Where philosophy meets culture: exploring how coaches conceptualise their roles
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Although conceptually attractive, coaching in medicine remains ill-defined, with little examination of the transferability of coaching principles from other fields. Here we explore how coaching is enacted both within and outside of medicine; we aim to understand both the elements required for coaching to be useful and the factors that may influence its translation to the medical education context. METHODS: In this constructivist grounded theory study, we interviewed 24 individuals across three groups: physicians who consider themselves coaches in clinical learning settings (n = 8), physicians with experience as sports, arts or business coaches (n = 10), and sports coaches without medical backgrounds (n = 6). Data collection and analysis were conducted iteratively using constant comparison to identify themes and explore their relationships. RESULTS: We identified a shared philosophy of coaching, comprising three core elements that our participants endorsed regardless of the coaching context: (i) mutual engagement, with a shared orientation towards growth and development; (ii) ongoing reflection involving both learners and coaches, and (iii) an embrace of failure as a catalyst for learning. Enacting these features appeared to be influenced by culture, which affected how coaching was defined and developed, how the coaching role was positioned within the learning context, and how comfortably vulnerability could be expressed. Participants struggled to clearly define the coaching role in medicine, instead acknowledging that the lines between educational roles were often blurred. Further, the embrace of failure appeared challenging in medicine, where showing vulnerability was perceived as difficult for both learners and teachers. CONCLUSIONS: Medical education's embrace of coaching should be informed by an understanding of both coach and learner behaviours that need to be encouraged and trained, and the cultural and organisational supports that are required to foster success.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.023 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".