Understanding the experience of experience: a practical model of reflective practice for Coaching

Abstract

Coaching is inherently a reflective process. Constructivist theories of learning are well established and greatly inform thinking on coaching. The coaching practitioner literature promotes activities and offers many tools to aid reflection. While psychology provides some very pertinent theory, a review of practitioner literature finds little to help coaches understand how reflection actually works. This paper proposes a simple four-cornered model of the mechanism of reflection in coaching. The outcomes are illustrated in application to first hand accounts of reflection in a coaching context. This model is intended to have distinct practical utility, while being embedded in underlying theory.

Keywords

• coaching
• reflective practice
• learning