by Jim Knight

Something we often hear from coaches is that surprisingly the greatest benefit of being a coach is that it has helps people live better lives inside and especially outside the workplace. This talk explores the connections between coaching and life, and highlights how a deeper understanding of our purpose, being fully present, communicating effectively, leading effectively, along with other coaching skills, inevitably helps us live richer, more effective, and more beautiful lives. Coaching is life. This presentation offers an opportunity for everyone to look at their life and coaching from different perspectives and learn more about both topics by doing so.

by Dianne Vella-Brodrick

It is important to find engaging and effective ways of helping individuals learn about and apply wellbeing strategies so they can improve their quality of life and performance in valued pursuits. There are many coaching principles that can help to achieve this, including a personalised approach that focuses on authentic and internalized goals and regular monitoring of progress. In this presentation I am going to discuss specific methods that can be employed to make learning more practical and sustained. The first method involves biofeedback, whereby coachees can receive feedback about their neurophysiological responses to different wellbeing strategies, including respiration, brain activity and galvanic skin response. Receiving wellbeing data that is tangible can foster increased belief, self-efficacy, motivation and direction. The second method entails developing a collective culture of support using peer coaching. This enables coachees to learn from others, increase wellbeing literacy, normalize wellbeing practices, and reinforce applied learnings. Examples of how biofeedback and (near) peer to peer coaching have been adopted in a school context to promote student wellbeing and performance will be presented along with some of the benefits and barriers of adoption.

by Ellie Drago-Severson

Today’s urgent and unprecedented challenges call for new, enhanced ways of coaching, working, learning, and leading together. Offering feedback—so that others can hear—is one of the most important ways we can support each other, transform our schools and organizations, and grow. Indeed, feedback is part of living and leading in our “new normal” world—and is vital to effective coaching. Yet, when and where do coaches learn how to give feedback that meets people where they are? And, how might coaches’ own inclinations, preferences, and orientations influence others’ experiences with feedback, both the giving and receiving of it?

Drawing from the presenter’s co-authored book, Tell Me So I Can Hear You: A Developmental Approach to Feedback for Educators (Harvard Education Press, 2016), this interactive keynote address offers an opportunity to bring new strategies and ideas to your coaching practice with a developmental approach to feedback. You will learn about the importance of intentionally differentiating feedback so that adults—who make sense of their experiences in qualitatively different ways—can best hear it, learn from it, and improve their instructional and leadership practice. Please feel warmly invited to attend.

by Mark McKergow

Over the past two decades a new form of Solution Focused practice has been drifting into view, based on helping people to build detailed descriptions of better futures, presents and pasts.  Mark McKergow will bring these new developments together by introducing an ‘art gallery’ metaphor and showing how SF coaches can refine and hone their practice with some small adjustments based on questions about noticing (rather than doing), descriptions (rather than explanations) and interactions (between self and others).  This new picture of SF coaching also allows us a new perspective on how come this form of practice is so rapidly effective – we are helping our clients to ‘stretch their worlds’ by bringing new opportunities for action into being.  This shift is both practical and profound, allowing the coach to let go of some things and focus on others with clarity and purpose.  Mark will present his model of three levels of interaction which can be used by coaches and SF practitioners to really open up space for new opportunities and progress.