Coaching With DSA Tips

Many of you have opportunities to coach others on best practices in instructional design and development whether coaching is a formal part of your position description or not. Coaching others on topics you have deep knowledge about can be as natural as Bobby Knight tossing a chair across the Gym in a basketball game.

Toby Dresner, Training Manager, CVS CAREMARK in Scottsdale, AZ, writes that he uses the Tips articles to coach others. Toby says,

"Your articles are very useful as I coach my training team on instructional design and learning development."

Indeed, a few years ago a client (IBM) asked me to create coaching tools for their design teams. Here is the formula I used for the program that resulted in 24 coaching lessons for team leaders to use with their instructional design teams. Each module had a team members' guide and a coach’s guide. The element of each module is listed below.

The Team Guide each consisted of:

1. Title – What is this module’s name (an identifier)?
2. A rationale – Why should this particular task be done?
3. Project Team Objective – What is the outcome the team needs to produce?
4. Procedure – How should we proceed to accomplish the task?
5. Examples of the end product – What does a good one look like?
6. Job aids – Is there a quick reference tool we can use to speed the process?

The Coaching Guide

The coaching guide had the same elements as the Team Guide with a little more detail in what to say and do along the way, plus one very important additional element titled “Secrets for Success”.

Secrets for Success – What do people who have “been there and done that” many times know that the less experienced do not know? One user of the process in the early testing of the program remarked that Secrets for Success added wisdom, those things learned from experience.

The tips articles combine many of these–and more–into an article format and often provide examples and tools you can request via email to me or link to directly.

So here is the deal...

To encourage you to give this "Coaching With Tips Idea" a try, here is a link to access all the tips articles. I suggest you use the tips on an as-needed basis providing just-in-time-coaching. If you are working with a team, you might consider the format above that I used for presenting an idea or procedure for my project with IBM.