they started in first year.
yeah, I should maybe mention that, shouldn't I? So this is a first year module. It's a full year module and they get They get this module from day one of year one because at Sheffield University Management School, we are committed to making sure that their career choices and employability and skills development is forefront in their mind and it's they're thinking about it the whole way through.
And so we've got this cycle now of undergraduates who are just coming towards graduation and they're able to provide some really good testimonials as to, yeah, you know, and this is what they say. I didn't really see the value of it at the time. I didn't kind of see the point and now look at where I am. And actually it gave me a really streamlined opportunity to work out what my choices were and had opportunities to get work experience throughout the time.
And I selected some modules that I knew would give me the knowledge and skills in order to do what I wanted. and look now I'm on this grad scheme and it's kind of doing this and everything else. But the whole principle of the career development. plan is that it teaches you skills for life. So whatever stage of your career, you can just put all of the things into the plan and it gives you a way of thinking that will always help you move forward really succinctly.
Wow. I love what you said about them not really thinking it was very useful at the beginning. And yet now, my sense as you're speaking Sarah, is that they're ahead of the game. I would really like that. I've written about this quite publicly about how my personal experience was that I had a unique combination of things I like doing and a careers advisor very early on said to me, can't do that. because you'll not get a job doing that. You won't get into university with that set of A-levels.
So I ended up taking A-levels. didn't want to fail to them, no surprise. Went to university, did a course that I didn't especially want to do, lost all my confidence, came out of that feeling like, well, what was the point in that? Because I don't know what I'm going to do. And I feel like I had to build up all my confidence and all my skills from the bottom.
And yet where I am now, you know, and I think I've done really well, but it's taken a lot of education and a lot of thinking and a lot of support from other people to keep me going when I didn't really see the point. And I don't ever want anybody to go through that because it's, and you know, it was awful. And I'm not saying I would change anything because I am who I am because of it. But if I have an opportunity to help people say, no, I don't want that.
I want some life goals and I know what I want and I'm just going to go and get them. and then go on and do bigger and better things. Then of course I want to help. And the module is not for everybody and it doesn't engage everybody. And some people aren't interested in it and some people love it and some people hate it. You know, there's a whole range of things, but it's one way, isn't it?
It's one way of helping people to become autonomous and take control of their life and start listening to their own opinions rather than the opinions of other people. feel we still clap. Sounds brilliant, Sarah. I want to clap. That's amazing. Because isn't that what coaching is all about? And what I absolutely love about what you said is how many people are on the program at any one time, Sarah? So the most we've had is 620. This year we've got 420.
So they're doing it themselves and you've created the container for them to do it in. And I create different spaces. So we do traditional lectures and tutorial groups, but then we also created a large group teaching event, which is the only opportunity for that number of students to come together. And we do an immersive three hour interactive session where they get to think more detail about what they want to do, but they get an opportunity to talk about it with each other and practice.
talking about their career choices with people they've not met before. So the advantage of having a large cohort, I'm not sure there are loads of advantages of having large cohorts, but the advantage in this is that there's a lot of them they don't know and they have to talk about, well, here's what I want to do, here's why I want to do it, here's what I think I'm good at. With people they haven't met before.
And really surprisingly, some of the best feedback that we get in the module evaluation is, I've never spoken to anybody I didn't know before. about these things. And actually it was not a bad experience. So I realized it's a safe environment, but that's what the whole module is designed to give people confidence that if you can't be confident about your choices in life and who you are and what you want to do, life is really difficult.
So let's be confident about who we are and give everybody a fighting chance that actually, yes, I believe in you and I want you to go on and do what you want to do. And that's what the module is designed to do really early on in their career.
Wow. Yeah, I'm interested, Sarah, to know if you tell your story to the students, because I think, as I alluded to earlier on, I think there's students who are kind of intimidated, they don't know enough, or the academic is the expert, you know, and I don't want to ask a stupid question. And yeah, do you share your experience of university?
You know, because I think a lot of issues a lot of things like life in general if people were showed a bit more vulnerability if people admitted they didn't know everything and they showed that they had a different kind of journey that that would be helpful to the students so I'm really interested Sarah to know how much of that you share with them. Well Claire knows I'm really good at being vulnerable in front of people. So I am no different.
I am no different with my students than I am with anybody, however, and I think I have to defer here to some of the other people because I don't have children and I don't have experience of working with younger people. But my experience of working with my students is they're not very interested in my story. I'm just an old person who's trying to tell them things that maybe they're just not ready to hear.
So I have written about it in a blog that's publicly available and that blog is available on my Blackboard site where they can have a look at. But beyond that, don't get the impression they're that interested. So maybe there's some insights here about younger people that would be helpful for me. Thank you. Sorry, Claire. I'm just wondering what Sue, Sarah and Jim, how you want to bounce off that. Sue. Yeah, I have listened to you for ages actually, Sarah. I've got lots and lots of questions.
But if I do a bit of a build, I wonder if I may. It's really interesting about young people may not be any different from any people. And it struck me that one of the things that I think I'm noticing is encouragement from lecturers, supervisors.
to help the students have more of a voice, bring questions to their supervisors, etc. I think I'm noticing in some of the areas that I'm working that actually the supervisors don't feel they have much of a voice and how interesting it is to kind of put that to them, that their desire to encourage with really good hearts the students, there's something about what are you able to do for yourself that might then just rub off, you know, the confidence maybe in what you as a supervisor bring.
And I just wonder about the nature of some of the organizations that we operate in that might squish confidence, autonomy, voices, and that actually then becomes really prevalent, doesn't it, in the culture, and it seeps into everybody, whether they're a student or whether they're a lecturer or a department head or whatever. Yeah. Sarah and Jim, you're on the outside, well, sort of the inside outside. I'm just curious what insights and questions are coming up for you.
Yeah, mean, me, what Sue said just there was really interesting. mean, as I said in the brief introduction, I'm coaching a couple of the senior teaching staff. And what Sue said there about, know, rubbing off supervisor stuff, rubbing off on other people. You know, if I can, one of the things that I'm finding is, you know, I like to think that, I know they are finding it really useful. but it also gives them a different perspective.
You know, that's not necessarily the way they interact with the students on a kind of daily basis, sitting in silence and being more quiet. It's not, you know, they're usually telling them what to do and whatever. And I just think if some of that coaching that I'm doing with them can rub off, you know, that might help. I it'll only be a small, you know, but it does trickle down and it has to start at the top. And if it can trickle down, that would be a really positive thing.
I just think what Sarah just talked about that was just brilliant. Absolutely. And if coaching is facilitating a climate where people can think, the thing I find most inspiring of all the inspiring things that you just said, Sarah, is that with 620 students, that's all you can do. So it's about creating the container or facilitating the climate for them to do the work because you can't touch them all. And I love how you've done it on such a big scale.
Cause if you could do it on that scale, you could do it on any scale, can't you? And you've created, you said, different spaces, but they're doing the work. And isn't that what coaching is all about? And actually I think, or wonder whether actually that's a shift that, you know, what difference would that make in education if, if we can shift that. So I did a podcast. I think it came out in January with Kate Carrow, who home educates her children.
And she was talking about facilitating them to do some really good learning. And it completely blew my mind around home ed, because basically she gives them the space that they need to learn. She doesn't teach them anything. And what a wonderful thing. And then they go back into mainstream education at 14 and 15 and they may have a couple of knowledge gaps, but they really know how to be great students. Sarah, what are your thoughts as you hear Sarah Marston?
I thought it was interesting, Sarah, your comment about, I don't think younger people are particularly interested in me. They just see me as an old person. And I think think their minds are very busy though, aren't they? Their minds are so busy about everything that's going on in their brains and their brains are still developing allegedly, aren't they, 25. And I think that sometimes I find that with my own sort of daughters, especially the older one, there seems to be a lot about her.
And I don't think that comes from a negative place. I just think that comes from a very busy mind. And as Claire's just said, allowing that thinking time. away from everything else that's going on is just so powerful. And I totally relate to you, Sarah. I messed up my education spectacularly. The same thing, wrong A levels, failed them all. We're going the wrong path.
If only, if only I'd had that, you know, opportunity and time and realized that I didn't have to do everything in such a hurry and get on the next step and then mess it all up. Would have been brilliant. Yeah. So what other insights and questions are emerging for us? I've got a resource question and it's something Jim that you were saying about, which really struck me about we can all believe that coaching is of great value to students, teachers, heads and so on.
But there is a difficulty in education and it's about funding, isn't it? And how do we get this thing which we believe helps individuals and systemically the culture and society and so on. What do we do about the funding issue? Jim? mean, so I haven't necessarily got any magic answers, but, you know, the two that I coach are both massively stressed. I mean, I'm sure they're just typical senior teachers. I went in for a coaching session at four o'clock in the afternoon.
She'd been there since 6.30 in the morning and we didn't finish till half six. And that was kind of, said, pretty much a normal day. And then that was a Friday. And she said she'd be working Saturday and Sunday as well. So they're all really stressed and a lot of teachers are getting burnt out.
And if you could find a way of convincing people that by doing some coaching, working in a slightly different way, giving yourself that space and listening, reduced stress levels and made you actually more productive, so you got more done during the day. It's an easy argument, but it's not. It's easy to say it, but I don't know how you would convince the government to change what it does and the way it invests. But there is a really obvious case there, which was just.
When you talk to them, it just makes perfect sense, but I don't know how you get to that point. At my institution, I'm an internal coach, so I coach colleagues, staff at Queen Mary, and there's a bunch of us who are trained to do that. And it's interesting because we, so the actual, the offer of coaching is available to staff, so academics and also professional services staff. But the take-up is still quite limited.
And also what I've noticed is that people, because they're so busy, often people cancel. very close to kind of last minute, or they don't make time. So I had somebody who had sometimes two months between our sessions. And so that's also another job. And interesting as well that the, all of the internal coaches are volunteers. And I think there's about 25 of us, I think, but not everybody's coaching all of the time.
So I think there's a, an acknowledgement that it's valuable, but actually scaling that up again is really difficult. On the leadership side of things, know that senior academics who are going into leadership roles are offered coaching as part of the leadership programme. My head of school is a fantastic person. He has got his own coach. He got through that. yeah, but actually getting it as part of the culture and sustaining that and having the staff to facilitate that and relying on volunteers.
Yeah, it's tricky. think the need is acknowledged, but making that happen is hard. There's something, isn't there, about normalizing the value of traveling through your entire career with an external support person right from the beginning, rather than trying to squeeze it in afterwards. But, you know, people who go into public service are generally not self-serving.
And if you see coaching as a self-serving thing, then you're going to put the needs of others before you put the needs of yourself. you know, it's oxygen masks, isn't it? Put your own oxygen mask on first. So we're having two really interesting, but different conversations here. One is about the formation of students into a thinking environment. and one is about staff. So I wonder what insights and questions are coming up for us.
Sarah. I think I was interested in Sarah talking about, you know, managing to scale up to have 600 and odd students on the program. Because obviously as an individual coach, you can only reach so many students individually. I was quite curious to know how I know you said that there was one time when they all got together, how open they are to working as a team.
So if there was an issue that they were that maybe it's not to do with career, let's talk about sort of, you know, friendships and relationships, because those things do come up. How interested do you think the students would be to come together and work with some group coaching? That's a good question. When I first took over this module, which was five years ago, and then I redeveloped it into what I've got now, I'd never worked with 18 year olds before.
I'd worked with executive education learners who are mature professionals, experienced professionals. So my experience was very different and I didn't really know what to expect. And I think maybe I'd expected from what I'd heard maybe just from the sector generally is that it was quite difficult to get students of 18 to engage with the conversations that were happening in the room. And so I'd gone in thinking this is going to be really hard.
And I remember the first large group session that I did. We had 450 people in the room and we had developed a four hour intensive coaching set of activities. So there was some breaks in there. but we did an appreciative inquiry exercise, we did a visioning exercise, we did some drawing, we did some peer coaching, we did all the kinds of techniques that we might do with large groups and we were all completely blown away by how engaged they were with it, partly because it was unique and novel.
Students had never done anything like that before, but partly because Once they'd kind of got over the hurdle of, I have to think about myself and talking about myself. I think they started to realize that actually this is quite nice because I can't really get this wrong. And I think maybe there's an element there of being able to tap into. And that's why I emphasized it earlier. You know, we need to be confident with who we are because if we don't have that.
everything else is going to be much more difficult. So I think to answer your question more directly, I think that group of people, the students, because they don't know anything different, actually being immersed in that environment and having somebody there who says, no, come on, it's okay. This is really good stuff. works. think it worked. I think it worked. Yeah. Wouldn't it be interesting to do a longitudinal study?
of those students as they go into the workplace, linking to what you said, Jim, to see whether the recognition that they now have for good thinking space has been an important thing might continue. That would certainly make the world of work better, wouldn't it? If everyone going into employment started off with that attitude, or a slightly variation of that attitude, I think that it'd give it a few years and the people leading different institutions would be significantly better.
Thinking space matters, It reminds me of a student thinking about, thinking that students aren't going to enjoy things or, you know, they're not going to like this or whatever. But it reminds me of a student, we had a summer internship module where students would go out to work in summer, then they reflect on what they learned, they write a report, they come back. And one of the assessments was a presentation where they have to tell us about kind of some key lessons.
So it's more of what have you learned about yourself, not kind of like practical lessons as in technical skills and everything. And I remember a student came up to me afterwards and said, thanks so much for making me, and he was in his final year, thanks so much for making me do that. I've never ever done anything like that before. I've never reflected on my learning and that was so powerful and I'm gonna do it more.
And he'd never, we provided that kind of scaffolding and structure and we asked open questions. And he was in his final year and it was like, well, hang on. So I'm kind of thinking, going back to what Sarah said about, know, if you're kind of embedding these bits of reflection where we can, then you get into the habit of seeing how powerful that would be when you step back and get the chance.
Cause we just gave him the chance, the time to think and to talk about himself and he'd not done that before. So yeah, yeah, it's powerful and it works and we should just try it. Wow. So as we're moving towards the end of our time, I guess my question to everybody is, what's the insight, and this is for you too listeners, what insight have you had from today that you're going to do something with? Who wants to go first? Go on, Sarah.
okay. So as I've said, I'm relatively, well, I'm very newly qualified compared to everybody else. So my brain is ticking over all the time about how I can build a business and how I can make it work. And it's really interesting to hear Sarah say that this can be sort of scaled up. So, you know, I... know, we all have a dream, don't we? And in my little dream moments, perhaps I do see myself working in further education and standing in a lecture hall and coaching to big groups.
So that's my dream, you know, it's out there. But hopefully, now you've said that it might be possible. That's amazing. And isn't it interesting that you're doing that, Sarah Brooks, as an internal? So the journey is to find a way of doing it. but you're already legitimately in the space and you're already being paid to be there. Jim. I think. So the school I I'm a governor at is in a mat with 44 other schools. So it's a reasonably large one and the thought that what Sarah said is, know.
Could we how would we go about? Obviously we could. How would we go about? How long would it take? and would there be the interest across the mat to do something similar? Because obviously it's different age groups, but similar where appropriate. And that's got me thinking about, when I talk to the CEO of the mat, which I'm going to be doing about some other bits and pieces, is that something you would even be aware of?
Bye. Well, I've been very encouraged by hearing Sarah in particular talking about what she's done with her students because as I'm moving into this new role, I have got kind of license actually to be coachee, which is great. So I was planning to do it anyway, but I'm gonna do it with with gusto now. Yeah, so there's things, and also I was thinking, I keep kind of questioning myself thinking, know, doing things on a large scale is difficult.
Is it really coaching if we're just kind of adding some reflective tasks? And it is. And I think that there are ways that I can incorporate coaching into what I'm doing with the students moving forward for this new project module that I'm taking over. yeah, so I think it's just kind of keep doing it. It works, I think is what. I know it works. It's just great to hear that other people think it works too. Lazy. Sarah, what are you taking away? Well, I think there's two things mainly.
One of them is that I'm really, I'm kind of a bit blown away by the response of it because I don't talk about this. This is my job and this is what I do. And you can imagine, can't you, that it's stressful. And this has been four years in the making and we've tweaked it as we've gone along and we've trialed and erred and you know, there's things that have worked and things that haven't worked. But that's really nice to hear your enthusiasm. So thank you, that's been really nice.
I think my other insight is, and this gives me lots of confidence as a coach, whatever I do really, is at whatever level somebody is at, even if you ask a question that they're not capable of working through, it's a starting point. And I remember working with some of my students and somebody saying to me, that is too advanced for them. And I thought, well, no, it's okay, because if it's too advanced, they'll ask another question and then we'll get to the level that they're at.
And that's how we genuinely, that's how we generally do that. Yeah. Amazing. So I'll put your contact details in the show notes so that people can contact you if they want to talk more. Sarah, is your Blackboard site publicly available or is it just available internally in the university? Yeah, it's just available in the university. Yeah. I mean, I can send you a link to the blogs if you like. Okay. Yeah. And we'll put those in the show notes.
Thank you. Jim Robinson, Sarah Marston, Sue Blanch, Claire Revel, Sarah Brooks. Thank you all very much for coming to the Coaching Inn today. And it's been an absolute pleasure to have you here. Everyone, thank you for listening. Do subscribe or follow if you want to get every new episode as it drops and all the details will be in the show notes. So thank you everyone for listening. Thank you guests for coming. Have a good day, everyone. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you very much.
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