Using a Practice Framework

I have written previously about developing my Practice Framework - a personal model of excellence for my coaching practice.

Having worked with it for a few years now, it seemed a good time to share it with others. So I introduced the concept into a training programme for experienced coaches wishing to become supervisors that I was running with Grant Thornton, and have just trialled it for the EMCC's suite of programmes with the Bank of England's coaches, who kindly volunteered to evaluate it for the EMCC.

The feedback has been very positive in both cases. 

For the Grant Thornton supervisors-in-training, I encouraged them to develop their own supervision practice frameworks, as a way of pulling together all the things they had learned as we went through the programme, and as an aid to continued reflective practice.

I did similar with the Bank of England coaches - encouraging them to discover, articulate and capture their implicit practice frameworks. They then discussed these with each other - fascinated to see how each had approached the task slightly differently, which promoted a lot of learning. And again, they saw the benefits of these as an aid to reflective practice going forward.  As one said, 'I had been expecting to be given a framework to use; but developing our own made it much more relevant and useful.'

And as always, I learned from them. One insight I gained was how well this helps one to articulate one's identity as a coach or supervisor. As I am considering re-designing my website to reflect who I am now, rather than who I was X years ago when we last did it, that was particularly timely. Other intelligent questions and discussions led me to see a wider range of uses for the framework, and a way of using it more consistently and systematically. So as from this autumn, I will be holding one aspect of the framework under review for a period of four weeks, and then moving on to another, and so on, cycling round the whole thing every year.

And that is part of the joy of my work: I always learn from my clients whose questions, challenges and reflections both keep me on my toes and teach me my craft.

Reflections on our Thinking Environment Day of Practice and Discovery

The Delegates

Last week we had our long-heralded Day of Practice and Discovery at Durham University. We brought together 40 people who are interested in the use of Nancy Kline's Thinking Environment in the context of HE or FE. It was a remarkable day for several reasons.

The first was that we heard from a range of people in different HE and FE settings who have been experimenting with the use of the Thinking Environment; from those using it as a modus operandi in PhD supervision (which is pretty radical, when you think about it!) to those who have found that it enables and supports cultural change at the organisational level. For details of all the sessions, see here.

The second was that every session included extensive opportunities for all present to think together about whatever the presenters had shared. We used a range of Thinking Environment approaches to do this, including rounds, thinking pairs, dialogue, and a Thinking Council.

The Team

The third was that the whole day had been put together using Thinking Environment principles from the start. The organising team met and thought together about what needed to be done and organised themselves to do it. 

The fourth was that all delegates were offered opportunities, both one-to-one and group, to experience the Thinking Environment in practice, prior to the conference, to ensure they had a rich understanding of the ideas underpinning the day.

And the fifth was that the whole day was done on a shoe-string budget, so that we could offer it for £50 a head - just enough to cover the hire of the venue and the food. We (almost) broke even.

The result was a day that was buzzing from start to finish, with high levels of engagement, and loads of fresh thinking arising in every session. We are collating some of the outputs now and they will appear in due course on the TE in HE website.  And we all had a lot of fun, too.