Coaching Research Study Update

My research colleagues at Oxford Brookes University and I have been making great progress on our project to create an instrument that can be used to describe what happens in a coaching session. This project has been funded by the Institute of Coaching at Harvard University.

With the help of a senior group of coaches that met with us in the UK, we created a new version of our list of items to be included in the instrument. Since that meeting, we have continued to revise the list and currently have just over 90 potential items. On November 1, we will meet with a group of senior coaches in New York City to further refine the list. On November 3, we will meet with a group of senior coaches in Toronto, where we will be hosted by Adler International.

In each research focus group, coaches get experience using the most recent version of the instrument to describe a coaching session that has been captured on video. Our goal is to come up with a list that is universal enough to be cover many forms and levels of coaching.

We are hoping to have a way for an even broader group of coaches to be able to provide additional input on the list of items through the internet, after we have completed our focus groups in New York and Toronto. After this, we expect to begin publishing our results. Our hope is that this will become a valuable tool for future coaching research, allowing researchers to explore what is most effective in coaching, how different styles of coaching differ in practice, and how coaching differs from neighboring disciplines.