The Trouble With the Name: A Unifying Theory of Everything in Coaching
This is a 2.5hr Deep Dive Workshop
Coaching, in many different forms, has been adopted by many schools as a way to improve teaching and learning, pedagogy, well-being, self-efficacy, efficiency, performance, leadership and flourishing. Some very interesting work has also been done on using a coaching approach to effect organisational change.
Yet the experience varies so much that two people are rarely talking about the same thing when the word “coaching” is mentioned. If coaching is to have the sort of beneficial effect that the profession, indeed that humans in society in general, need, some clarification is essential: at present, the confusion caused by labelling many different forms of help or support as the same single word, is already damaging. Worse than this, some very helpful forms of coaching are being serially misrepresented to their significant detriment.
Will coaching go the way of other initially positive interventions and become lethally mutated?
Will it be considered a fad, alongside various recent fads in education, in the years to come?
People will learn to:
- Understand the way things become lethally mutated in education, and to prevent that from happening with coaching
- Understand and articulate the continuum of helping
- Distinguish between the many different types of coaching
- Understand the counter-intuitive power of the non-directive
- Highlight the strengths and the context-specific effectiveness of those different types of coaching
- Clarify when and how each type might help, and in what ways
- Explore when and how the same type of coaching is represented in different ways
- Reconnect all those forms of coaching to their roots
