Session 6: Final Approach – Coaching Learners Toward Transformation
Welcome aboard our final flight in the Mockingbird onboarding series. In this session, we land where all great instruction leads: learner transformation.
While many learners come to us with a history of struggle, labels, or disengagement, transformation begins when we stop trying to fix them—and start coaching them.
In this flight, we’ll shift from compliance-based instruction (and relationships) to relational coaching, focusing on how to move learners from learned helplessness to earned empowerment.
In this flight session, we’ll explore:
What learned helplessness looks like in the classroom—and how it hides in plain sight
How empowerment happens through choice, voice, and connection
The basics of motivational interviewing—and how subtle shifts in our language can spark action
Why practitioners who coach, not correct, build momentum learners carry long after the lesson ends
This final session brings together everything we’ve practiced: trust, mindset, attention, engagement—and adds the relational language, cognitive strategies and belief systems needed to support sustainable change.
You’ll leave with a framework for having meaningful conversations that activate motivation and honor autonomy—especially for learners who’ve been told for too long what they can’t do.
As always, your post-flight tools and practice materials will be waiting in Echo after landing.
This flight isn’t about rescuing. It’s about releasing learners into who they’re becoming—with you as their co-pilot