This chapter looks at current and emerging trends in coaching and also explores what near-term incremental improvements, innovations, and new developments to coaching models and strategies are on the horizon. The chapter also looks at how institutions can realign and innovate with positions and supports within their organizational structures that can help to support and optimize coaching performance and institutional retention rates. Chapter 7 also investigates a few new student success tools and technology options that offer promising strategies or approaches to improved retention through coaching. The chapter also explores some future research directions that should be explored in order to further develop the scholarship and academic literature in the area of retention and student success coaching.
TopIntroduction
This Chapter looks at current and emerging trends in coaching and also explores what near term incremental improvements innovations and new developments to coaching models are on the horizon. The Chapter also looks at how institutions can realign and innovate with positions and supports within the organizational structure that can help to support and optimize coaching performance. Chapter Seven also investigates a few new student success tools and technology options that offer promising strategies or approaches to improved retention through coaching. The chapter also explores some future research directions that should be explored in order to further develop the scholarship and academic literature in the area of retention and student success coaching.
In developing this chapter, the author interviewed experts in the fields of coaching, retention, enrollment management, non-cognitive assessment and educational processes consulting. The chapter brings together the thinking of these experts with the experiences of the author, seminal studies and the academic literature. The goal of the chapter is not to try to predict the future or even the future direction of the current trends discussed. Rather, the goal of the Chapter is to provide thoughtful discussion around meaningful and current coaching issues and topics and to give some direction on how institutions might work with or evaluate these new and evolving topics as they explore coaching options and directions within their own organizations and institutions.
Catching Up
A lot of the changes, innovations and advances over the next several years will be catching up to good practices, assessment tools and retention models that we know about but have not yet integrated into coaching models or institutional retention processes. Predictors of retention and student success will need to be intentionally and systematically integrated into the discussion of student learning and vise-versa and then meaningful assessment and improvement initiatives will need to take place in order to optimize the changes. Institutions will need to become open and explicit about their processes and systems for tracking retention and student success as we move toward the second decade of the 21st century. Institutions and organizations working in the areas of coaching, retention and student success will need to understand how to use predictive modeling and optimization algorithms (Vasant, Alparslan-Gok, & Weber, 2018) to target where coaching and support resources can be used most efficiently and to understand where they can be most effectively deployed to maximize retention impact.
One good example of this type of advance is the use of non-cognitive assessment as a key driver of predictive modeling to determine which students are most likely to be retained and to determine the likelihood of persistence of applicants and or first term students (Markle & Rinkoon, 2018; Nemeth, 2018). We know that disciplined and systematic work in this area is a key retention driver and highly impactful for early stage student intervention (Black, 2016) but institutions and coaching processes have not caught up with this advance or they have not yet built these types of emerging tools into their established coaching processes. Once coaching organizations and institutions with coaching departments begin to integrate these new innovations, approaches and tools it will still take several more years before the new tools can be optimized for coaching and retention impact. The process of change, innovation and refinement of adaptations is slow and meaningful change takes a long time to optimize and to be properly understood (Rueda, 2011) at most American post-secondary institutions.