The Handbook of Knowledge-Based Coaching: FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE

THE GROW MODEL

In the 1970s, Tim Gallwey, a Harvard graduate on sabbatical as a tennis coach, noticed that his students seemed to be more successful at teaching themselves than by learning from an instructor. Gallwey’s work (see, for example, Gallwey, 1997) was discovered by an English baronet and ex-racing driver, Sir John Whitmore, who opened a tennis and ski school to develop the techniques. Eventually Whitmore’s team was invited by corporations to inject a day of tennis coaching into their management training courses to help managers embrace the principle of self-directed learning. The GROW model, which sets the pattern for the coach’s questions, emerged from a group that included Sir John Whitmore, who later popularized it in his book