How Do You Set Targets with a Bereaved Student?

This question was asked by one of the trainee coaches on my accredited programme as we were studying how to apply the GROW coaching model in educational contexts.

It’s a brilliant question as it raises the issue that we so often face in education, how do we best support students who have lost a loved one, especially when we aren’t trained counsellors?  Yet, often it’s educators in front-facing roles who need to have these challenging conversations, in order to encourage a pupil’s progress, but we also feel very aware of the teaching equivalent of the Hippocractic oath ringing in our ears, meaning we’re more focused on doing no harm than how to do good.

It’s a tricky balance but in my experience, this is where coaching skills come into their strength. We coach from a stance of the person being whole and not needing to be fixed, and we are coaching the person and not the problem. This approach helps to meet the student where they are, and by creating a safe space, and then asking open questions, we let them choose the content of the talk, whilst we guide them to taking small steps one at a time.

I know that as a teacher, when you’re aware of a student in your class who has suffered a bereavement, you go out of your way to be sensitive. However, it can become like the elephant in the room, and I recall once changing a heap of questions in the French speaking exam practice, as there were many personal ones that focused on what family members did, and that felt totally inappropriate.

Yet, in both the classroom and on the pastoral side, educators are often asked to encourage pupils to set targets which will inspire and motivate them. This can so often feel like a tick box exercise that to do it effectively takes great skill and care. If we rush the first steps of the GROW model and aim to be at the action steps by the end of the allotted time, we may well have a student who is writing something down mainly to please us and move on, but that has little intrinsic value for them.

So, to answer this insightful question, of how to coach students to set targets when they’ve suffered a bereavement, for me, it comes down to three key points:

1. Creating an informal Coaching Agreement – allowing them to set the parameters of how they would like to be coached
2. Meeting them where they are – if that means just asking open questions with no time pressure to “achieve” a goal, that is fine
3. Inspiring hope.  As the late, great Leonard Cohen said: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

As an addendum, this book was a very helpful resource when I was running a boarding house and we had a student who lost a close family member: The Little Book of Bereavement for Schools (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Little-Bereavement-Schools-Independent-Thinking/dp/1845904648).