Martin Richards is from Gothenburg, Sweden and founded C4E in 2019. He is currently directing C4E and living his dream of providing coaching support for educators.
Martin was born in the UK in the mid 1950’s. Thanks to the great Math teachers at his school, who never criticised his answers, he successfully passed the exams and applied to Sussex University where he became a Maths teacher, to motivate students to love math the way he did.
When he moved to Sweden, he started a one-man business teaching English to Swedish executives. He soon discovered that adult language learners needed to work on their self-confidence more than vocabulary. Without knowing it, Martin had begun to use a coaching approach as a language teacher.
In 2004, at a presentation about Coaching, he got a wakeup call when he realised that, like every other teacher, trainer and consultant there, he was often focusing on the problem rather than the solution. coaching then became martin’s magic sauce that enabled the people he was teaching and coaching to learn, have fun and grow beyond their fears. Martin trained as a Co-Active Coach and had the a CPCC certification.
Martin recognised that even his school math teachers had been using coaching in many ways, and felt passionately that all educators deserved to know about coaching AND that their students would also benefit from it.
Together with other certified life and wellness coaches, Martin approached the Swedish Education Authority and encouraged them to look at coaching as a way of supporting educators.
2014 was the start of an ESF, European Social Fund, finaced project that lasted four years and combined lesson observation with coaching feedback. The results were very good, but when the financing ended, so did the coaching.
In 2015, Martin and Meg Hanshaw PhD met and began to work together to create a coaching approach training and other programs for i.b.mee.
In 2019, Martin founded the not-for-profit C4E, Coaching for Educators, as a project to see how it would work. It was very successful, so much that in 2021, Martin and Meg decided to integrate all the work they had been doing together into one program and C4E became a very important program in the trauma-informed coaching approach they were training educators in already!
Welcome to the C4E Adventure!
