Kolb's Learning Cycle

A reflective practice programme structured around experience, reflection, conceptualisation, and experimentation.

What's inside

This collection structures reflective practice around Kolb's four-stage learning cycle, helping clients extract maximum learning from their experiences rather than repeating the same patterns. Each stage includes a micro lesson, blind spots, journal prompts, and a five-day habit builder.

The four stages:

Concrete Experience — Learning to notice and capture experiences as they happen, rather than letting them pass unexamined. Developing the habit of paying attention to what's actually occurring.

Reflective Observation — Moving beyond 'what happened' to 'what did I notice, feel, and assume?' Developing the capacity to observe your own experience from multiple angles.

Abstract Conceptualisation — Extracting principles and patterns from reflected experience. Building personal theories about what works, what doesn't, and why.

Active Experimentation — Designing deliberate experiments to test your theories in practice. Closing the loop between insight and action.

How to use this collection

As a reflective practice programme, deliver over six to eight weeks. Each stage builds on the previous one — you can't reflect well on experiences you haven't noticed, and you can't experiment meaningfully without principles to test.

For coaches developing reflective capacity, this programme helps coaches build their own reflective practice — particularly useful alongside supervision preparation.

As a learning framework, use the four-stage cycle as an ongoing tool after any significant experience, project, or coaching session to extract and apply learning systematically.

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