Coaching involves labs in which students are generally practicing and applying previously learned skills or discovering new applications for old ideas. The final mode is Socratic questioning which is done through weekly seminars and range in subject matter through all of the disciplines. In my program I am a mathematics coach. This means that my classes are math labs, often team-taught with the didactic math teacher. The math labs allow us the chance to touch on applications in areas of math that many students never see.
Students often do lab work in cooperative learning groups.
Since our focus is on developing critical thinking skills, labs are designed to be active and engaging. I have had classes work on coming up with a rule for the Four Color Theorem, finding a generalization to figure out how long it would take to solve the Towers of Hanoi, and playing a Fantasy Baseball game. Sometimes labs are interdisciplinary in nature. One such lab focused on buying and selling wheat which helped the students understand the supply and demand concepts from their social studies class while they simultaneously developed their mathematical skill at data analysis, prediction and generalization. The third teaching mode, the seminars, are what give Paideia its distinctive feel.