Ambitious Coaching Core Practices: Borrowing From Teacher Education to Inform Coach Development Pedagogy

Coach development programs have been moving away from knowledge focused, rationalistic pedagogies toward more constructivist, applied approaches that recognize the complex, relational, and contextual nature of coaching and learning to coach. Teacher educators have been doing similar pedagogical work: trying to identify the dynamic elements of what makes an expert teacher and distill those elements into a learner-centered teacher education framework that brings knowledge into action. One such practice-based teacher education framework is ambitious teaching core practices. Core practices are empirically-based moves and social routines that teachers learn to enact adaptively to enhance learning across diverse groups of students. The purpose of this study was to explore the application of ambitious teaching core practices to coach development and take a step toward identifying and defining coaching core practices. Findings from this Delphi panel of expert coaches resulted in 15 ambitious coaching core practices for facilitating athlete performance and well-being including allowing space for athlete exploration, creativity, and problem solving and developing and flexibly executing a practice plan. Applying the concept of core practices to coaching is both a novel way to understand effective coaching and a first step toward a new practice-based coach development framework.