Teachable Moments: For Colleges, the Future of Coaching is Now

Around the country, university faculty are wrapping up the syllabus for January.

We may be selecting each week’s readings and wondering just how to have students do the assignments. But ironically, a fixed syllabus of readings and assignments for open-ended project-based learning courses may prevent us from capitalizing on “teachable moments.”

In the learning sciences, teachable moments go by many names: impasse-driven learning, preparation of future learning, desirable difficulties, or productive failure. In each case, the teachable moment occurs when the student realizes that his or her knowledge and skills are insufficient to achieve a desired goal.

But in project-based learning courses where students tackle open-ended problems, teachable moments do not occur on schedule. Plotting a fixed schedule of assignments and readings far in advance risks giving the right information at the wrong time. With good intentions, we may plan teachable moments right out of the course.

For teaching open-ended problem-solving, we must instead rely on coaching. Rather than use the instructor’s time to deliver content that is easily provided online, coaches spend their time meeting with teams to help them analyze obstacles, plan next steps, and find resources to help them make progress.

In coaching, rather than try to teach a certain idea to all students at same time before they need it, the coach waits until students are stuck on a problem and require new knowledge. When new information is provided at that teachable moment, it’s more likely to stick.

To be sure, recognizing teachable moments faces several challenges. Our research on coaching in Design for America Northwestern’s Summer Studio shows that students often don’t describe problems to their coaches, either because they have trouble recognizing the problem they face, they are embarrassed to admit what feels like failure, or they incorrectly believe that the coach can’t help.