ABSTRACT
This chapter explores, how critical thinking skills could be developed in coaches and Coach Developers (CD), so they can identify appropriate information and knowledge to inform their practice. In practice there are five key attributes to effective critical appraisal of a coaching session: a clear purpose, an experience that has relevance to that purpose – potential to learn, ‘capturing’ that experience – the experience is impactful or can be described in sufficient richness, depth, and detail, having sufficient comprehension to understand the relationships of the different parts of that experience, and distilling the learning into key actionable parts. Coach development programs that facilitate and encourage criticality would therefore have several characteristics. Importantly the CD role is to acknowledge and grasp the complexity of coaching practice, explaining it as simply as possible but not making it simplistic.
