Abstract:

The establishment of the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE), as it is defined in the Bologna Declaration, implies important changes in the organizational, pedagogical and methodological aspects of knowledge transmission. Traditional methods based on teaching must be replaced by new methods based on learning and competences’ development.

The implementation of this new educational model has required, among other adjustments, a significant increase in autonomous work in relation to traditional face-to-face instruction activities. This adjustment provides more time for personal tutoring and mentoring in order to really promote a student-based education paradigm.

The success of the new Higher Education paradigm relies on the development of students' self-learning skill, that is, the ability to motivate themselves, grow their self-confidence, define objectives, search for information and select good references, organize and schedule their work and apply self-assessment to their learning outcomes as well as to the process.

This paper presents a new method for developing the self-learning competence through cooperative learning based on coaching. Coaching is a practice for training people in using their own resources, knowledge and expertise for achieving goals or increasing performance. Self-learning means using self-resources to learn, so coaching is a good approach to develop this competence. Particularly, our proposal is based on the principles, skills and procedures of dialogical coaching, a new model of coaching based on dialogical philosophy.

Keywords:

Self-learning, coaching, tutoring, competence development.