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In the recent years, coaching and mentoring techniques have become integral elements of the modern social reality. These activities are considered to be effective tools of professional as well as personal development, so highly valued by the today’s workforce.
High-quality coaching and mentoring serve to enhance motivation, productivity, morale, and provide strong emotional support for the needs of individuals, especially in case organisational change initiatives are being pursued. Through the implementation of such practices, both the organisation and the employee tend to benefit tremendously. Coaching and mentoring are both closely connected with the concept of reflective learning, which helps to develop analytical skills, critical thinking, etc. All in all, the issue of coaching/mentoring is still the matter of topical interest, since it embraces a number of unexplored techniques.
As far as the conversation learning is concerned, I would like to say that that there are five dialectical dimensions defining the boundaries of conversational space. These are formulated in Conversation as Experiential Learning by Baker, A. C., Jensen, P. J. and Kolb, D. A., and include the following: apprehension and comprehension (integrated knowing), reflection and action (praxis), doing and being (epistemological and ontological recourse or spiral), individuality and rationality (intersubjectivity), status and solidarity (hospitalty). The simultaneous interactions among these five dialectics will ultimately guide and sustain the act of learning through conversations. Creating the circumstances for the engagement cross all these oppositional concepts is the key to successful conversational learning at an interactive level of experiential learning.
In general, I can assess my experience of being a coach and a coachee as highly valuable. The conversation sessions definitely developed my expertise in the field of coaching and helped me obtain deeper understanding of the process of coaching and its potential outcomes. Beyond the shadow of a doubt, “real life experience” can hardly be fully implemented through the learning style models, since individual factor often appears to be of utmost importance.. Trying to incorporate these approaches into the coaching practice, taking into account the individual learning styles, mentor and coaches realize the variety of knowledge acquisition mechanisms that can be applied by different students/learners/coachees. Eventually, the application of different methods results in the enhanced effectiveness of coaching in general.
All in all, I also think that nothing is ideal in our world, and the theory of experiential learning is no exception. In general, the theory is being criticised for the lack of objectivity, reliability and validity. One controversial issue related to this approach is that it can only be implemented within certain cultures. All things considered, its broader use still needs further research.
