A call for clarity and pragmatism in coach education

Abstract

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.