Focus on your learning

Being a coach or leader is primarily about being an active learner.​ In this course, we’ll lead you through an approach to coaching that takes account of the changing knowledge landscape and gives you practical guidelines for how you might further develop your coaching practice.While many of the examples provided in this course come from the sporting world, the principles apply to many other contexts, including leadership, teaching, coaching juniors, even parenting. We encourage you to translate these principles to your own context.It’s important to realise that in coaching, it’s not about being right or wrong, it’s about picking the actions most appropriate to your current context. Keep this in mind as you navigate the course and particularly as you engage in the tasks.We encourage you to invite a peer, friend or fellow coach to join you in this course. Having someone to talk through the ideas presented here, and to share the plans for actions you intend to take, will help you further develop your coaching practice.When choosing a peer for the purposes of peer coaching, consider what you want from a coach: someone you can trust, and someone who has your well-being and growth at heart (not necessarily someone who knows more than you).We encourage you to share your thoughts with others in the comments, and we look forward to your active engagement in learning about the changing landscape of coaching, and your exploration of how you fit within it.

Your learning outcomes

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Recognise why a different approach to coaching is required
• Identify your own place within the changing landscape
• Experientially navigate the changing landscape.

This course addresses the question: can you become more effective in growing both the people and performance of those you coach?For an overview of all course activities and steps, see the course map.

Meet the team

Your Lead Educator for this course is Paddy Upton, an accomplished international cricket coach who brings a modern approach to coaching.You’ll also be supported in conversations and discussions by mentor
Dr Sharon Pittaway. Sharon is an experienced teacher and has worked closely with Paddy in the development of this course.If you haven’t already, view your team’s profiles and follow them for course updates, feedback and discussions.

Your task

Watch the video to find out more about the topics you’ll explore in Week 1. Take some time to introduce yourself in the comments, tell us why you’re interested in this course and what you hope to learn.When you’re done, select the mark as complete button and move to the next step.