Development of coaching competencies in students through a project-based cooperative learning approach

First-year chemical engineering students carry out a horizontally integrated design project working in teams. The teams are each led by two fourth-year students, one taking on the role of team leader and the other of knowledge manager so that the project is also vertically integrated. Team leaders facilitate project and team management while knowledge managers facilitate the learning process of first-year students in such a way that both are essentially coaches. Fourth-year students experience alternatively both roles during the two semesters (15 weeks) of the academic year. These new roles require a new set of technical and social skills: Team management, facilitative leadership, and project management skills, which are formally introduced in the fourth-year Project Management course and put into practice in the Project Management in Practice course. The real challenge of the whole approach is ensuring that fourth-year students resist the temptation of reproducing the supervisory role of professors in the classical classroom environment, despite the pressure of achieving project objectives, the inexperience of first-year students who are not used to this approach, and the cultural inertia of the professors involved.