International Sport Coaching Journal, (Ahead of Print) https://doi.org/10.1123/iscj.2022-0101 © 2023 Human Kinetics, Inc. First Published Online: June 22, 2023
PRACTICAL ADVANCES
Supporting Coaches to Learn Through and From Their Everyday Experiences: A 1:1 Coach Development Workflow for Performance Sport Bob Muir and Julian North Centre for Sport Coaching, Carnegie School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, United Kingdom
This paper overviews an intensive 1:1 coach development workflow developed and used in U.K. performance and highperformance sport. The workflow has been field tested with over 60 coaches in mainly Olympic and Paralympic settings in a variety of sports. The workflow proposes six main stages: “beginning new relationships,” “seeking first to understand,” “preparing for reflective conversations,” “engaging in reflective conversations,” “working with difference,” and “supporting change.” The stages are tailored pragmatically to context, and the workflow does not suggest a fixed sequence. The application of the workflow requires adaptive expertise based on considerable coach development experience and a breadth and depth of coaching and coach development knowledge. The workflow suggests the need for coach developers to build and support trusting, collaborative, and supportive relationships with the coach, as a foundation for the coach development task. Coach development practices and the workflow are continually being developed and refined in a U.K. context, and future work will provide case studies, evidence of outcomes, and refinements to the work. Keywords: experiential learning, scaffolding, coach learning, reflective practice, relational inquiry This paper overviews an intensive 1:1 coach development workflow developed and used extensively by the first author, and to a degree by the second author in a research and development context, in U.K. performance and high-performance sport. The workflow has been developed and utilized in work with over 60 coaches in association football, boxing, cricket, cycling, golf, hockey, kayak slalom, rugby league, rugby union, sailing, swimming, taekwondo, and triathlon over a 12-year period. This includes work with 22 Olympic, three Paralympic, 17 “Podium Potential,” and 23 England national age group coaches. The workflow has been developed through practical and academic engagement, application, and reflection, through consultancy commissioned by the United Kingdom’s lead agencies for highperformance and performance development sport—UK Sport, the English Institute of Sport, Sport Scotland, Sport Northern Ireland, and U.K. governing bodies. The approach is well known among the U.K. coach development community but has not been formally published. The following presents information on the origin and development of the workflow; its theoretical, empirical, and practical justification through the overview of the underpinning principles; and the 1:1 coach development workflow itself.
Origin and Development of the Workflow The first and second authors have been professional colleagues since the mid-to-late 2000s. The first author established the sport coaching degree program at Leeds Beckett University (then Leeds Metropolitan University). The second author was director of Research at UK Coaching (then Sports Coach UK, and also based
Muir https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9890-2317 North (j.north@leedsbeckett.ac.uk) is corresponding author, 0000-0003-0660-1803
https://orcid.org/
in Leeds). Our paths crossed through the development of the UK Coaching Framework (Sports Coach UK, 2008), and the initiation of the UK Centre for Coaching Excellence (now disbanded), where the first author was seconded to UK Coaching. As a result of wider stakeholder engagement that resulted from the UK Centre for Coaching Excellence, the first author was asked to undertake 1:1 coach development work with England Hockey and UK Sport at the turn of decade 2010. This was novel work at the time and based on using audio–video feedback as a stimulus for reflection and the application of two coaching frameworks: “A framework for coach decision making” (Abraham et al., 2010; Muir, Morgan, Abraham, & Morley, 2011) and the “Coaching practice: Planning and reflective framework” (CPPRF; Muir, 2012; Muir, Morgan, & Abraham, 2011; Muir et al., 2015). The original work has been developed considerably through iterative cycles of deployment and reflection across multiple sport coaching contexts (Muir, 2018). The second author, among many tasks associated with his UK Coaching role, was exploring critical realism (Bhaskar, 1978/1998, 1975/2008, 2012) as a means of synthesizing the different disciplinary positions (cognitive, behavioral, strategic/ functional, complexity, social, and normative) used to describe, explain, and prescribe sport coaching, as well as addressing difficulties linking research and practice, to reflect the multilayered, multifaceted, work of coaches. The first and second authors began working together to explore the synergies between their practical and research endeavors in the early 2010s, and a joint presentation on this work was undertaken in 2011 (North et al., 2011) with further work published in 2013 (North, 2013a, 2013b). The critical realist synthesis evolved into an embedded, relational and emergent framework of/for sport coaching practice, which was published as a monograph in 2017 (North, 2017). This practice-based approach was taken on and adapted to shape an embedded, relational and emergent intervention strategy for coach learning and development (Muir, 2018). 1
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