The Innovative Conservatoire is an international collaboration to stimulate knowledge exchange, innovation and reflective practice in Conservatoires. 

The theme at this conference was mentoring and coaching skills. from the Icon Website: 

"Mentoring-coaching offers a new and rewarding dimension to teaching, mentoring and management roles. It brings additional creativity, energy and focus to the wide range of problems we face every day. It is a craft that is increasingly understood to make a positive difference to how we perform and learn, develop our well-being and resilience, and liberate our resourcefulness. In a time when we are all facing complex, and frequently unpredictable change, mentoring-coaching skills and techniques seem to be particularly important in a conservatoire. They can enable us to take ownership of our development, generate new perspectives, and access our ‘best possible selves’ and those of the people we work with, be these students, colleagues or other professionals around us.

At ICON we have been working with mentoring-coaching techniques for some time. Research at the Guildhall in 2015-16 has also confirmed that engaging with these skills in many cases leads to transformational experiences. People find that it opens up new ways of working and an evolving mindset. These seem to empower students and staff to access the core of their artistic selves as well as the full resources they have as learners.
This seminar offers an intensive mentoring-coaching skills workshop, led by Jane Cook, director of the Guildhall mentoring-coaching programme.

Within this context participants will work on the core mentoring-coaching skills, including how to:
• listen for and illuminate meaning;
• ask questions that prompt new learning;
• how to motivate and encourage new and creative thinking."