#172 From Schooling to Learning: How coaches grow
Educational philosopher Robin Barrow (2007) draws a sharp distinction between schooling and learning. It’s a distinction that matters far more to coaches than we often realise.
Schooling philosophies are concerned with transmitting knowledge, maintaining standards and ensuring consistency. They come in three flavours:
Dogmatic – Knowledge is fixed. There is a right way and a wrong way. The learner’s task is to absorb the canon.
Technological – Learning is a technical process. Break skills into components, teach them step‑by‑step and assess competence.
Liberal – The expert knows best. The learner becomes educated by exposure to the wisdom of the knowledgeable.
By contrast, Learning philosophies focus on the learner’s agency, identity and meaning‑making:
Progressive – Learning is experiential and practical. The learner develops through guided exploration.
Humanistic – Learning is self‑directed, relational and concerned with personal growth.
Radical – Learning is mutual, emergent and transformative. Outcomes are not predetermined.
Many coach training programmes sit firmly in the Technological camp. They teach models, skills and competencies. They assess observable behaviours. They prepare coaches to ‘do coaching’ correctly. This is valuable, up to a point. But it is only the beginning.
Once qualified, many coaches pursue accreditation. The ICF’s ‘gold standard’ credentialing process requires Mentor Coaching, which again reflects a Technological philosophy: assess the coach against a set of behavioural markers. Yet in practice, Mentor Coaching often drifts into the Dogmatic (‘pure non‑directive coaching is the only real coaching’), or the Liberal (‘I know how coaching should be done; learn from me’). Coaches frequently tell me they leave Mentor Coaching feeling constrained rather than expanded.
This is a problem. Because maturing as a coach requires letting go of rigid notions of correctness and discovering your own philosophy, presence and signature. You cannot find your voice while trying to sound like someone else.
This is where coaching supervision offers something fundamentally different. Supervision is grounded in Learning philosophies. It is facilitative, reflective and relational. It adapts to what the coach needs in the moment.
A supervisor can take three stances:
The Guide (Progressive) – helping you embed practical coaching knowledge through exploration rather than instruction.
The Enabler (Humanistic) – supporting you to understand who you are, how you show up and who you are becoming as a practitioner.
The Animator (Radical) – entering a mutual exploration where neither of us knows where the learning will lead.
Supervision invites you to move from doing coaching right to becoming the coach only you can be. It shifts the centre of gravity from Schooling to Learning. That shift is important because it is the only place where genuine professional maturity can thrive.
