Best Practices in Coaching

How many meanings can you think of for the word “coach”?

You might have thought of an historic vehicle that was pulled by horses, or you might have thought of an imaginary vehicle pulled by magical mice or helpful dragons.

“Coach” also refers to a basic, no-frills, level of service in train or airline travel.

In a related usage, in British English, “coach” refers to the large vehicle that speakers of American English tend to call a bus. And as a next step, therefore, because British English is in fact perceived as fancier than American English (see Module 7), fancier buses intended for longer trips in the U.S. are often referred to as coaches, or as motor coaches, at least by the bus companies trying to convince us that their buses are fancier than their competitors’ buses.

In another sense, a coach can also be the high-profile leader in charge of planning and publicity for a large athletic team, or the person who teaches and then provides play-by-play instructions to the members of an athletic team, or the person who provides specific individual suggestions and feedback to a single athlete. Because of those usages, “Coach” also serves as a title with the person’s first name or family name (Coach Chris or Coach Wilson) or as a respectful form of address on its own. (Thank you, Coach).

And of course, athletics need not be involved in “coaching” at all! The etymological attributions in the Oxford English Dictionary actually link old-fashioned coaches as horse-drawn physical conveyances to the first use of “coach” to refer to a person, and the meaning had nothing to do with sports. Instead, originally, a coach meant an academic assistant who was hired to metaphorically “carry” a student through an examination, long before the word expanded from the frame of academics to its currently presumptive frame of athletic coaching. In current usage, the athletic connotation has become so pervasive that we add another word to specify any activity other than sports; thus, a reading coach can be a person focused on helping a child learning to read, an instructional coach can be an experienced teacher-administrator whose role is to help all the teachers in a given school or in an entire school district with their curriculum or pedagogies, and an executive coach can be a person whose role is to help a high-level business person navigate the complexities of their position. In all of these examples, by extension from academic support and by extension from athletic instruction, a person focused on giving another person or persons helpful feedback as they learn, practice, or execute almost anything might be referred to as a coach, if that person provides individualized instruction and feedback while the learners are engaged in doing the activity.

So what makes someone an effective coach, or how do we create effective coaching situations?

Interestingly, the results of research about effective team-based and individual coaching overlaps with what is known about adult learning and also departs from the adult learning research in ways that add some other useful ideas. Côté and Gilbert’s (2009) influential attempt to distill a definition of effectiveness for sport coaching, for example, described the relevant issues in terms of three multi-layered categories, as summarized in Box 27.2.

Which of the ideas in Box 27.2 seem similar to the ideas in Box 27.1? Which are different?

As Côté and Gilbert (2009) described, the coach’s expertise serves as the first necessary element of effective coaching. Effective coaches bring expertise about the sport itself (professional expertise); expertise about communicating with other people, including but not limited to the coach’s abilities in teaching the sport (interpersonal expertise); and also expertise about themselves as experts, as teachers, and as reflective learners who are also seeking continual improvement in their abilities as coaches (intrapersonal expertise).

The effectiveness of any sport coaching also depends, of course, on the athlete, in ways that serve as both causes and effects of the coach’s actions. Athletes vary in their “competence, confidence, connection, and character” (Côté & Gilbert, 2009, p. 314), widely known in coaching as “the four Cs.” Effective sport coaching identifies the athlete’s current abilities, and seeks to improve the athlete’s abilities, in all four of these interwoven goals and outcomes.

(The public statements made by well-known, high-level sporting coaches often reflect these four elements almost to the letter. They will comment on the work that the athletes are doing to improve their skills, the need for the athletes to believe in themselves, their team-building efforts or accomplishments, and how hard-working, supportive, and/or competitive the athletes are. Good coaches for children’s teams have the same four emphases: we are learning the skills, we are learning to believe in ourselves, we are learning to be a team, and we are trying to be honest, hard-working, and kind.)

Finally, in sport coaching, the research identifies the important differences between two broadly defined coaching contexts. In sport coaching, the importance of context includes especially the distinction between participation contexts (for children, beginners, or recreational players) and performance contexts (for competitive or professional athletes). An effective coach for beginners is teaching the same sport as an effective coach for elite professionals, but to be effective in either realm the effective coach will organize the practice differently, explain differently, and provide different levels of modeling or explanation. In speech-language pathology, similarly, we introduce new ideas to new clients in certain ways, we explain in different ways to advanced learners, and we distinguish between what we as professionals need to understand and how we will explain different versions of that information to colleagues, clients, or family members. Effective coaches recognize which context they and their athletes represent and provide the supportive, developmental assistance or the challenging, high-level assistance that fits the situation.

Coaching occurs well beyond athletics (or speech-language pathology!), also, as we recognized. In their systematic review of research about effective executive coaching for business, for example, Cidral et al. (2021) identified many of the same predictors of success or of coaching effectiveness that Côté and Gilbert and others have described for sport coaching.

Cidral et al. (2021) summarized the predictors of executive coaching success using only two categories:

• the formality of the process, and

• the emotional connection between the coach and the learner.

Did that short list maybe surprise you? Is it as simple as that?

It is, but notice also that “formality of the process” and “emotional connection” are both very efficient terms that include and require a lot of work.

With respect to process, Cidral et al. described coaching as effective when it involves the pieces that you might recognize as necessary to a good speech-language therapy program. A formal program requires explicit shared development and use of specific goals, organizational strategies, and teaching tactics. It also requires the identification and measurement of performance indicators, as well as iterative change to the process based on those indicators. As we also know from our work as clinical service providers, coaching effectiveness is also influenced by what Cidral et al. called the “emotional connection” and we might call parts of the therapeutic relationship: the coach’s affection and empathy for the learner; the learner’s affection and empathy for the coach; and the coach’s emotional abilities including creativity, communication skills, and self-reflection abilities as a coach.

What can we gain from these multiple views of coaches and coaching, as we think about our efforts to continue to improve as culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathologists?

We are familiar with focusing on ourselves as instructors, clinicians, teachers, or coaches for our clients or students, as my examples in this segment have mentioned. Much of what we do as clinicians can be thought of as “coaching,” in many ways.

More important for us at the moment, though, is actually asking the question the other way around, or focusing on ourselves as the adult learners. We are working on continuing to learn about how culture, language, and identity will affect our practice or should affect our practice.

How can we use what is known about effective coaching to help ourselves as learners, or to help ourselves when we are the people being coached, or to help ourselves be better learners in the realms of client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology?

The Your Turn questions below will allow you to think through some imaginary and more realistic options for yourself, but the short answer is relatively straightforward.

When we phrase it from the direction of the learner, all the information we have, from all the many ways that coaching has been implemented and studied, suggests that adult learners benefit from coaching when they are prepared to accept knowledgeable and individualized suggestions from someone they trust.

Try thinking about what that might mean, for you, as you continue to learn about client-centered, culturally and individually appropriate speech-language pathology.