International Coaching Psychology Review

The coaching space, too often undervalued in education, is an effective space for allowing students to enhance cognitive capacity; an opportunity to pause, to think and to perceive clearly. This brief article, drawn from the author’s solution-focused coaching practice in an A Level Further Education context, attests to the efficacy of applying Coaching Psychology in conversations with older teenagers on their educational journey. Insights from the Covid 19 Lockdown are applied to illuminate the potential value of Coaching Psychology interventions for students in the post-pandemic context.

This short article presents an overview of coaching psychology in education with a focus on the educational value of coaching psychology practice. The article calls for actions to institutionalise coaching psychology education, to acknowledge the value of coaching psychology knowledge for learning and development, and to celebrate the positive influence of coaching psychology intervention for enhancing performance, as well as promoting health and well-being. The discussion is framed by three key questions to generate further interests in coaching psychology in an educational context.

Research into supporting children with speech, language and communication needs (SLCN) has primarily focused on risk factors and deficit-based interventions. Studies are beginning to highlight the importance of protective factors that mitigate risks of SLCN, including supportive school environments that foster resilience. Teacher efficacy is an important consideration in fostering supportive environments for children. The aim of this exploratory study was to investigate the impact of short-term solution focused group SLCN coaching on teacher efficacy. The research employed a quasi-experimental pre-test-post-test control group design. Sixty-two primary school teachers participated in the study, of which 37 attended a two-sessional solution focused coaching intervention and a non-equivalent control group consisted of 25 teachers. Measures of teacher efficacy were obtained pre- and post-intervention. The paired sample t-test results demonstrated an increase in student engagement in the intervention group compared to the control group, but not for overall efficacy score and instructional strategies/classroom management. No statistically significant differences were found in the control group. Coaching teachers to identify strengths, resources and what’s already working for children with SLCN fosters a more holistic, resilience-oriented focus and facilitates student engagement.

While literature on coaching has grown exponentially in the past two decades, there have been only a handful of articles that discuss coach education and few have discussed what constitutes good pedagogy. In this conceptual article based upon observations from the field and our own ongoing action research, we review those discussions and offer a pragmatic, scholar-practitioner approach to coach education that supports the five intentions of coach education (Bachkirova et al., 2017). We offer Ostrowski’s The Four Provinces model (2022) – which includes the coaching context, relationship, process, and self – as a navigational map for coaching students as they begin their journey to becoming a coach. Because it is agnostic of any specific knowledge areas, the model affords coach educators the flexibility to emphasise their preferred coaching knowledge areas (such as systems theory, humanistic psychology, adult learning theory, and developmental psychology), while providing structure to their curriculum development. We also share early feedback resulting from the implementation of the Four Provinces within a credit-earning graduate-level concentration in Leadership Coaching and explore implications for future research and practice.

Educational coaching can positively influence student learning in various ways. This study focuses on specific teachers’ classroom-coaching behaviours (TCCBs) and explores their influence on student learning from a cross-cultural perspective. The study was conducted based on two samples of undergraduate students from China (N = 288) and the United States of America (N = 325). The results show that although TCCBs positively influenced students’ learning variables in both samples, significant cultural differences in TCCB existed as perceived by Chinese and American students. Furthermore, TCCBs had stronger positive impacts on the American students’ deep learning and academic buoyancy than on the Chinese students. The study attempts to explain cross-cultural differences in the impact of classroom coaching on student learning and offers practical recommendations for classroom coaching.