Judie Gannon ✉ (Oxford Brookes University)

Welcome to this edition of the journal which comprises twelve articles and two book reviews. There is one article covering group supervision, four articles with a mentoring focus and the remaining seven articles focus on coaching, including team and peer coaching. The papers derive from research undertaken by scholars based in the UK, Canada, the USA, the Netherlands, Belgium, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

In this edition we have several articles which explore coaching and mentoring in various sectors, including five papers which are based in educational settings. Fried, Atkins and Irwin’s paper investigates graduate students’ experiences of peer coaching to support resilience and anxiety management, building on their previous 2016 study. While Foster and Hill devote their attention to emerging nurse scholars. Their descriptive, correlational research design of the relationship among career development mentoring, psychosocial role mentoring, mentoring satisfaction and career satisfaction identifies that career development and psychosocial functions support mentee development, satisfying mentoring relationships and boost career satisfaction.

Adopting a rather different research approach Atkins’ paper explores trust-based mentoring within the teaching profession in New Zealand. The mentoring between Specialist Classroom teachers and Provisionally certificated teachers is seen to be based upon trusting, collaborative relationships leading to enhanced professional growth and the ability to draw on a wider inventory of educational choices. Also within the educational setting, Tee, Barr and Van Nieuwerburgh explore, through IPA, the experiences of six undergraduate trained educational coaches prior to their initial placements in secondary schools. The themes which emerge offer a better understanding of how to support educational coaches in their work with young people. The final paper offering insights into coaching and mentoring in educational settings is Jackson’s study of nine women engaged in coaching within the English higher education context. The heuristic study offers valuable insights into the ways coaching can support authentic leadership and behaviour in political and oppressive organisational settings.

Our next two papers offer insights into coaching with two very different groups. First, in her paper on goal focused coaching with female pre-retirees, Fogg highlights the implications for participants wellbeing arising from their coaching relationships. Second, Ahmann and Saviet examine the use of different communication modalities (in person, via telephone, via video conferencing or a blend of approaches) for coaches working with individuals with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). They find that client choice and geographical location shape the communication modalities deployed in these coaching relationships.

Our subsequent two papers focus on mentoring with migrant communities in the European context. First, De Cuyper, Vandermeerschen and Purkayastha provide a conceptual paper which seeks to clarify the variations in the ‘migrant mentoring to work’ literature and indicate key attributes in this area and a refined definition to support other researchers and practitioners. Second, Weiss and Tulin undertake an empirical investigation to explore the use of mentoring in the support of employability and labour market engagement of Arabic-speaking humanitarian migrants in Germany, Greece and Italy. Both papers offer valuable additions to our understanding of the role mentoring can play in supporting migrant and refugee communities.

The final three papers offer fascinating forays into coaching from three different perspectives. In Lawrence’s paper based on qualitative research with supervisors and their group supervisees, the results suggest that supervisees see group supervision as an opportunity to become more aware of the self and the system. There are, however, also interesting discrepancies between supervisor intent and coach/supervisee experiences offering further inducements to research this aspect of coaching supervision practice. In this edition’s penultimate article Folscher-Kingwill and Terblanche explore the effect of coaching on clients’ spoken and internal language using a qualitative phenomenological approach. Their findings indicate that clients’ language changes as a result of coaching and it is suggested that this language change underpins individual change. Finally, Hastings and Pennington examine the methods deployed by external team coaches in the workplace and identify the underpinning intentions of these methods as facilitating the coaching space, raising team self-awareness and supporting accountability and autonomy, further extending our understanding of this aspect of the coaching field.  

Our book reviews in this edition of the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring provide discerning assessments of two interesting additions to the coaching literature. Ciesielska provides a valuable evaluation of publication, Values and Ethics in Coaching by Iordanou, Hawley and Iordanou, in our first review. The second review is completed by Cox and appraises the fascinating volume by Eastman, Coaching for professional development: Using literature to support success.