“Without reflection, people would not learn from their experience.” — Ho Law
According to David Kolb’s learning cycle, reflection is an important factor in the transformation of experience, as part of the dual dialectics of action and reflection. Ho Law, a founding member and former chair of the BPS special group in coaching psychology, defines reflection as, “a cognitive process that involves both thinking and feeling about an experience (past or present): From this thinking and feeling, a new consciousness emerges with a new appreciation, understanding and insight about that experience.”
“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” — Timothy Gallwey
A coach partners with a coachee in a process of inquiry that prompts the latter to reflect and think critically about their own thoughts, assumptions and perceptions. The resulting newfound awareness and the link to their own motivation acts as a launchpad to design goals, actions and accountability measures that integrate and expand new learning. Old assumptions often hide misconceptions, and addressing these in the learning process ensures that the learning and development sits on solid ground. This is nicely depicted in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics’s 1987 documentary, “A Private Universe.”
In 1910, American philosopher, psychologist and educator John Dewey was already arguing against simply asking students questions and testing their memory recall skills. He wanted students to challenge their assumptions and doubt what they thought they knew. Dewey nicely describes the value of questioning and doubting what we know: “Men thought the world was flat until Columbus thought it to be round. The earlier thought was a belief held because men had not the energy or the courage to question what those about them accepted and taught.”
“Action closes the learning circle and reconnects the processing inside the brain with the world.” — David Kolb
One core competency from the International Coaching Federation is about how a coach should facilitate a client’s growth which is all about integrating new awareness, insights, or learning. In “Becoming a Coach,” the authors explain that the key elements of this competency are that the coach should:
- Facilitate learning into action.
- Respect the client’s autonomy.
- Celebrates progress.
- Partners to close the session.
In Kolb’s learning cycle, this would be the active experimentation stage. The coach, through reflective inquiry, supports the coachee exploring what actions need to follow. Some questions could be:
- What is changing now that you have explored this further?
- What will you do differently now?
- Where else might this insight be of use to you?
“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” — Aristotle
In as early as 350 B.C. Aristotle had already described the notion of “learning from doing” — later defined as experiential or active learning. Kolb, in his seminal work, defined experiential learning as, “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experiences,” adding that, “learning from experience results in modification, growth and pruning of neurons, synapses and neuronal networks; thus learning physically changes the brain, and educating is the art of changing the brain.”
“Emotion creates attention.” — David Kolb
Daniela Kaufer, associate dean of biological sciences at Berkeley University says, “You are learning and remembering completely differently when the amygdala is firing or not.” In a published study titled “Hippocampal Brain-Network Coordination During Volitional Exploratory Behaviour Enhances Learning,” the authors suggest that active learning activates executive functions that are advantageous to learning as these communicate with the hippocampus to enhance its performance. The benefit of activating these executive functions also lends itself nicely to a mapping to Bloom’s taxonomy.
Coaching focuses on what is important to the coachee and in that way supports the creation of enduring memories by linking to the brain’s emotion structures. A core coaching competency from ICF is to “evoke awareness” for coachees by challenging the learner, and ask questions that invite the person to explore beyond their current thinking. Rich experiences like these are more memorable.
Two important biological aspects of learning and development are plasticity and neurogenesis — plasticity, because to learn, we need to rewire our neurons (or as Kaufer mentions “synaptic and dendritic remodeling”), and neurogenesis because when we create new neuron, they are “recruited” much more easily when learning happens. Factors that play a positive role in plasticity and neurogenesis are sleep, nutrition, exercise and happiness (through the release of dopamine). Coaching is oriented around positive behavioral change and around taking action (we already talked about celebration being a key element of the last ICF competency), and we know from studies that this acts as a self-reward which produces dopamine, an important chemical that is implicated in the “stamping-in” or “consolidation of memory.”
Coaching, having a positive orientation, contributes to euphoric or happy emotions and feelings of less stress, thus increasing the dopamine levels in the brain, which increases the brain’s effectiveness to learn.
Scientific fields such as neuroscience, adult learning, change management and psychology are all helping us understand both how people learn and why coaching works in that context. Reflection, attention, experimentation and emotions are critical factors in the learning process. Coaches become important facilitators of that process by practicing reflective inquiry in their sessions, thus supporting a deeper awareness and turning the learning into action.
