‘Having supervision is a fundamental aspect of continuing personal development for coaches, mentors, organizational consultants and supervisors, providing a protected and disciplined space in which we can reflect on particular client situations and relationships, the reactivity and patterns they evoke in us and by transforming these live, in supervision, profoundly benefit our clients.’  Hawkins & Smith (2006)

What is reflective inquiry; why do it, what are its benefits, and how do we create the kind of space where this can happen?

Reflective inquiry is a term that comes from the original work of Donald Schon and Chris Argyris (1974), who worked in the field of professional education. Their view was that skilled professionals who are faced with challenging and often complex worlds need a way to stay open to themselves and to keep checking out the impact of their interventions on clients, to ensure their effectiveness. They taught a whole range of students how to engage in the process of reflection-in-action as a way to generate continuous learning about how they practiced in their respective fields.

Why do it? Schon (1987) argues that we all design our behaviour and hold theories for doing so, and calls these theories of action. These theories include all our underlying assumptions about people, our values and beliefs, and well established patterns of relating. As much of this theory is tacit and out of our awareness we may have become habituated to certain ways that are ineffectual and need revising. One of the ways we can explore our assumptive worlds is to begin to map them. McGonagill (2000) has done this and outlined the benefits to his continuing development as a coach.

Benefits: a reflective practitioner has developed the ability to stay open and present in each situation, bringing the most creative and appropriate contribution to the coaching conversation, and is open to continuous testing and reformulating. We can see that such a practitioner will have an edge on one who simply acts by rote as it were, applying models and approaches without taking the time to reflect on their appropriateness.

How to bring this into supervision: Appreciative Inquiry, a language and methodology developed by Cooperrider (2002) and colleagues, brings much to supervision practice as it offers a hopeful method of discourse. Ludeman (2002) says:

‘vocabularies of hope serve as powerful catalyst for positive social and organizational transformation. They are ignited when organizational members (1) nurture cooperative relationships, (2) exercise a sense of optimism about their capacity to influence the future, and (3) inquire together into their most deeply held values and highest aspirations. Appreciative inquiry is offered as an alternative to critical and problem-focused inquiry methodologies.

We can support coaches to develop reflective practice by bringing to our supervision an invitational approach that truly welcomes inquiry without judgment, that makes learning about who the coach is as a person, how they think, what moves them, what inspires them to be really effective, one of the focal points of the meetings. The working assumption here is that we all have blind spots and need someone we trust to hold up a mirror to us so we can see what we are actually like, not just what we believe we are like. Baker et al (2002) refer to this as conversational learning.

Following the example of McGonagill, we can facilitate the coach’s development of their model so that they can begin to see what lies behind their actions, what and who has influenced them as they have come through life. An exercise I took part in during my supervision training was called ‘Honoring the Ancestors’ during which we stood in a group and named those we had learned from, those whose influence on us was deeply felt and who lived in us still. This was part of my building up my own maps and models, and has influenced the development of the Full Spectrum Model of the CSA course.

We talk about developing the Internal Supervisor.This is that part of the professional that does the reflecting-in-action. As supervisors we can model reflective behaviour by bringing our own openness to exploring our part in the supervision conversation. We can contract from the start that we will offer our feelings, thoughts, ideas and reflections about the work we are doing together.

Author:                 © Fiona Adamson May 2008

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References

Peter Hawkins & Nick Smith, (2006), Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consulting, Supervision and Development. McGraw Hill

Chris Argyris & Donald Schon, (1974) Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness. Jossey-Bass.

Donald Schon, (1987) Educating the Reflective Practitioner. Jossey-Bass

David Cooperrider et al. (2002) Appreciative Inquiry: An Emerging Direction for Organization Development. Stipes Publishing

James D Ludeman(2002) From Deficit Discourse to Vocabularies of Hope: the Power of Appreciation, chapter 29 in Cooperrider.

Grady McGonagill (2000) The Coach as Reflective Practitioner, Notes from a Journey without End. In Executive Coaching: Practices and Perspectives. eds Catherine Fitzgerald and Jennifer Garvey. Davies Black Publishing.

Ann C Baker, Patricia J Jensen, and David A Kolb, (2002), The Evolution of a Conversational Learning Space, Case Western Reserve University.