The Importance of Professional Judgment in Coaching

I am delighted to be joined by Dr Mike Ashford and Dr Loel Collins in this episode. Both Mike and Loel lecture at Edinburgh University. Loel is the Programme Director for MSc Performance Coaching and Development and Mike lectures in Sports Coaching and Performance. They are also both coach developers at Grey Matters, a company specialising in performance enhancement and coaching development for individuals, sporting/cultural organisations and systems.

And they’ve written a paper along with Prof Dave Collins and Dr Jamie Taylor called “It depends coaching – The most fundamental, simple and complex principle or a mere copout?”. In this paper, the authors set out the arguments for Professional Judgement and Decision-Making (PJDM - the scientific representation of it depends coaching) as a genuine construct in coaching and, therefore, coach development. They do this through a critical consideration of three “pillars” or core constructs of PJDM. Namely, the concept of nested planning, the nature and use of knowledge in coaching, and the expression of expertise in coaching utilising a PJDM approach.