The Wheel of Competencies to Enhance Student-Teacher Role Awareness in Teaching-Learning Processes: The Use of a Classical Coaching Tool in Education

Introduction

In the past decades, pedagogical methods that involve students actively working on learning tasks and self-reflection processes have been representing the new teaching-learning model for both schools and universities worldwide. In this context, blended learning means online digital resources combined with face-to-face teaching. This approach induces proactive behaviours in learning rather than an outcome that originates from instruction that defines self-regulated learning (Andrade & Brookhart, 2016, 2020; Lynch & Dembo, 2004; Panadero et al., 2018; Van Laer & Elen, 2017). When blended learning is associated with active methodologies, which considers the students as the protagonists of their learning process, positive effects have been reported for both students and teachers, such as reducing the students' failure rates (Freeman et al., 2014, Talbert & Mor-Avi, 2019). However, student's self-regulation and teachers' technological challenges were already identified. Moreover, practical training support to the teachers is a frequent institutional challenge (Rasheed et al., 2020). Bruggeman et al. (2021) reported crucial teacher attributes for implementing blended learning in Higher Education in their findings. Recent publications have highlighted the effects of blended and video-based coaching approaches on preservice teachers' self-efficacy and perceived competence support (Weber & Greiner, 2019). One of their conclusions was that the implementation of blended learning starts with realising “a better logical need for change”. Also, the authors highlighted that it would be essential if the teacher could connect technologies to learning processes creatively.

Understanding the need for a helpful approach for the knowledge construction process for improving the teaching-learning power, coaching became a robust tool for self-knowledge and self-criticism. It highlights the teacher as a facilitator and the student as an individual with more independence, confidence, creativity, curiosity, and engagement. This tool is a personal or team development approach in which a person called ‘coach’ supports a learner or a group of people in achieving a specific goal (they are usually called coachees). Coaching has proved itself as not being new but not well-explored in Education, as it has been in Psychology and at Sports Science. Coaching Psychology has been increasingly used in the discourse of Education (Wang, Q, 2012). The first use of the term coaching to mean an instructor or trainer arose around 1830 in Oxford University slang for a tutor who carries a student through an exam. The term 'coach' was also used in the UK, since 1500, for conductors of carriages. The first use of the word concerning sports came in 1861, according to the online etymology dictionary. And since the mid-1990s, it was officially linked to the International Coach Federation (ICF) and some other coaching academies and associations (Arnold, 2013).

There has been little research systematically looking at how coaching can make a difference to the knowledge construction process and learning power development impose on postgraduate students. Some authors explored coaching Psychology in inquiry-based learning and the development of learning power in secondary Education (Wang, 2012). In their findings, there was a mention of 'coaching for learning' as a complex process in which teachers and students moved along different modes of coaching relationships. This complexity was noticed after a significant increase in students' independent learning with considerable relationships, confidence, autonomy, and awareness. Increases in critical curiosity, meaning-making, creativity, learning relationships and learning engagement made the authors conclude that coaching for learning differs from life coaching or executive coaching (Wang, 2012; Bengo, 2016).