GROW: coach yourself
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Four questions, in order
GROW is Goal, Reality, Options, Will: four questions that turn a wish into a plan. A catering tutor wants better behaviour in the kitchen. Nobody could say on Friday whether that had happened. You use GROW on yourself, with nobody else in the room. Nobody collects it.
For exampleBetter behaviour in the kitchen. Goal, or wish?
With your learners
- In a one-to-one or a tutorial, ask the same eight questions and say as little as you can between them.
- Let the learner choose the option. A step they chose at seven out of ten will beat one you chose at ten.
- Finish on the will check, and write down the day they said.
Your jobChoose a goal, a first step and a date, and get a plan to keep.
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Where do you most want something to be different?
Run it on your own for ten minutes, or ask a learner the same eight in a one-to-one.
Why this works in your room
A goal you can check and one small step beat a good intention.
For your learners: Used in a one-to-one, the same questions get a learner to their own next step and not yours.
For you: You leave with one step you are sure you will take, and not a list.
Goal
What do I want to be different, and by when?
How will I know I have got there?
Reality
What is happening now? Count it.
What have I tried already?
Options
What could I do? And what else?
What would I tell a colleague to do?
Will
Which step will I do this week? What helps?
When do I look back? Out of ten, how sure? Under eight, shrink it.
Elsewhere in Bradford ThreadWorks
RAISESet my target: six questions about one group that find a goal for the year.Open RAISE (opens in a new tab)
WalkThrusCoaching WalkThrus: a technique guide as the focus for a coaching conversation.Open WalkThrus (opens in a new tab)
Prompts to paste into Copilot
Copilot makes a patient coach, as long as you tell it to ask and not advise. Change what is in brackets.
Coach me with GROW
Coach me using the GROW model. My starting point: I want [what I want to be different] in my [subject] lessons. Ask one question at a time, two for each stage, in order: Goal, Reality, Options, Will. Do not give advice. In Will, ask for a first step this week, what could help, and a date to look back. Finish by asking how sure I am out of ten, and if it is under eight, help me make the step smaller.
Make my goal checkable
Here is a goal for my teaching: [the goal]. Rewrite it three ways so that someone could check on a named day whether it had happened. Each version needs a date, something I could count, and a number that would mean it worked.
Where it comes from
GROW was made widely known by John Whitmore in the early 1990s, from work with business and sports coaches. Its claim is modest: people act on answers they reach themselves more readily than on advice.
Whitmore, 1992
A checkable goal, and a day
Studies of goal setting find that specific goals lead to better performance than being told to do your best. A plan that names when and where you will act is far more likely to be carried out than an intention (Gollwitzer, 1999). That is what Will is for.
Locke and Latham, 2002 (opens in a new tab)How sure is this?
Goal setting and plans with a day are well supported in general. GROW is a way of asking those questions in order, and we found no study of teachers using it on themselves. Whitmore's own claim about advice rests on coaching practice, not on trials.
No source claimed