What is coaching?

Akademisk Coaching provides fast solutions to acute problems of struggling students and researchers. Contact us if you are stuck with writing up your thesis, your presentation or your research proposal or if you experience learning difficulties. We assist in studying for exams. We also work with gymnasium students.

We guide your academic achievement and competency development and we strengthen your organisation skills. These are big words. But these abilities will undoubtedly benefit you in life and throughout your careers. Coaching produces better results than traditional teacher-student processes of knowledge and skills transfer, such as mentoring and remedial teaching.

Writing is a problem for many students. Difficulties are almost always due to the lack of a clear, realistic and concise plan. Without a plan, there is no conceptual or linguistic clarity. Organisation is the most important factor of all writing. It is essential to never lose sight of the point that is being made. If this is unclear, students will go off in all directions. Over time, this leads to exhaustion, frustration, cognitive overload and demotivation. All of these factors increase the risk of failure and dropout. Each year, more than 100.000 students in Sweden fail to graduate on time. This should not happen, as effective strategies exist to help them succeed.

We offer a facilitative environment in which we identify challenges and strategies together. Joint goal setting leads to much better goal attainment than authoritative prescriptiveness. Coaching is a developmental process. It’s good to talk and it raises your self-confidence and self-esteem. Confidence, in turn, nurtures achievement. Your final result should look cool, well-thought out, well-written and it should be relevant.

Our services

Planning and finishing your thesis

We offer three types of services:

• Thesis planning and development: We help you to create a general outline, work on thesis formulation, the hypotheses and empirical methodology. We discuss the essential literature, assist with the organisation in chapters, the formulation of the general conclusions and with proper referencing.

• Thesis evaluation: We examine the overall quality, merit and relevance of your work and the logical consistency and the value of your argumentation. You will get comments like  “explain to me, why is this part necessary?”, “I understand what you mean now, but is this sufficiently clear to the reader?”, “are you sure this is right?”, “you could put this discussion somewhere else”, “expand on this a bit!”, and so on.

• Thesis editing: We correct grammatical mistakes and typos and suggest better formulations. We help you in polishing up the text so that you are able to submit the best thesis possible.

We do not write for you. We help you in becoming better in composing scientific texts. Contributing copy to a thesis is not only illegal, it is also fundamentally dishonest. It is also counterproductive. You have to do your own work. Do it well and be creative, so that you can be deservedly proud of it.

Writing up a research proposal

Submitting a proposal can be the chance of a lifetime, but writing up an excellent research proposal is extremely difficult. We read through your proposal, provide feed-back and assist in writing up new versions. Find yourself an experienced outsider who is capable of evaluating your proposal on logical consistency, creativity, boldness, conciseness, scientific merit, promise and originality.

Preparing presentations

A good presentation might make a world of difference. We assist with its preparation. We can plan the presentation together or we comment on your text. You can present your presentation to us first. We won’t let you go before you do it right.

Studying for exams

Studying for an exam can be demanding at every level. Several pitfalls exist. Students can be unsure about what is expected of them. They might find it impossible to assimilate so much information. Stress makes learning processes harder. If you study for an exam and you feel you don’t advance, you need support. It is a matter of using some straightforward, efficient, strategies.

Services for gymnasium students

We offer assistance to gymnasium students. We help you to improve your study skills, time management, organisational skills and writing competence. We assist you with preparing for tests and overcome test anxiety. Many students, even at a young age, suffer from severe stress. This has to be addressed.

Consulting for educational institutions and administrations

Coaching for your students

During the last two decades, Swedish schools have slipped from being one of the world’s best in international ratings to one of the most mediocre. Sweden has now one of the highest dropout rates in Europe. Socioeconomic status is a major predictor of educational achievement. That does not mean that no effective academic interventions can be identified. The results of a recent meta-analysis indicate that it is possible to substantially improve educational achievement for target groups. Tutoring, feedback, progress monitoring and cooperative learning have effect sizes that are educationally important, statistically significant and robust. Coaching and personal feedback methods are increasingly used in industry or in individualised education. Students who are randomly assigned to a coach are much more likely to persist and complete their degree. Coaching proves more effective at increasing graduation rates than any other strategies, such as increasing financial aid, which is much more costly to implement.

Institutions are trying hard to increase retention and decrease dropout. It is essential to identify struggling students at an early stage. Students who don’t show up or don’t hand in assignments on time might be in acute need of help. The ability to recognise these signs and the willingness to offer assistance signal to students that they are important. Providing students with the opportunity to meet up with a coach provides them with the opportunity to communicate their problems and develop effective strategies. It makes a world of difference. Motivation leads to achievement which increases resilience and optimises learning.

Instructional coaching for academics

There is a high need for instructional coaching in higher education. Lecturers and professors enter their professions with little formal training in how to teach. Rather incredibly, teaching at university level remains one of the very few vocations that requires neither formal training nor standard processes for evaluation and thesis supervision (see Gormally, Evans and Brickman, 2017). Many lecturers remain unaware of new pedagogical techniques and their effective use.

Our strategy of micro-teaching workshops is based on the most recent literature on evidence-based teaching, feedback procedures and coaching practice. The workshops are designed to combine the critical components of in-depth knowledge, open communication, micro-teaching, peer review feedback and follow up. Instructional coaching is not an assessment or a formal evaluation. It is a support to optimise teaching effectiveness. Our understanding and practice of competent, professional, teaching must continually evolve so that it accurately reflects new insights. It has to optimally respond to the new contexts in which learning and teaching are being delivered.

It is impossible to improve teaching performance without feedback. Models of coaching, rather than student evaluation or peer observation and review, effectively encourage the adoption and use of evidence-based teaching strategies. Academics need exposure to these teaching practices at workshops, feedback from experts and peers and they need training and additional support throughout the implementation process.

The micro-teaching workshop is a highly specific intervention that has been developed by Akademisk Coaching.

Workshops refer to group meetings of six to ten lecturers and professors and one coach. The workshop starts with a question and answer session. This increases buy-in for the process. It leads to a two-way conversation, elevating the process from problem formulation and evaluation to communicative coaching and effective learning. In the micro-teaching part, lectures present a recording of their teaching practice. The presentation is meant to generate comments, remarks, insights, suggestions and tips from peers and the coach. Strengths and weaknesses are being identified. Corrections are being suggested.

The role of the coach consists of many things: she more or less guides the discussion, brings up new topics, makes suggestions and informs about recent insights. She will ask the lecturer to do her or his mini-lecture or part of it over if this is considered helpful. Teaching is a craft. Knowing how to teach is insufficient. Doing it right takes practice. The combination of peer and expert review is currently the best evidence-based model available to improve teaching performance.

The process is being followed-up in two more workshops. This is not a luxury. Concrete change based on peer and expert review needs to be analysed, re-adjusted and fine-tuned. We need to make sure that changes occur, that they are being understood, that they are being implemented correctly and that they become standard practice.

Micro-teaching workshops are also available for gymnasium teachers. The outline of the process is identical.

Please read about instructional coaching in more detail here.

Please read more about our  Services and Prices.