Coaching in Education: Getting Better Results for Students, Educators, and Parents

We are most familiar with coaching in an athletic context, where an individual teaches, motivates, and leads a team or individual athlete to maximize their performance.The idea of coaching in organizations has recently gained popularity as a way to improve individual performance.Coaching in this context is embedded within professional development and training initiatives in organizations, including schools, colleges, and universities.Coaching as a development approach is based in humanistic psychology and a learner-centred focus to teaching and learning.Although more specific, it fits the ideas about performance and achievement proposed in the literature on learning organization, learning communities, and self-directed learning.These ideas suggest building a learning culture where learners take an active role in their own development and teachers play a more supporting, facilitating, and coaching role.Coaching in Education examines the idea of coaching in educational settings at the primary, secondary, and postsecondary level.It looks at coaching both in a general sense, as it applies in educational organizations, and specifically in terms of various audiences, students, teachers, and parents.Additionally, some chapters speak specifically to coaching applications to develop mental toughness and positive education programs.The chapter authors use both empirical and experiential bases to support the case that coaching can be an effective approach for performance improvement.In addition to short case studies included in many of the chapters, the book closes with four detailed case studies, including a final chapter on coaching in higher education.Van Nieuwerburgh's edited volume provides a range of insights into how coaching has been applied in education that should be useful to those working in adult and continuing education.Reviewing the volume more selectively within this context, five chapters appear to apply more directly.The book opens with a very good overview of coaching in education that defines coaching, differentiates it from mentoring, and provides a useful list of references of the supporting literature.The second chapter is also relevant to adult and continuing educators by addressing how coaching supports leadership development and performance.In particular, the chapter outlines the skills of effective leadership and provides a model for leadership development.Chapter S ix describes a research-based instructional coaching process that proposes to improve teaching.Key to the coaching process are considering individual principles, learning