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Coach Expectations
The most important expectation is to live and act in a way that is consistent with the stewardship that you hold as an adjunct faculty at Brigham Young University. Next, the interactions that you have with people will greatly determine the quality of experience that students have in Capstone.
Interactions with Your Team
You will spend the majority of your time in Capstone working with the individuals on your Capstone team. In the section Getting Started there are some tips and advice about setting things off on the right foot.
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. So it's important that 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.
Your mentoring has many different dimensions - about people and about the project. We have broken this up into four sections that you can examine, which describe major elements of your mentoring:
Students are learning tremendously as they work in Capstone. The growth that they will have during the year is really quite surprising to 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. It should include feedback on both the project work and individual characteristics that help or hinder their work.
You will have the opportunity to grade your team members on their performance. The Individual Contribution Score is one that you can use to help to quantify the performance of individuals.
Interactions with Other Student Teams
Not only will you work with your own team but you will have the opportunity to participate in design reviews for other teams. Because you control so much of the grade for these other teams, your review feedback is important for both their academic and professional growth. Some interesting life perspective on this is found in this commentary about Widening the Plate.
We hope that you review the Design Reviews section to familiarize yourself with these procedures and expectations.
We also hope that you will engage in informal advisement of other teams in your pod and, perhaps, the individuals on those teams. They may want to take advantage of your expertise, especially as they encounter technical problems in their development. Informal mentoring can be a valuable part of their Capstone experience.
Interactions with Sponsors
Your interactions with your sponsor can have a significant influence on the success of your project. Working With Sponsors provides some suggestions for how to get the best results from your sponsor interactions.
How Long Should All this Take?
Please see the Coach Time Expectations page for more details about the expected time requirements and in-person requirements for coaching this year.
