Reflecting on reflective practice: a coach’s action research narratives

Abstract

Reflection is now advocated by coach education programmes around the world as a framework for coaches to learn from their experience. Yet, there is a paucity of empirical and critical work focussed on coaches’ experiences of reflective practice. Consequently, we lack understanding as to the utility of reflection in the messy realities of practice, and of what is meaningful to those who engage in such a personally involving, emotive and challenging process. This article presents a series of narratives that evoke the dilemmas I (the lead author) experienced reflecting on my reflective practice within an action research process. The narratives tell a highly personal tale about the temporal, emotional and contextual qualities of reflective practice, a tale that counters traditional presentations of the coach as a calculated, dispassionate and rational being who operates as if in a social vacuum. By providing insight that befits the problematic nature of practice, we hope to contribute to a more authentic and holistic epistemology in sports coaching.

Keywords:

• Sports coaching
• coach learning
• coach development
• reflection
• narrative research

Notes

1. See Lacy and Darst (1984).

2. The questions were informed by the work of Ghaye et al. (2009), Johns (1995) and Hardman and Jones (2013).

3. I later reflected upon my early memories as a player of coaches talking to me like this, as well as seeing similar verbal delivery modelled by older coaches and tutors in coach education settings. Finally, it became clear from watching further video footage that the team’s head coach also used an authoritarian tone of delivery, which all likely informed my own ‘performed character’.

4. Some speech-associated hand gestures can be distracting to recipients (Skipper et al. 2007).