Turning Edinburgh's Red Cocktail Lounge yellow: we talked coaching in education with mango daiquiris in hand.
Set in Edinburgh’s buzzing West End, The Daiquiri played host to an evening of great cocktails and even greater conversations. Turning their red cocktail lounge yellow for the night, The Daiquiri gave their eponymous signature cocktail The Educational Coach twist, with a vibrant yellow mango daiquiri. Living up to its playful nickname, The Conversation Starter, the cocktails proved to be more than just a talking point, getting the conversations flowing after a full day’s programme of formal and informal talks and discussions at the IAPS conference in partnership with HMC.
Our lead coach and founder, Julie Keyes, and associate coach, Lindsay Cunningham, welcomed head teachers from around the country to the cocktail hour event. Perfectly positioned opposite the Edinburgh International Centre, the cocktail bar lay a stone’s throw from the annual conference venue.
The theme of this year’s conference - Enlightened Education - looked at the city of Edinburgh and its influential power, and the rights-based approach to learning as outlined by UNICEF. The conference is open to headteachers from around the country, with a special event for international leaders hosted by Fetters College, Edinburgh.
Our Education Coaching Model
Many of the attendees of the cocktail hour are schools currently working with us here at The Educational Coach. The Every Conversation Programme takes our very own education coaching model - The HELP Coaching Method - and breaks down the fundamental aspects to provide a real-world approach to embedding a coaching culture in your school. It focuses on our belief that in order to hone in on what makes an effective conversation and how to coach others in your school, you must first put yourself in the position to be coached. Experience coaching to better understand the learning process, to ultimately practise better coaching conversations for yourself.
Always very happy to sing the praises of coaching, our Edinburgh cocktail hour was the perfect opportunity to chat informally to our current schools who know only too well the benefits of coaching for themselves. We took the opportunity to say ‘thank you’ and gain feedback on the impact coaching has had on their work and career goals. The relationships we build with our schools is a key goal of our own, and observing the impact we have on these schools is a reminder to us of the transformative power of coaching.
To the schools who were keen to learn more about the work we do at The Educational Coach, we provided an introduction to the coaching basics, discussing how coaching is currently used in schools and how to know if your school is ready for coaching. This forms the hook, part of our HELP coaching acronym, a stage so important we gave it its very own letter! This is to highlight how your preparedness for coaching matters. If your school isn’t hooked on the idea, then you can’t expect to see a whole school change. Assess your current culture and how staff feel about their current work environment. We have excellent resources to do this, so get in touch to find out more.
Thank you so much to all who came to our cocktail hour. It was so great to see all the familiar faces and wonderful to meet all the new ones, too. If you want to start the conversation about coaching and how to embed a coaching culture in your school, get in touch. We’re always happy to talk all things coaching.
We must give a special thank you to Jonathan Carroll, Associate Coach, without whom we most certainly couldn’t have drawn together such an incredible group of people to discuss coaching - all whilst drinking some delicious cocktails.
Komentáře