264 The Coaching Toolkit for Child Welfare Practice
If you want to bring about a fundamental
change in people’s belief and behavior,
a change that will persist and serve as an
example to others, you need to create a
community around them, where those
new beliefs can be practiced and
expressed and nurtured.
~ Gladwell, 2000, p. 173
Why Evaluate
In order to know what differentiates effective coaching from
ineffective coaching, it helps to
determine the effectiveness of social work practices and services
in meeting the needs of the clients;
demonstrate the costs and benefits of these services;
advance the professional learning of the social work field; and
identify the needs and resources of both learners and clients.
As stated by Sheldon (2007, as cited in Grant & Cavanagh, 2007):
“the single most important thing for coaching...is the necessity of
collecting rigorous empirical evidence.... This may be the only thing
that separates the field from earlier humanistic psychology and from
current non-validated self-help books, while also dealing with