Coaching in secondary and tertiary education: The effects of two interventions on students’ well-being and teachers' stress

Abstract

Michael Bernard (2005) claims that the You Can Do It! (YCDI) Mentoring Program can help children and young people who achieve less than their potential, also referred to as “underachievers”. In particular, he argues that improving self-confidence, persistence, organisation, getting along, and emotional resilience (5Keys) can help underachievers adapt and perform better in school. For a Ph.D. project, the effectiveness of the YCDI! Mentoring Program on social-emotional characteristics and behaviors of secondary school and higher education students was evaluated as the primary goal of the project. Additionally, in the literature, it is also suggested that as students' socio-emotional skills improve, teachers will experience less stress in their relationships with students. For this reason, the study also observed whether the degree of this so-called student-related stress among secondary school teachers decreased after students had worked on the 5Keys through the YCDI! Mentoring Program. Considering the findings, it can be concluded on the one hand that, in secondary education, the YCDI! Mentoring Program helped underachievers in the experimental group, as the mentors observed, to better regulate their emotions and change their behaviors in a positive way. On the other hand, no significant statistical change could be observed in the student-related stress of teachers. With regard to the second experiment on college students, it was observed that the YCDI! Mentoring Program stimulated the students to become more confident, persistent, organized, emotional resilient and get along compared to the students in the control group.