American medical schools do not have a model approach for teaching and learning medical ethics. The literature on medical ethics instruction identifies the recent revisions to accreditation requirements, which link undergraduate and graduate ethics education, as an opportunity to create a new medical pedagogy. This dissertation develops a theoretical account of "coaching," a form of instruction that is both critical to medical ethics education and meets the new accreditation requirements. The development of this account of coaching is, in part, conceptual, supported by philosophical methods and the wider literature on coaching in music, athletics, business, and education; and, in part, empirical, stemming from research in particular medical ethics sessions taught in the third year of the University of Rochester Medical School. The method for the empirical portion of the research is qualitative description and relies in part on analytic induction. The data come from analysis of course evaluations, participant observations of the target ethics sessions, field notes following the observations, analysis of audio-recorded participant observations, face-to-face interviews with the instructor of the ethics sessions in question and with a convenient sample of approximately ten students, and analysis of audio-recorded interviews.