Dr Peter Jackson

The new edition of this indispensable book provides insights into the role of supervision and a fresh perspective on the fundamentals of the discipline. Coaching supervision is now widely recognised as essential to effective coaching and professional development of coaches. This book uncovers current research and explains the established ideas for practice. It also: 

• Contains a comprehensive overview of coaching supervision, from both theoretical underpinnings to practical guidance on different perspectives and approaches

• Allows both students of coaching and experienced coaches to compare approaches and develop their own, unique ways of being supervised

• Supports supervisors in planning their own developmental journey towards a more integrated, evidence-based practice

• Includes leading thinkers from across the field and many emerging authorities

Coaching and Mentoring Supervision is the definitive text for coaching supervisors, supervisees and those working toward qualifications in coaching supervision. It will also be of value both to HR professionals and those participating in mentoring programmes.

This is your student guide to research in the field of coaching. It answers your questions about doing research and explores the challenges and opportunities presented by different ways of doing research specifically in coaching. An ideal introduction for trainees and practitioners looking to understand the what, the why, and the how of coaching research. 

Postgraduate and research students in applied social disciplines are often required to examine and explain their epistemological and ontological positions underpinning their research strategy.  As a tutor, I have found myself working with students who have produced a whole range of responses to this requirement in the methodology chapter of dissertations and theses.  Some of these responses are excellent, some are cursory, some are enquiring and some are conventional.  There is a lot to think about in creating your own research outputs for the first time and many students find it easier to deal with the more concrete problems such as data collection and analysis.  Generally, people find it hard to discuss ontology and epistemology and hard to make them relevant to their research process.

This chapter explores both value of such discussions and also seeks to make the task of discussing methodology at the theoretical level both easier and more productive.

In order to do this I intend to

• Highlight the role of theoretical thinking in the construction of research

• Clarify various uses of key terms such as ontology, epistemology and paradigm, and how these are described in the research methods literature
• Present a brief recent history of the use of these concepts in research, including some points where there is disagreement between different perspectives
• Identify some debates and anomalies that confound attempts to describe theoretical foundations effectively

The sections that follow are presented in this order.

In this chapter I make only brief mention of the meaning of different philosophical stances, doing so where it is necessary in order to progress the argument.  General methodology texts such as those cited in this chapter, amply provide more specific guidance and, in turn, refer to more specialised texts that provide comprehensive treatment of the theories concerned.

In this chapter we outline an approach to developing practice in coaching and supervision aimed at achieving a practice that is congruent with the self of the practitioner. The PPP framework is inspired by an original idea of David Lane’s (Lane, 2006), but has been developed further to reflect our particular philosophy of professional development. In the introductory sections that follow, we outline what the PPP framework is, and describe the educational philosophy and logic that sits behind it. In the central section of the chapter, we expand on the three elements of the framework: philosophy, purpose and process. We reflect on the hurdles practitioners experience in developing their practice model using the framework and report first-hand experiences of those who have used it in our supervisor professional development programmes. Finally, recommendations are given for further reading and reflection.

This paper seeks to explore with the research community the experience of finding an appropriate research paradigm; in this case the most effective approach to investigate a complex practice situation such as coaching practice. The discussion is based around a metaphoric narrative of the researcher as allegorical traveller. This narrative was initially produced in an attempt to explain the author’s own epistemological stance, but has since been used with colleagues to explore possible research paradigms and to discuss how researchers come to develop their own stance. In the case in point, it facilitates thinking around multiparadigm enquiry (Lewis & Kelemen, 2002) and complex realist case-based approaches (Byrne, 2009; Harvey, 2009). The use of narrative itself is presented as evidence of researchers’ willingness to engage with epistemological stratification (Harvey, 2009; Lewis & Kelemen, 2002).