Research Review: Exploring the benefits of being a student coach in educational settings: a mixed-method study

by Christian van Nieuwerburgh & Chloe Tong  (2013) Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Practice, and Research, 6, p. 5-24 . Original article is available is available to members of Institute of Coaching Professional Association.

Special thanks to Brodie Gregory, PhD, Founding Fellow of the ICPA, for providing this summary and implications. 

When it comes to the outcomes and benefits of coaching, most people tend to focus on the experience of the coachee. But what about the coach? In their article, “Exploring the benefits of being a student coach in educational settings: A mixed-method study,” Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Chloe Tong examine the impact of coaching and coach training on coaches.

There are two reasons why this article makes a significant contribution to the coaching literature. First, van Nieuwerburgh and Tong take us outside of the business setting in an examination of coaching in a school setting. Additionally, rather than relying on teachers or external professionals, students take on a coaching role with their peers. Second, van Nieuwerburgh and Tong focus on the impact of coaching and coach training on the coach rather than the coachee. Little research has been devoted to exploring the positive outcomes and personal development opportunities afforded to coaches as a result of their training and coaching experience.

Students selected to be peer coaches participated in a 3-day coaching skills training course that drew on behavioral and cognitive behavioral techniques, as we all Whitmore’s (2002) GROW model. Once peer coaches were matched with younger students of similar gender and with similar interests, coaching dyads met approximately once per week for 9 months.

Van Nieuwerburgh and Tong used both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to arrive at a number of important conclusions. Student coaches reported a number of positive outcomes as a result of the coach training and their experience as a coach, including improved communication skills (specifically, learning how to ask good questions and really listen), increased self-confidence, improved skill in perspective-taking, and improved relationships with peers, teachers, and even siblings.

These findings have broad implications for both coaching practice and also for application in school settings. How have your coach training and your experience as a coach positively impacted you? We focus so often on outcomes for the coachee… how can coaching researchers build on van Nieuwerburgh and Tong’s work by further exploring the benefits of coaching and coach training on coaching practitioners?

Resiliency

by Carol Kauffman, PhD, Director of Institute of Coaching

Success isn’t about how far you fall; it’s how high you bounce back. What are the ingredients of resilience? How do we get more? I think the building blocks are: optimism, interest in learning from mistakes, self/other compassion, and developing options when you hit the wall.

There is massive research on resilience. One stream of research that comes from positive psychology, particularly the area of “Hope Therapy and Coaching” is CR Snyder’s research on “hope” that strongly predicted performance in over a hundred studies.  His cognitive model of hope includes two main ingredients:  Will power and Way power.  The first is based on a sense of “agency” that you CAN do something. There are many coaching techniques to support empowerment that we all know. But “Waypower?” (For the science deep dive see: Positive Psychology: Scientific and Practical Explorations of human Strengths, Sage publications 2010 or Google CR Snyder)

Brainstorming is the “O” in the famous GROW model of coaching. Did you know there is a vast body of research that shows that highest, most enduring performers can articulate 6 pathways to a goal?  In science-speak: this variable accounts for a significant percentage of the variance of performance in many, many different situations.

A brand new paper ( March 2013) on resilience, linking psychological and biological perspectives, concludes:  Secure attachment, experiencing positive emotions and having a purpose in life are three important psychological building blocks of resiliences. ( abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23488807

What does this say to me?   Often, what we are trained to do as coaches, even if we haven’t learned the theory, turns out to have solid research evidence.  Why is that good to know? Understanding it not only helps your practice, it can help you market what you offer more effectively.