Led by Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture and Researcher Development and Co-Director of the Lab for Academic Culture, University of Glasgow @kayguccione.bsky.social
This post is based on a recent webinar for the Coaching in Higher Education Network which asked me to discuss how coaching in universities can be situated within educational practice.
Coaching and mentoring: learning processes
My work focuses on the learning that happens within doctorates, for supervisors and research team leaders, for research professional staff, and within research communities. My profession is broadly labelled ‘Researcher Development’. It could be seen as a sister profession to Educational Development but has some subtle differences in how it’s positioned and toned.
To single out one specific difference from my experience, it is notable that the development of doctoral researchers and university staff is often positioned as being something separate from ‘educational’ practice. For these groups, the words we use to describe their ongoing learning at and through their work leans more toward the language of ‘careers’, ‘professional skills’ or ‘practices’, ‘leadership’, ‘training’, ‘compliance’, or ‘performance’. In the midst of creating comprehensive multi-strand development programmes, we can forget to centre those being developed as ‘learners’.
Coaching and mentoring are increasingly key components of such a multi-strand approach to development of the academic and research professional workforce. But when we say ‘coaching’ and ‘mentoring’, what are we talking about pedagogically? In brief, we are describing two people learning together through dialogue, in a style that draws on the Humanistic principles of ‘person-centred’ approaches. This means working with the whole person, supporting reflection and sensemaking, and trusting our interlocutors to make the choices for themselves, that best fit their development needs and interests (after Rogers, 1959). What this looks like in practice, is a learning conversation.
For clarity, I define the two sister-practices of coaching and mentoring according to Guccione and Hutchinson (2021) as:
- Coaching: a designed, non-directive learning conversation
- Mentoring: A coaching conversation (larger part) plus some experience-based contextualisation, advice or guidance (smaller part).
In the rest of this post, I’d like to share with you three ways that ‘designed learning conversations’ (whether we position them as them straight coaching or nestle them in as part of mentoring partnerships) can be embedded within educational practice. I use learning experiences occurring within doctoral programmes as the framing for my examples, but it won’t take a great deal of imagination for you to apply these to your own learners, and contexts.
Accessing the hidden curriculum
The value of a doctorate is understood as being more than its resulting academic credential; it, when seen as a process of development, is a personal opportunity for testing and learning about the self, and for acquiring a wide range of personal and professional experiences and social contacts (Bryan and Guccione, 2018). What each person deems ‘of value’ will be unique. Doctoral researchers have diverse past and ongoing lives, different personal and professional motivations for embarking on their doctoral journey, and a range of aspirations for their careers during and post-doctorate completion. Consideration of the doctoral candidate as a whole person existing within a working culture and personal and societal context helps us to see the differing needs of candidates within doctoral cohorts and to focus on the idea of creating a person-centred study experience, a personalised approach, rather than a uniform one (Guccione, 2025). Personalisation through different formal learning opportunities, is enhanced through a curated web of supportive relationships and networks that create rich opportunities for developmental conversations. These can help doctoral researchers to make sense of disorientating learning experiences and to navigate the academic workplace. To enable this rich culture of learning, the formal doctoral learning curriculum and traditional academic relationships can be supplemented with informal, often hidden, sources of learning and support, leveraging the doctorate’s hidden curriculum (Elliot et al, 2020) and helping students to process and make sense of experiential learning.
Completing experiential learning through conversation
Applying the idea of ‘learning through dialogue’ to this personal, messy and predominantly experiential mode of learning, we can immediately spot an excellent candidate for a theory of learning that a quality coaching conversation can support. Kolb’s (1984) Cycle of Experiential Learning offers the idea that learning is derived from our own experience, when it is appropriately reviewed, analysed and evaluated systematically. A busy doctoral researcher, rapidly accumulating new experiences, and with pressure to move at pace can find that without prompts to do so, they are not really reflecting on or analysing their experiences before dashing on to the next thing. A coach or mentor (in the form of supervisor, peer, researcher developer, etc) can support learning, by seeing their role as being one that supports the learning cycle to be completed in depth and detail. They place themselves in a position to help their coachee to describe their experience reflectively and to probe for deeper detail as they evaluate what it means for them. A coaching conversation can apply incisive questions about what next and why. It can support a plan for next steps to be realistic and chunked down into manageable actions. It can provide the encouragement to go and try it out, and the accountability for action to be taken as soon as possible.
Transformative learning requires sense-making conversations
If self-awareness, self-evaluation, and prioritising what is relevant and required to move through the doctorate can be supported through opportunities to engage in coaching that provide critical reflective discourse, coaching can hence be situated within the theory of Transformative Learning (Mezirow, 1991). Transformative Learning Theory focuses on the idea that learners have the capacity to adjust their ingrained thinking patterns and ways of ascribing meaning to new events, based on the critical evaluation and reflective sense-making of those events. The theory states that Transformative Learning is initiated as a ‘Disorienting Dilemma’ (often an emotionally provoking process). Many of us will recognise this as being a prominent and recognisable phenomenon in the doctorate, as old ways of approaching learning and generating academic success prove to be ineffective within the doctorate’s more open, unchartered and individualised learning framework, with high level of tacit, unspoken or hidden curriculum (Elliot, 2021). Understanding our own entrenched perspectives and habits (e.g. those picked up through prior study experiences) and unpicking these to weave in new ideas and perspectives (when we find those old ways are no longer working for us), is key for anyone on a sharp learning curve, with limited time to completion. Following Mezirow’s model, a coaching conversation (or many, with a number of different interlocutors) can help to resolve a Disorienting Dilemma through its pre-disposition to encouraging self-examination and critical assessment of prior assumptions before supporting the trying out of new ways of being and doing. Self-critique can be scaffolded through conversations with an empathetic ally (peer, developer, or supervisor) with shared experiences, and who affords the learner time and space to unpack both emotional and cognitive disorientation.
Patterns, boundaries and organisational learning
Whilst through the above examples, coaching conversations sound universally useful and ubiquitously applicable, coaching conversations have limits. We cannot coach away power differentials, or structural inequalities. We can’t coach one person to make another person act more fairly or responsibly towards them. We can’t coach higher funding success rates or more favourable peer reviews. And we can’t expect every coaching conversation to produce a transformative experience. There are boundaries to what coaching can achieve, and to what is a reasonable request of a coaching conversation. For example, in a PGR peer-mentoring programme, Guccione and Blackmore (2022) found that third-year PGRs could support first-year PGRs to access the hidden curriculum, make sense of emotionally charged experiences, provide allyship, navigate role expectations and try out new things. They could not support those same PGRs to overcome persistent issues of supervision related to the supervisor’s lack of people skills, neglect, poor ability to give feedback, or inclination to use bullying behaviours. Similarly, within a Thesis Mentoring programme (Guccione, 2021)postdoctoral research staff were able to support PGRs to develop good writing habits, to plan and track progress, and to reduce stress. They could not however enable PGRs to resolve persistent issues of supervision, as described above.
It’s important to note though, that where coaching conversations persistently can’t support certain educational outcomes, coaching can instead become a methodology for organisational learning – asking us to consider not ‘did we get the programme right?’ but ‘is this programme the right way to support the issues doctoral researchers face?’ (Argyris and Schön, 1974). In such cases we can utilise the collective intelligence arising from many coaching conversations and partnerships to facilitate strategic change. From the above data, for example, I developed an evidence-informed supervisor development programme, teaching supervisors to use coaching skills as a means of interrogating their power, relational position and pedagogical approaches, as well as being a means to support their doctoral scholars. Additionally, the great volume of positive feedback documenting the high value of postdoctoral research staff to doctoral education was used to create a case, to UK Council for Graduate Education for a new Recognised ‘Associate Supervisor’ Award.
Taking all this together, we can see that a coach acts as an empathetic ally who facilitates movement through the stages of learning, supporting personal transformation. I hope that for those of you now thinking about coaching practice less as a business tool, and more as a distinct set of pedagogical practices that enable dialogic learning, this opens up new ideas about how to deploy structured and well-designed coaching conversations for your learners. Let me know how you get on!
You can join the UK’s Coaching in Higher Education Network here, and you can access my recent webinar related to coaching as an educational practice here.
References
Argyris, C. and Schön, D. (1974) Theory in Practice. Increasing professional effectiveness, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Elliot, D. L., Bengsten, S. S. E., Guccione, K., & Kobayashi, S. (2020). The hidden curriculum in doctoral education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Guccione, K.(2025) A whole culture approach to doctoral education. In: Creaton, J., and Gower, O. (eds.) Prioritising the Mental Health and Wellbeing of Doctoral Researchers: Promoting Healthy Research Cultures Routledge: Abingdon-on-Thames
Guccione, K. (2021) Thesis Supervision: the educational value of postdocs in supporting research writing. Presentation for UCL Institute of Education Doctoral education and its purposes: research training for a changing world. Access online: https://youtu.be/kd9rKmZuluw
Guccione, K., and Blackmore, C. (2022) Stabilising transitions to doctoral study: Finding the reasonable boundaries of peer mentoring. Presentation for Student Mental Health Research Network. Access online: https://youtu.be/hTC_f3qZH_4
Guccione, K., and Hutchinson, S. (2021) Coaching and mentoring for academic development. Series: Surviving and Thriving in Academia. Emerald Publishing Limited.
Bryan, B., and Guccione, K. (2018). Was it worth it? A qualitative exploration of graduate perceptions of doctoral value. Higher Education Research and Development, 37(6), 1124–1140
Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Mezirow, J. (1991). Transformative dimensions of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Inc Pub.
Rogers, C. R. (1951). Client-centered therapy. Houghton Mifflin.
Author Biography
Dr Kay Guccione, Head of Research Culture & Researcher Development and Co-director of the Lab for Academic Culture, at the University of Glasgow. Since starting her career as a Researcher Development Professional in 2010, she has developed specialisms and research interests in mentoring, research supervisor development and research community building – anything that revolves around a good quality conversation, and the making of a positive research culture. Kay has published work on Coaching and Mentoring for Academic Development, The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education, the Value of the PhD, and the Part-Time Doctorate.
In 2018 Kay was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in recognition of her impact in researcher development, and this is where her work at Glasgow focuses. She is a Principal Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, a Masters qualified Leadership Coach, and a Member of the EMCC. Kay is a trustee of the UK Council for Graduate Education and has recently worked with them to develop a Recognised ‘Associate’ Supervisor Award that recognises the often invisible contribution of postdoctoral research staff to doctoral supervision.
Kay edits the ‘Supervising PhDs‘ blog and co-edits ‘The Hidden Curriculum in Doctoral Education‘ blog, and is one of the editors behind the Journal of Imaginary Research, a zine that published micro-fiction in the familiar format of the academic abstract.
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