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=====Coaching Expectations=====

Welcome to Capstone!

Brigham Young University’s Capstone course (Me En/EC En 475 & 476) has gained a reputation as one
of the finest student mentoring experiences of its type in the country.
Your role as a Faculty Coach is integral to each student’s educational success
and helps ensure positive outcomes for the students and for the Capstone
course. With your help, we know that this will be a successful year. We are
excited to work with you to help these remarkable students become leaders in
learning a practical design process while focusing on designing a
desirable and transferable product.

We hope that this guide is helpful in outlining your responsibilities and
providing guidelines for your success as a faculty coach. Following this guide, the Coach Reference
lists items alphabetically by topic that we hope provide information
to help you succeed.We look forward to
working with you and hope you will enjoy the Capstone course as much as we do.

If you have any suggestions or ideas for improving the course, don’t hesitate
to let us know. We want the Capstone program to continually improve and we welcome
your feedback.

**//Principles of Capstone Coaching//**

To help you in your role as a Capstone coach, we have identified six
principles of Capstone mentoring. These principles include mentoring in teams, during the product development process, with effective teamwork, in completing the project, individually, and through feedback.

1. __The job of the coach is to mentor the team.__

 As a Capstone coach, your primary job is to mentor the team and the
individuals on the team.  Capstone is not primarily about getting the
project done; it's about helping the students develop traits that
will help them be influential engineers in the future. Therefore, rather than doing the project yourself, you must
guide the students to successful completion, which is often much
harder.  But if you take over, the students don't grow.

 It's also important to understand that the coach role is not a passive
bystander.  You are not a supervisor or an observer of the team.  You
must be an active mentor, helping the students develop the hard and
soft skills needed to excel on the product development project.  You
must figure out how you can best mentor the students to grow both as a
team and as individuals.

2.__Students need mentoring in the product development process.__

Most students have never seen the product development process in either
theory or practice. By sharing your real world experience, you can bring the academic
subject to life for the students.

See [[Mentoring in Product Development]] for specific actions you can take to mentor students in this period.


3. __Students need mentoring in effective teamwork.__

Students have worked on teams, but still need mentoring in how to
make their teamwork more effective.  As an outsider who is intimately
familiar with the team operation, you are uniquely qualified to
provide teamwork mentoring.

[[Mentoring in Teamwork]] discusses materials that may be helpful in providing teamwork mentoring.

 
4. __Students need mentoring in completing the project.__

Students are used to having specific questions that they answer on their homework
and having specific tasks assigned for them to complete in labs.  In contrast,
on their project, they must decide what needs to be done and how it should
be reported.  Therefore, they'll need your help to mentor them to successful project
completion.  

[[Mentoring in Project Completion]] discusses how you might mentor students to help them complete the project.


5. __Students need individual mentoring.__

Students are working hard to develop as individuals and engineers. As such, they have many things with which they struggle.  As their Capstone coach, you are in an ideal place to provide individual mentoring relative to their professional development.

[[Individual Mentoring]] provides some help for this important role.


6. __Students need candid and helpful feedback.__

Students are learning tremendously as they work in Capstone.  The growth
they have during the year surprises most of us, even when
we've seen it over and over.  An important part of helping them to grow is
providing candid and helpful feedback. This feedback should include discussing
both their strengths and areas where they can improve on both the project work and individual characteristics.  

[[Feedback]] discusses your formal and informal role in providing feedback to team members.
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