Redesigning Reflective Learning: Lessons from Embedding Peer Coaching in Enterprise Education

Reflective dialogue can help students learn from experience, test assumptions and make decisions in uncertain entrepreneurial contexts. Peer coaching can complement information and guidance delivered by careers and employability professionals to help students explore entrepreneurial career options, navigate uncertainty, develop confidence and identify next steps. We know that interacting with others enhances learning, however this is often implicitly understood rather than explicitly designed. Peer coaching approaches, where reflection is developed through facilitated dialogue, remain underexplored in enterprise education, despite its potential value. This vignette shares my practice-based insights from six years of developing peer coaching activities within an undergraduate enterprise pathway, and considers how careers professionals might adapt it within coaching sessions, taught programmes and incubators. It does not offer a plug-and-play model, but identifies conditions that support reflective and peer learning.