Action Learning in Schools

Reframing teachers' professional learning and development

Peter Aubusson, Robyn Ewing, Garry Hoban

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136616969
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Teaching is becoming increasingly complex in the 21st Century, creating a need for more sophisticated frameworks to support teachers' professional learning. Action learning is one such framework and has been used for workplace learning in business settings for many years. It is now becoming increasingly popular in school and university settings, but it is often misunderstood. This book clarifies what action learning is, linking key concepts to illustrate that it is not merely a process, but a dynamic interaction between professional learning, communities, leadership and change. The book brings together more than a decade of the authors' research in school-based action learning.

Rich and diverse, the research draws on more than 100 case studies of action learning by teams of teachers in schools. The authors:

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• provide practical advice on how to initiate and sustain action learning;

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• explain the interaction between action learning, teacher development, professional learning, community building, leadership and change; and

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• illustrate how action learning can link to classroom practice so closely that it becomes part of what teachers do, rather than an added impost.

Addressing the highs and lows, the successes and failures, and their underlying causes, Action Learning in Schools provides insights into theories of cooperation, innovation, leadership and community formation to inform individual projects and large-scale school improvement initiatives. It will be of interest to teacher educators, pre-service and experienced teachers alike, as well as school and education system managers and policymakers keen to enhance teacher professional learning and educational outcomes for students.

Chapter 1

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie*

Introduction

 

Action learning has been used for workplace learning in business organisations for over seventy years, but it is only in the last fifteen years that it has been applied in schools to underpin teachers’ professional learning. It is timely that the value of action learning is explored in this book as a contribution to teacher learning and development literature. In this book we have examined the roles, processes and outcomes of action learning in school contexts, bringing together more than a decade of our research in action learning projects.

Our research includes projects we have conducted using action learning, as well as studies of school-based action learning conducted by teams of teachers. The research projects discussed are rich and diverse, while they also share the common goal of sustaining teacher professional learning to improve classroom practice. We have drawn on more than a hundred case studies of action learning in schools. Many of these involve teachers collaborating with academic partners to facilitate action learning. By analysing these case studies, we explain how action learning interacts with teacher development, professional learning, community building, sustaining change and school-based innovation. In the busy world of teaching, action learning can link closely to classroom practice so that it becomes part of what teachers do rather than an added imposition.

It will also be shown that understanding how action learning works and how it can be organised is critical to its ongoing success, so that it does not fail just as it germinates. This book describes the successes and failures of action learning, and suggests some of their underlying causes. It provides practical advice on when, how and why to initiate and sustain action learning. It articulates theories of teacher learning underpinning action learning, as well as notions of teacher professionalism that can inform individual projects and large-scale innovations.

This book also spans significant fields of educational development to illustrate action learning, not merely as a process for implementation, but as a dynamic and interactive tool that can link the teacher learning processes of reflection, community, leadership, action and feedback. Action learning is a process at all levels, not just because it requires team members to respect each other in their professional conversations, but also because it acknowledges and utilises the creativity, wisdom and practice of teachers as professionals.

While traditional debates about school improvement have focused on a dichotomy of top-down/bottom-up approaches, we believe action learning can span the apparent differences in these approaches. Action learning provides a framework to address the many challenges, problems, issues and concerns that arise in schools. For example, in a school, the problem of poor student engagement might be addressed by implementing a well-known pedagogical approach such as cooperative learning. Like many attempts to address such problems, teachers face the question of how to arrive at the desired outcome. The problem is not one of what is to be done, but how to get it done. In this situation, action learning can be used as a process to find ways to implement the new approach in the school to improve student engagement. Alternatively, the same goal to improve student engagement may be achieved by a different pathway, depending on the context of the school. Action learning provides a means to create new possibilities for change, using the resources of the people who know best: the teachers in the schools. Action learning recognises the capacities of teachers with expertise and knowledge of their particular school contexts, which must be understood if innovation is to succeed. Action learning that succeeds works because it is a collaborative learning process that does not presuppose that the means to an end are available a priori, and because it assumes that problems in real schools require professionals to learn in situ if practical, productive change in education is to be realised.

If the potential of action learning in education is to be realised, then its underlying principles need to be clearly understood and its practices explained. The book explains in depth the key aspects of action learning in schools. The chapter entitled ‘Positioning action learning’ discusses the fundamental character of action learning and explores its place in teacher learning, school innovation and change. The chapter begins by examining the origins of action learning in the writing of Revans in the 1940s, as he worked with the managers of coal-mines to share and find solutions to their management problems. It outlines action learning as a professional learning framework and illustrates this framework using examples in various industries and the public sector. This chapter also clarifies the differences between action learning and action research, as well as between professional development and professional learning.

Having established a prima facie case for action learning as a vehicle for professional learning and innovation in schools, the next chapter, ‘Enabling action learning: Getting started’, explains how to initiate and promote action learning in a school setting. Taking into account the external factors that influence individual schools, including socio-political contexts, this chapter explains how action learning can be instigated to target real issues of significance to particular school communities. Matters considered include: selecting, defining and focusing the issue, concern or problem; setting targets and timelines; the type of leadership required to promote action learning; team formation, membership and shared responsibility; and meeting the challenges of applying action learning in school environments.

Consideration of how to initiate and plan for action learning leads naturally to an analysis of the principles and practices that underpin it. ‘The dynamics of action learning’ expounds the four key processes of action learning to show how they interrelate and enhance each other. The first process, reflection, involves participants thinking about something problematic to make sense of their experiences and help them cope with similar situations in the future. The second process, community, involves a group of six to eight members sharing personal anecdotes to gain a deeper understanding of the meaning of their personal experiences. The third process, action, entails participants exploring ideas that have been generated by personal reflection and community discussions. And the fourth process, feedback, utilises the important element of responses to actions from colleagues and students. Independently, these principles are not new, but action learning is a framework that integrates all four processes to create a dynamic relationship, providing a helpful mechanism to support ongoing professional learning.

The following chapter on ‘Community’ elaborates on the synergistic interactions between action learning and community. This chapter offers insight into ways that the building of community can be enhanced. It discusses different views of professional community and learning teams to highlight implications for using action learning in schools. Barriers to community formation are discussed in the context of ways action learning can assist to overcome them. It is also acknowledged that, just as the genesis of a professional learning community can lie in action learning, so too the existence of a collaborative school community can lay the foundation for the origin and evolution of action learning.

Effective, evolving professional communities are not isolated but have mechanisms to generate new ideas from within, as well as ways to allow new ideas to enter from outside. One device that supports this in action learning is the external facilitator. The chapter on ‘Facilitating action learning: The academic partner’s role’ is divided into two sections, examining two aspects of external assistance to schools during an action learning project. It begins by briefly examining the role that system personnel can provide through external assistance in funding, framing and developing parameters to support action learning. The main part of the chapter then explores the crucial role that an external partner can play as a critical friend in school-based action learning. Both action learning team and academic partner perspectives are discussed, and some frameworks for working productively are suggested, based on our experiences.

‘Gathering and learning from evidence’ builds on previous chapters, arguing that action learning depends on professional conversation from a committed team of teachers. The basis for the team’s decision-making and learning can be shifted to more robust ways of thinking by seeking evidence to inform these conversations. The chapter explores the ways in which teachers gather evidence in action learning, how this is analysed, and how it is used to inform or promote innovation. It also discusses peer observation, the selection and use of instruments, survey, focused discussions, reflection, reporting, capturing episodes, stories, anecdotes and the role of professional sharing. While acknowledging the role of these elements in research, this chapter focuses on the part they play in, and what it means to engage in, professional learning with colleagues.

Rich conversation, the honest sharing of views, trust and genuine collaboration are integral to action learning. This requires much of our personal and professional selves – our beliefs, values and practices – to be exposed to others. It also leads to actions that can have significant consequences for others. These matters raise significant ethical questions for action learning. Yet, to date, the ethics of action learning in schools have been largely ignored in the literature. The chapter on ‘Ethical action learning’ explains what it means to be ethical in action learning by considering the consequences of our actions for others.

As a professional learning framework, action learning promotes innovation and change in schools. These are needed to ensure they maintain their key role in our rapidly changing society. However, many efforts for educational reform are short lived because they are not accompanied by processes and conditions to support teacher learning. If developed effectively, action learning provides the learning processes and conditions to underpin the longevity of professional learning reform and to increase the possibilities for change. Our chapter on ‘Sustaining professional learning’ proposes a model for sustainable professional learning in schools and elaborates the implications for organisational learning. It draws heavily on case studies of projects that have been sustained over three or more years and advocates the establishment of a broad and collaborative professional learning community.

Finally, in the Epilogue ‘Extending action learning’, we reflect on the complex environment of modern schools and emphasise the need for schools to redesign themselves if they are to maintain relevance in the twenty-first century. Children are rapidly changing in our complex world. Teachers also need to change. This chapter discusses the way in which action learning can help to reinvigorate schools by promoting teacher professionalism and bringing new ideas and practices to the fore. The quality of student learning in schools is dependent on the quality of teacher learning. In concluding, we have speculated on how action learning itself might develop in the future as it continues to fulfil the role of supporting teachers’ professional learning.

* Shakespeare, All’s well that ends well, Act I, Scene I.

Chapter 2

Positioning action learning

Each manager learned not only much about coal mining by discussing his experiences of it with others who were then urged to discuss their own, but he also learned about himself, and why he said the kinds of things he did say; why he felt as he did about the things he did say; why he felt as he did about the decisions as a manager that he could be seen by his own staff and colleagues to take – even if they were bad ones. Action learning, in other words by being question-based rather than answer-based (as in most other training) tells managers a lot about themselves; they begin to see how it is that their own personality is stamped upon the mine they are appointed to run.

(Revans, 1982b: 66)

When Reg Revans, the founder of action learning, wrote these words in 1982 he was arguing that the most valuable type of learning for mine managers involved them reflecting upon workplace experiences and sharing these insights with other managers to help each of them interpret and inform their experiences. This is how action learning started over seventy years ago – by having a small group of people, who worked in similar occupations, give opinions on each other’s work-related issues and problems. Moreover, workplace learning is not just about reflection on experiences, as learning from experience means ‘action and reflection; one gets to understand by doing and to do by understanding’ (Revans, 1983b: 49). Emphatically, Revans italicised ‘and’ because of the essential interplay between the ‘doing’ (the action) and ‘thinking about the consequences of doing’ (the reflection) to maximise workplace learning.

Reflection is a process that helps develop meaning from experiences. If you don’t reflect, then what you learn from your experiences is limited. This interplay between reflection and experience also resonates with earlier ideas in Dewey’s theory of learning through experience (Dewey, 1933) and later in Kolb’s notion of experiential learning (Kolb, 1984). While the notion of rethinking actions was first mentioned by Aristotle over two thousand years ago, Dewey (1933) was the first to highlight the value of reflection as a way of thinking about a problematic situation that needs to be resolved: ‘The function of reflective thought is, therefore, to transform a situation in which there is experienced obscurity, doubt, conflict, disturbance of some sort, into a situation that is clear, coherent, settled, harmonious’ (Dewey, 1933: 100–1).

Although Revans first wrote about action learning in October 1945 in a report commissioned by the Mining Association of Great Britain, he also acknowledged that many of the key ideas underpinning action learning can be found in the writings of Aristotle two thousand years earlier: ‘Life, as Aristotle still reminds some of us, is made up of action as well as of reflection’ (Revans, 1983b: 50). What Revans did, however, in his original writings, was not only re-emphasise the age-old importance of learning through action and reflection, but demonstrate how it could operate in the workplace. He initially did this by establishing small groups of coal-mine managers to work together to solve each other’s operational and management problems (Revans, 1983b).

As this shows, action learning originated in business settings and has evolved in different forms over the last seventy years. It has only been used in schools in the last two decades. The purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to explain the origins of action learning in business settings, clarify what it is, and introduce how it can be used in schools for teachers’ professional learning. Since most action learning studies have been conducted in business settings, many of the references in this chapter will come from the literature of this context.

This chapter is presented in four sections. First, we will discuss how different conceptualisations of teaching align with different forms of teacher learning. Second, three different forms of teacher learning will be explained. In this section we will clarify the differences between three common phrases used in the teacher learning literature – ‘professional development/in-service’, ‘continuous professional development’ and ‘professional learning’. Importantly, we will also articulate the difference between two professional learning frameworks – action learning and action research. Third, examples of action learning will be provided to show that it has already had widespread use in many non-educational settings. Finally, this chapter will argue that teachers should be encouraged to use action learning in schools.

Conceptions of teaching

There is a relationship between the nature of teaching and the type of teacher learning required. From extensive research with teachers in Chicago in the 1980s, Wise et al. (1984) deduced several different conceptions of teaching that necessitate different forms of teacher learning. One conception of teaching suggests that it is a ‘craft’, meaning that the knowledge base for teaching is fixed and has little to do with varying contexts. This conception implies that teaching is about the delivery of prescribed knowledge and, if teachers can learn enough knowledge about their practice, then it can be ‘mastered’. If this is the case, then teachers can learn about their practice ‘bit by bit’. This can occur from brief after-school workshops providing different chunks of knowledge about teaching in classrooms.

A different conception of teaching requires a different type of teacher learning. When teaching is viewed as a profession, it implies that the body of knowledge is not fixed, and that what teachers do in classrooms depends on a myriad of factors. This means that teaching is more than the delivery of prescribed knowledge using a range of strategies, but is ‘a dynamic relationship that changes with different students and contexts’ (Hoban, 2000b: 165). Having a conception of teaching as a profession means that classroom decisions are about many ‘holistic judgements’ every day (Day, 1999). It means that teaching involves complex decision-making, whereby

the teacher must draw upon not only a body of professional knowledge and skill, but also a set of personal resources that are uniquely defined and expressed by the pers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie: introduction
• 2 Positioning action learning
• 3 Enabling action learning: getting started
• 4 The dynamics of action learning
• 5 Community
• 6 Facilitating action learning: the academic partner’s role
• 7 Gathering and learning from evidence
• 8 Ethical action learning
• 9 Sustaining professional learning through action learning
• 10 Epilogue: Extending action learning
• Glossary
• References
• Index