Canadian Medical Education Journal 2019, 10(4) Correspondence: Dr. J Landreville, Department of Emergency Medicine, The Ottawa Hospital, Civic Campus 1053 Carling Ave., Box 254, Ottawa, Ontario. K1Y 4E9; telephone (613) 798-5555 ext. 19255; email: jlandreville@toh.ca e109 Canadian Medical Education Journal Commentary and Opinions A definition for coaching in medical education Jeffrey Landreville, 1 Warren Cheung, 1 Jason Frank, 1,2 Denyse Richardson 3 1 Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada 2 The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Ontario, Canada 3 Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada Previously published ahead of issue October 2, 2019; published November 28, 2019 CMEJ 2019, 10(4):e109-110 Available at http://www.cmej.ca © 2019 Landreville; licensee Synergies Partners This is an Open Journal Systems article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Consider world champion tennis player Roger Federer. As the number 1 ranked tennis player for a record 310 weeks, he represents one of the most successful professional athletes of our time. To what does he owe his success? While he undoubtedly possesses a remarkable amount of self-motivation, dedication, and athleticism; there is another factor to consider: he has a coach. In fact, he has a team of coaches who work on every aspect of his game with a common goal of performance enhancement. In a recent tribute to his coaches on social media, Federer wrote “Could never have been the oldest #1 without my team. Thank you to everyone who has helped me along the way”. 1 Despite its wide application in other high- performance professions such as athletics, music, and business, coaching has only recently gained attention within medicine and medical education. The adoption of Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) and emphasis on observation has led to increased use of coaching terminology within the medical education community. However, a clear definition of coaching is lacking, and people often use the term coaching interchangeably with related terms such as teaching and mentoring. 2 We need a clear operational definition of coaching in order to advance the use of coaching within medical education and to conduct meaningful research on this topic. We believe, coaching is a process that guides a learner towards performance improvement. Coaching requires establishment of supervisor- learner rapport, setting of expectations, and observation of the activities that are being developed. Following observation, the supervisor and learner engage in a bi-directional conversation which leads to meaningful feedback and practical suggestions for performance improvement. Supervisors may document their conversations to provide a developmental trajectory over time. Educational researchers have previously defined coaching as a “one-to-one conversation focused on the enhancement of learning and development through increasing self-awareness and a sense of personal responsibility, where the coach facilitates the self- directed learning of the coachee through questioning, active listening, and appropriate challenge in a