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Young People & Education Pod

Using coaching to work with young people to help them address the climate challenge

A vital part of responding to the climate emergency is ensuring that education institutions respond to the challenge and enable children and young people to develop the skills, knowledge and attitudes that they need to play their part in working towards a sustainable future. We think that coaching can play an important role in facilitating this process.

In a survey of over 500, 000 young people aged 4-17 in England “When children were asked what they were most worried about, the environment was an overwhelming priority” (2021).

We believe we need to bring young people into the room and are finding that coaching can help create a safe listening space and has potential as a process to help empower them.

“If we don’t fix climate change, we won’t have a future”
12 –year-old

“The effects of it may be irreversible, and it is very daunting for young people to have the responsibility of dealing with its effects”
15-year-old

Emerging Themes

Some emerging themes that The Young People and Education Pod has explored:

  • Scale of issue/ awareness – How do we approach this with young people/ deal with misconceptions/ enable them to access the information? 
  • Vision – How do we use the coaching approach to enable young people to develop their vision?
  • Connecting to the emotions to enable action – How do we help young people connect with and work with their emotions?
  • Importance of local environment – How do we help young people balance global v local, collaboration v individual, through the coaching approach?
  • Lack of action of adults – How do we recognise power inequalities and empowerment through the coaching approach?
  • As educators we also need to recognise boundaries of what we can and can’t do (schools’ role, curriculum and budget constraints, involving parents)

Communication

The Young People and Education Pod meets online on the Third Monday of each month, alternating between a morning and evening tisession.

To find out more or to join us, please contact get in touch: education@climatecoachingalliance.org

Initiatives

Some initiatives we’ve been involved with:

  • Creating a guidebook/toolkit for educators using a coaching approach with young people to help empower them to tackle the climate challenge
  • Connecting with young people through videos conversations to see how their learning/ thinking develops
  • Peer coaching with each other
  • Hosting sessions by members on different topics affecting young people

Actions

How we want to take action:

  • Raise our own awareness of the wider system and issues
  • Self-care to overcome overwhelment or obsessiveness
  • Discover what others are doing in education to combat climate change
  • Facilitate spaces for collaborative conversations
  • Create communities and support groups to share and honour feelings
  • Become more skilled in understanding and working with psychological responses to climate change
  • Become more skilled in working with clients who are not informed/interested/ or resistant
  • Become more comfortable with the aspect of ‘not knowing’

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