Practice-Based Coaching Cycle
Reflection and Feedback Coaching Skill Examples
The middle part of the Reflection and Feedback session may feel challenging to facilitate, but it also provides many opportunities for a coach and coachee to deepen and enrich their relationship through celebration, collaborative analysis, and extended learning.
Supportive Feedback:
There are two types of feedback used in Practice-Based Coaching: supportive and instructive feedback. Supportive feedback is well suited for debriefing a Focused Observation in which the educator is trying out a new skill or is demonstrating positive growth aligned with the M from the Shared Goal and Action Plan session.
Coachee: “I’m really enjoying talking with children/youth about feelings!”
Coach: “It was great! I noticed how you stayed engaged with the children/youth by pacing the activity and modeling each emotion to ensure that children or youth understood it.”
Instructive Feedback:
Instructive feedback is focused on providing information that enhances a coachee’s understanding of how to effectively implement a practice. This means that it is a coaching skill that may be used in a Shared Goal and Action Plan coaching session to ensure a coachee understands the correct way to implement a practice as well as in a Reflection and Feedback coaching sessions to specifically deepen a coachee’s understanding of practice. The instructive feedback has instructive intent, but it is not instructional.
Let’s say a coachee’s goal is to use open-ended questions throughout the day with children or youth. During a Focused Observation session, the coachee’s coach notices that the coachee has used mainly close-ended questions. During the Reflection and Feedback coaching session there may be a conversation that goes like this:
Coachee: “My goal was to use four open-ended questions throughout the day and I’m sure I had a few, but I think some of my questions were probably close-ended.”
Coach: “I agree with you. A few of your questions were really great examples of open-ended questions. There were some questions for which the children or youth only had one-word responses, even though you started the question with ‘how . . .’ What other open-ended questions could you try out to help children/youth provide elaborated, rather than single-word responses?”
Notice in the example above that the coach does not teach or instruct the coachee how
to ask an open-ended question. Instead, the coach asks the coachee to reconsider how
to ask a question that does not have a single-word response.
Simple Reflection:
A simple reflection, also known as a reflective statement, involves restating, in slightly different words, what someone has said. When using a reflective statement keep in mind the importance of emotional tone and body language that convey not only, “I hear you,” but also “I’m restating what you said to show I’m listening, understanding, and to engender trust in our relationship.”
Coachee: “Looking at my video, I see how all that preparation we did on the action plan really paid off!”
Coach: “It sounds like you feel proud of how this Focused Observation turned out. Say more about that.”
Perceptive Reflections:
Another type of reflection, perceptive reflection, is intended to stimulate a coachee’s imagination about potential change. As the term implies, a perceptive reflection relies on a coach’s interpretation of a coachee’s assessment, through their thoughts and feelings, of their practice.
Open-ended Questions:
Open-ended questions and open-ended inquiry questions often begin with, what, when, how, and can (and sometimes why, but more about that later). They fall in the category of perceptive reflection because a coach uses their perceptive skills to elicit different types of information from a client.
Open-ended questions tend to support relationships while open-ended inquiry tends to be useful in eliciting insights, analysis, and possibilities from a client. Open-ended inquiry, sometimes referred to as powerful questions, invites a client to understand a practice through their own narrative and insight.
Notice in the examples below the purpose that both types of questions serve. Because the purpose of a Reflection and Feedback session is, in part, to engage in an analysis of the educator’s practice, open-ended inquiry encourages deeper thinking specific to the practice under analysis.
Coachee: “I tried using the sticky notes and while they were good reminders, it was hard to come up with many examples of language modeling.”
Coach: “That sounds like it might have been frustrating or at least disappointing. How do you think we can fix this?” [Open-ended question]
Coach: “That sounds like it might have been frustrating or at least disappointing. Can you describe what else you may need to know about language modeling to improve this practice?” [Open-ended inquiry]
Mindful Listening:
The ability to set aside one’s own agenda and distractions to put one’s full attention on the person who is talking.
When a coach is listening mindfully as a coachee talks, they don’t interrupt at all; they listen without making assumptions or thinking about what to say next and they do more listening than talking during the coaching conversation.
