Learning to Mentor in Sports Coaching: A Design Thinking Approach

Learning to Mentor in Sports Coaching is an innovative, user-friendly, practical and theoretical guide for educating sports coaches as mentors. It is the first book to employ design thinking techniques to develop a new approach to mentor education in sports coaching.

Providing theoretical grounding in mentoring conversations, design thinking and case study research, the book centres on a series of redesigned mentoring conversations between some of the world’s leading sports coaching experts, coach educators, mentors and mentees. It covers topics such as:

• supporting novice volunteer coaches’ learning
• the learning needs of novice volunteer coaches and novice professional coaches
• professional communities of learning in coaching
• the impact of coaching behaviours on learning environments
• autonomy-supportive learning environments
• coaching children, young people and adults

Closing with a critique of the sports coach mentor as design thinker, Learning to Mentor in Sports Coaching is important reading for any upper-level student or researcher working in sports coaching, sports pedagogy or youth sport, and any coach looking to integrate sound mentoring theory into their professional practice.

Fiona C. Chambers is Head of the School of Education and Programme Director of Sports Studies and Physical Education at University College Cork, Ireland, and Visiting Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the University of Athens, Georgia, USA. Dr. Chambers is on the Board of Trustees for the Association Internationale des Écoles Supérieures d’Éducation Physique (AIESEP) and is co-founder of All Island All Active. She is also the Link Convener of the European Educational Research Association Network 18: Research in Sport Pedagogy and works as an advisor to the Teaching Council of Ireland.