Notes on Coaching

[dearshrewdwit]

Leaving a beautiful comment for you, dear 💙

[EdwardAndress]

I have an innate understanding of the top-level goal and responsibilities at the Academy, forged my own success criteria and then helped others forge theirs, yet with the absence of what the apprenticeships course itself intends to deliver, it's been much harder than I thought here. – I'd love to know more about how this. Can you give an example of how your practice was effected?

[EdwardAndress]

I would say that the top level goal is to become a software developer but that's only the goal for the first 12 weeks – perhaps we need to do a better job of communicating and repeating this message. We lack a compelling goal for the placement.

[EdwardAndress]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts!

[dearshrewdwit]

I would say that the top level goal is to become a software developer but that's only the goal for the first 12 weeks – perhaps we need to do a better job of communicating and repeating this message. We lack a compelling goal for the placement.

If that were the top level goal for the off-the-job-training (the onsite course), how do we measure if learners have achieved it - and how well? At what point will learners know they have reached this goal?

I have an innate understanding of the top-level goal and responsibilities at the Academy, forged my own success criteria and then helped others forge theirs, yet with the absence of what the apprenticeships course itself intends to deliver, it's been much harder than I thought here. – I'd love to know more about how this. Can you give an example of how your practice was effected?

Sure! I have a clear sense of what the normal distribution of achievement looks like for each learning unit at the Academy and what the consequences are for the following learning units, given that they're trying to get their first dev job.

The apprenticeships course - the first week or two I had to re-set the curves (the standard was lower) and I struggled to quickly know what success looked like for learners. I have a vague sense of what's reasonable based on how much time is available to them, and my own sense of what a dev should be able to do, and so I tweaked my delivery.

But the main effect was not being sure what was important and what was not. Time is more limited to ensure the skill dependencies are covered - so I found myself covering the critical ones and tailoring the rest 1:1, betting that would be enough to roll forward with each learner through the course.

Examples of questions that were in my head:

• what does reasonable progress look like? And who is likely to need support?
• How important is it actually to cover all the objectives of TDD? Which ones were more important?
• What are the consequences of only 10% of learners passing my (academy) standard for OOD - consequences for the next unit, and for the next 5 after that?

[EdwardAndress]

If that were the top level goal for the off-the-job-training (the onsite course), how do we measure if learners have achieved it - and how well? At what point will learners know they have reached this goal? – the picture we have is a bit fuzzy, since we don't have the metrics attached to post-course hiring, such as time-to-hire, for example. We can try to compensate for this by gathering feedback from people who work with our apprentices (I am starting to do this). I am very much open to other ideas.

[EdwardAndress]

Thanks for the elaboration above. I have more questions but I think they will take us to a level of detail for which f2f is better