Exploring the nature and impact of coaches' application of coaching skills across contexts

Coaching is an emerging pedagogical strategy in health professions education, aimed at enhancing learners' growth and competency through self-reflection, self-regulated learning, and lifelong learning skills. Coaching programs are resource-intensive due to the training and support required for clinician educators. Through the lens of actor-oriented transfer theory, this study seeks to understand the broader value of coaching programs beyond benefits for learners by investigating how medical student coaches apply coaching skills beyond their direct coaching relationships and the impacts of this skill transfer.

Using a qualitative interpretivist approach, individual semi-structured interviews were conducted with 11 medical student coaches at UCSF School of Medicine in 2024-2025. The interviews, guided by literature on coaching and actor-oriented transfer, were analyzed inductively using template analysis.

Participants described applying coaching skills in various clinical, educational, administrative, leadership, and personal contexts in ways that benefit learners, colleagues, patients, family, and themselves. Themes address (1) the transfer process of coaching skills (transfer is guided by experience, integrating skills with prior values, and identifying similarities in new situations, (2) positive impacts of transfer experience on the coach (skill building and identity formation), and (3) positive impacts on the learning environment and organizational culture (improving faculty empathy with learners, applying relationship-centered skills broadly, and building a culture of inclusive educators and leaders).

This study shows how medical student coaches can have positive benefits beyond their formal coaching relationships by applying various coaching skills across professional and personal contexts. Actor-oriented transfer provided a framework to understand when and how these skills are applied. The study highlights the positive effects of transfer on faculty coaches, the learning environment, and organizational culture, supporting the benefits of coaching programs in medical education.