Certificates in Leadership Coaching Core Faculty

Linda J. Page, Ph.D., ACPC . CLC Co-Director and President, Adler School of Professional Studies.

From the beginning of her association with coaching, Dr. Page has been an advocate of maintaining professional standards and setting academic standards in coach education. For that reason, the Adler program applied for and received accreditation from the International Coach Federation in 2002, the first Canadian program to do so. Dr. Page has been active in the ICF, co-editing the Proceedings of the Second ICF Research Symposium (Stein, Campone, & Page, 2005); serving as Program Chair of the Third ICF Research Symposium; and presently serving as a member of the ICF Research and Development Committee.

Because of Adler’s emphasis on leadership in the workplace, Dr. Page has also been active in organizations to enhance leadership, executive, and organizational coaching. The most important of these for OISE/UT’s purposes is the Graduate School Alliance for Executive Coaching. Adler is a Founding Member of this Alliance, which is in the process of setting standards and accreditation procedures for leadership education at the graduate level. Other Founding Members include the Management Division of Babson College, Coles College of Business at Kennesaw State University, Graduate School of Applied and Professional Psychology at Rutgers, the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology, Division of Graduate Programs in Business at New York University, Ross School of Management and Leadership at Franklin University, School of Human and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University, School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas, and The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania. An affiliation with Adler would give OISE/UT a voice in setting these standards. Because the AECP department at OISE/UT draws on the academic tradition of adult education, that voice would lend an important dimension to considerations of standards, as current GSAEC members are mainly embedded in schools or departments of psychology or management.

Dr. Page is also on the Board of the International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO) and is active in supporting the Symposium movement begun by that organization. This is a series of limited-attendance meetings that bring together executive coaches, organizations that utilize coaching, and coach educators and researchers to examine issues, research, and cases. Drs. Laiken and Page attended the Symposium in New York City on October 5 and 6, 2006, in order to learn about the demand for leadership coaching in governmental and other organizations. They are hopeful that the CLC at OISE/UT would consider sponsoring a Symposium in Toronto, and Dr. Page has offered Adler’s support in planning for the event.

Dr. Page has collaborated on, written, and presented research reports and position papers regarding the importance of research and the need for a discipline of coaching studies (Ellingson & Page, 2004; Page, 2003; Page, 2005a; Page, 2005b; Page, 2006; Page & Stein, 2006). She is co-editor of the Business and Organizations Column for the Journal of Individual Psychology and has accepted an appointment to the editorial board of the International Journal for Coaching in Organizations. In October, she will co-lead a discussion on coaching research at the Conference of the North American Society for Psychotherapy Research in Burr Oak, Ohio, and is proposing a Handbook of Coaching Research to be co-edited with Dr. Francine Campone. Dr. Page’s particular theoretical and research interests focus on Interpersonal Neurobiology and research on the development and training of coaches.

As a representative of an ICF-accredited coach training program, Dr. Page serves on the Board of the Association of Coach Training Organizations (ACTO). She chairs a committee that is conducting research on the theoretical foundations of coach training and education, incorporating a global perspective. Dr. Page believes that because coaching draws on such a variety of academic traditions, a discipline of coaching studies has an opportunity to contribute a multidisciplinary and hopefully integrative perspective to academe.