Action learning – a process which supports organisational change initiatives

This paper reflects on how action learning sets (ALSs) were used to support organisational change initiatives. It sets the scene with contextualising the inclusion of change projects in a masters programme. Action learning is understood to be a dynamic process where a team meets regularly to help individual members address issues through a highly structured, facilitated team process of reflection and action. The key findings from the evaluation of the students and facilitators’ experiences are reflected on, together with plans for improving the experience for all stakeholders for the next academic year. In sharing this experience, the purpose of the paper is to highlight the most significant learning from the evaluation. Good preparation for action learning is vital to ensure a positive experience for all involved. From the student perspective, an appropriate learning set mix is needed to ensure a balance of support and challenge for the ALS. In addition to a preparatory workshop for action learning facilitators, regular meetings with the action learning facilitators in the form of ALSs could be scheduled as a support especially for those new to the process. Finally, it is hoped that this account will encourage readers to use action learning for supporting and engaging students in organisational change initiatives.     

Resistance in action learning: struggling with self-efficacy and the social Self – and what about the set advisor?

This account of practice explores the concept of resistance in action learning. Resistance is conceptualized as an attempt of self-protection that is manifested in action learners' struggles with their sense of self-efficacy and their social Self. These struggles are an inherent part of the action learning process and may elicit defensive undercurrents that constrain learning. I contribute to debates on criticality in action learning by recognizing the centrality of resistance as a source of learning for participants and set advisors. The intended contribution of this paper is to illuminate the importance of engaging with these limiting processes which can spark a powerful learning experience that reverberates long after the action learning programme has finished. Furthermore, I reflect on the opportunities this alternative view on resistance may provide for us as action learning facilitators and discuss how we may incorporate these reflections in our practice.     

Integration of the practice of mindfulness within action learning as an added component within a post graduate leadership programme: an account of practice

This account of practice provides a practical example of the use of mindfulness practice within action learning which was a component of a bespoke UK Business School post-graduate leadership development programme commissioned by an English NHS Mental Health Trust aimed at improving the leadership capacity of mid-level managers through work-based learning. The article discusses background and context of the programme followed by how application of mindfulness exercises was integrated within the action learning process to encourage participants to be ‘in the moment’ as an added component of their leadership development. The aim of the paper is to share examples of practice applied within action learning. Finally, the paper asserts that the application of mindfulness exercises helped to enhance the action learning process by creating a calm, focused space for individual and collective reflections, enhancing the quality of engagement and enabling action learning members to take a more pragmatic approach to addressing the work issues raised within the action learning sets.     

The effect of team feedback and guided reflexivity on team performance change

Providing teams with feedback has been forwarded as a powerful practice to improve their learning and performance. Yet, this learning potential may not be realized unless teams actively process this feedback by stepping back from their team activity, building plans, and ultimately putting them into action. In an experimental study (N = 212 undergraduate students), we compared the effects of team-level feedback with or without an intervention prompting shared reflection on the feedback (i.e., guided reflexivity) to a no feedback control group on team performance growth. The results showed that only the combination of team performance feedback and guided reflexivity lead to performance change, at the beginning of team activity. These findings suggest that prompting feedback processing at an early stage of collaborative work has the power to help teams benefit from their past experiences and improve performance.     

The formation of teacher work teams under adverse conditions: Towards a more realistic scenario for schools in distress

Group formation studies are rare in the literature on teacher professional learning communities (PLCs). But they are needed to render realistic scenarios and design interventions for practitioners who work in schools where teachers encounter distress and social adversity. Under these conditions, we may need approaches to PLC development that are not adequately captured with conventional models. Drawing from the literature on teacher collaboration, effective work teams, group development and identity, problem solving, conflict and collective resilience, the article traces the development of a grade level team in a distressed urban middle school that was charged to make the learning environment for students safer, more orderly, and more caring. When teachers face the social adversity that students bring to them from their life experiences, the problems faced by teachers are often not “friendly” problems. Rather these problems cause suffering: being challenged in one’s basic competencies as a teacher or one’s personal integrity. Oftentimes, they require collective action while they at the same time increase individual distress, fear of being seen as weak, and isolation. Work team development under these circumstances needs to capitalize on the desire to connect that may be imbued in collective suffering. Against norms of privacy, non-interference, and conflict avoidance, ideological rifts, and interfering interpersonal dynamics work team members need to look for the seeds of the desire to connect in the midst of this suffering.     

The power,and dilemma,of honesty: action learning for social entrepreneurs

This is an account of one particular set meeting during a year long programme for social entrepreneurs. It triggered a number of questions and insights for me about the amazing value of honesty, and its power. It released a great deal of energy, ownership and ‘control’. I realized how important it was to highlight, discuss and reflect on this, one of the fundamental values of action learning, with set members. However, it also posed dilemmas for them when returning to the ‘real’ world.     

Absent and Accounted For: Absenteeism and Cooperative Learning*

In a small section collaborative learning environment where student work teams promote mutual learning about investments, students limit the opportunity to learn from other students if they are absent from class. Absenteeism not only denies the student the opportunity to learn from others but also denies other members of the student's work team the opportunity to learn from the absent student. Other team members' absenteeism should be costly for individual performance if collaborative learning fosters learning and retention. The research finds that while absenteeism is detrimental to the student's own performance, absenteeism of other team members from team activities has a significant negative effect on both individual exam and homework scores. The conclusions validate the benefits of active learning and of encouraging attendance in collaborative learning environments in all disciplines.     

Enhancing postgraduate learning and development: a participatory action learning and action research approach through conferences

As supervisors who advocate the transformational potential of research both to generate theory and practical and emancipatory outcomes, we practice participatory action learning and action research (PALAR). This paper offers an illustrative case of how supervision practices based on action learning can foster emancipatory and lifelong learning within a university context that is becoming ever more focused on throughput of students, rather than on the quality of their learning. Conference attendance offers an excellent opportunity for postgraduate students to develop as researchers and lifelong learners, yet anxiety often prevents them from making the most of the learning experience. We explain how we encouraged the development of capabilities in students through a PALAR support programme that assisted postgraduate students prepare for a conference to make overall participation, presenting a paper and subsequent publication a true learning experience. We generated and analysed data from the written reflections of 11 postgraduate students who participated in the programme. The findings suggest that action learning, specifically PALAR, can be used to enable a rich learning experience for postgraduate students attending conferences through fostering relationships, building trust, a supportive environment, collaboration, communication and competence among them. Postgraduate students who experienced our PALAR support programme developed not only skills, knowledge, confidence and deeper appreciation of learning opportunities through conferences, but also understanding of the principles of PALAR that apply not just to the conference context but across all aspects of learning and research and life at large.     

Building high-performance teams through action learning

Team psychological safety is critical to team learning. When a team feels safe to talk about difficult issues and each team member feels comfortable to express feelings and ideas, the team continuously learns and improves its performance. Amy Edmondson identified team psychological safety in 1999 as a key to high-performance teams, and Google confirmed this in an internal research project in 2015. A lot has been written about team psychological safety, but very few research or experiences demonstrate how to increase the level of psychological safety in a team. The author has measured psychological safety in a team before and after a series of action learning sessions. The results are very encouraging: action learning increases the average level of psychological safety in the team and reduces the dispersion in team members’ evaluation of team psychological safety. A test was made to verify if the mere dynamic of team members participating in a facilitated workshop would have the same impact on the level of psychological safety, but this was not the case. It can therefore be concluded that action learning has a significant impact on team psychological safety and helps a team move toward high-performance.     

Early-Years Teachers’ Professional Upgrading in Science: a Long-Term Programme

In this paper, we present a professional development/upgrading programme in science for early-years teachers and investigate its impact on the teachers’ competencies in relation to their knowledge and teaching of science. The basic idea of the programme was to motivate the teachers by making them members of an action research group aimed at developing and implementing curriculum activities to which they would contribute and thus meaningfully engaging them in their own learning. The programme used a ‘collaborative partnership’ model for the development of the activities. In this model, the collaborative notion is defined as an act of ‘shared creation’: partners share a goal and members bring their expertise to the partnership. Within this context, the partners were a researcher in science education with a background in physics, who also served as a facilitator, and six in-service early-years teachers with a background in early-years pedagogy and developmental sciences, who had many years of experience (classroom experts). These teachers participated in the programme as co-designers, but were involved to a significantly lesser degree than the researcher. The programme procedures comprised group work and individual teachers’ class work. Data sources included teachers’ essays, field-notes, lesson recordings and group-work records. Data were qualitatively analysed. The main results indicate improvement of teachers’ ‘transformed’ knowledge of the subject matter, development/improvement of knowledge of instructional strategies, including factors related to quality of implementation of the activities, knowledge of the pupils and improvement of the teachers’ efficacy.     

Identification of dysfunctional cooperative learning teams and troubled individuals

In cooperative learning, students work together as a team to maximize the academic success of all the team members. The failure of even a single member can compromise the success of the entire team. Thus, to evaluate the functioning of the team reliably, it is necessary to consider both the performance of the individual team members and the interactions among them. In this study, a method was developed for identifying dysfunctional teams and troubled individuals by examining the correlation between the team scores obtained in sequential tests and the correlation between the scores obtained by the different team members. The effectiveness of the proposed method was evaluated via field experiments. Forty‐eight students were randomly assigned to cooperative learning teams and their learning performance assessed by four‐unit tests. The results indicated that the proposed method can identify the most troubled individuals in a team even when the team performance/grouping information is not taken explicitly into account. Furthermore, when the team information is considered, the method can identify both the dysfunctional teams and the troubled individuals within the teams. Therefore, the proposed method provides a useful basis for the development of computer‐assisted solutions for assessing the performance of cooperative learning teams.     

Creating a ‘world class’ programme: reciprocity and constraint in networked global collaboration

The article reflects on the construction of a common Master’s programme across four universities located on four continents, in order to explore the role of networks in international educational collaboration. The study draws on the documented processes of the principal members of the programme team. It is presented as a case study of the development of the programme that uses ideas drawn from actor‐network theory to draw attention to the conjunction of human and non‐human actors that shaped the resulting web‐based courses. Constraints arising from major institutional and systemic obstacles were addressed through the effects of the actor‐network. The reciprocity of action and de‐centring of individual activity made possible through the collaboration enabled the human actors to sustain a level of innovation within their own institutions that would not have been possible through them acting alone.     

Following the action in action learning: towards ethnomethodological studies of (critical) action learning

Action learning is a pedagogical practice that helps participants learn by talking about their workplace action with fellow participants (‘comrades in adversity’) in their action learning set. This paper raises questions about the action in action learning, such as: how do members of an action learning set learn from and through each other? How do they learn through their developing conversation and interaction?

To answer such questions, I argue that, ‘ethnomethodology’ (the study of ‘member's methods’ or ‘folk methods’ for doing any kind of practical action) is useful for showing the intricacy of the practical learning process in action learning, as in learning in action, more generally. The paper illustrates the conversational and interactional work of members doing things and learning together in action (for example discovering things in science and in board meetings); and argues that this approach may also be used to study action learning in practice.     

The role of collaboration in a comprehensive programme design process in inclusive education

This study focused on the role of collaboration in a comprehensive programme design process in inclusive education. The participants were six members of an inclusive education team and an educational designer who together comprised the design team. The study examined whether collaboration was evident in the practice of programme design and associated institutional processes. This was determined through an examination of institutional documents and reflections on collaborative practice provided by design team members in semi-structured interviews about their experiences. The study found that designing the programme collaboratively was more time intensive and at times challenging but ultimately produced a more coherent programme with transparent design, structure and content for students and teachers.     

Working with negative emotions in sets

This account draws upon learning from an incident in an action learning set where an individual challenged a mandatory organisational requirement. As a facilitator I reflect upon my initial defensive reaction to this challenge. The use of critical action learning to inform ourselves as facilitators of the underlying tensions between set members and the organisations within which we work is explored. The importance of recognising and working with emotions objectively in action learning sets in order to maximise opportunities to learn about ourselves as individuals and the organisations we work in is emphasised.     

Developing and changing practice in special educational needs through critically reflective action research: a case study

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the use of action research as a tool for developing critical reflection which has the potential to lead to change and development in practice in education, in particular, in the area of special educational needs (SEN) and inclusion. In order to support and illustrate the critique, a case study of a group of Dutch practising teachers and education professionals engaged in studying for a master's degree in SEN is used. The three-year programme of study followed by the group was a practice-based programme of professional development, with heavy emphasis on action research throughout. For this particular group action research was an entirely new concept, and indeed many of them expressed considerable scepticism about its validity as an approach to research, or for that matter, professional development, at the beginning of the programme. The whole group were working in areas associated with SEN where the need to change practice was an urgent imperative, due to changes in education policy and the rapid move towards inclusion in The Netherlands. Having been responsible for the development and teaching of the programme for several years, I decided to make a case study of one cohort of students in order to carry out some more structured and detailed evaluation of the impact of the programme on practice. I also wanted to reaffirm the general impression I had gathered from continuing student evaluation and feedback, that their work, and in particular the action research they had carried out, had led to genuine development and, in some cases, fairly radical change in their professional practice.     

Continuing professional development designed as second-order action research: work-in-progress

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to describe how Lesson Study as second-order action research can be applied and how we planned to evaluate and improve course design, learners’ progress, team members’ roles and learning objectives of a 2-year university course for English as a Second Language teachers. The article describes the concept of a Lesson Study conducted in a course for teachers with a minimum of 3 years of teaching experience, rather than for students or undergraduates as in traditional concepts of the Lesson Study approach. PFL (‘Pedagogy and Subject Didactics Programme’) is a 2-year programme consisting of three seminars and five groups meetings in which the participants focus on the reflection of their professional practice in their specific school situation. All participants are required to plan, carry out and document their own action research project. The team provides input on action research and current topics in language teaching and learning, and advises participants. The methodology follows a mixed-method approach based on action research methodologies including questionnaires, interviews and observations. Analyses are conducted qualitatively and quantitatively. The article presents the concept of the project but not yet findings at this stage due to curriculum development and approval issues.     

Action learning in postgraduate executive management education: an account of practice

The merits of action learning as a change tool and enabler of deep learning are well recognised. However, there is a gap in the literature of participants’ stories regarding their experiences on accredited postgraduate executive programmes underpinned by an action learning philosophy. The following account of practice addresses this gap and recounts participant experiences, in their own words, combined with my insights into these learning experiences of a Master of Business Studies. While the programme is underpinned by an action learning philosophy, it does not discount programmed learning. However, programmed learning is not privileged over the executives’ own experiences and knowledge of their own problems; they are seen as the experts. Throughout the programme, the participants are members of an action learning set in which they address real problems in their own organisations, problems on which they can take action. This account examines the experiences, as told by the executive participants, and so provides rich and in-depth insights into their learning experiences. It provides an opportunity for educators to appreciate the depth and richness of learning and change which can occur as a consequence of adopting an action learning approach on such programmes. Furthermore, this account provides evidence of how action learning can contribute and be an enabler to the development of executives as reflective and critical practitioners able to better face an ever more complex and challenging world.     

《烹饪教学论》课程中开展合作学习的探索与尝试

合作学习是指学生以小组为单位进行学习讨论的一种形式,充分体现学生的主体性,互补性,培养学生主动学习的能力。在高等师范院校烹饪专业教学过程中开展合作学习,对转变学生学习观念,帮助其树立良好的学习自信心,发挥学习主观能动性,培养创新能力有着重要作用。这是适应职教课程改革的需要,是烹饪教学发展的需要,也是实施全面素质教育的有力举措。     

Teacher perspectives on factors facilitating implementation of whole school approaches for resolving conflict

While social–emotional learning programmes in schools often have positive outcomes, many such initiatives are not well implemented and maintained. This paper reports on teacher reflections on the process of planning and implementing a whole school social–emotional learning (SEL) programme with a conflict resolution focus, called Enhancing Relationships in School Communities (ERIS). Ten primary schools participated in an 18‐month professional development programme offered by the researchers to assist schools to develop a whole school approach to handling interpersonal issues using a cooperative problem‐solving approach. Implementation (core) teams of three to five members, including principal or assistant principal and relevant teachers, attended workshops and managed the change process. In individual interviews, 29 core team members described the most significant changes that had taken place, what factors facilitated those changes and what assisted in overcoming barriers. A synthesised model of facilitators of implementation was developed on the basis of these interviews. The major components of the model included ensuring a whole school vision and process; pre‐programme engagement confirming commitment and alignment of researcher and teachers' visions; facilitative programme structure and processes such as linking the current programme to existing programmes and processes in the school; leadership and support for staff in the change process, for example, through the implementation team; the nature of the programme content; and monitoring and feedback processes to sustain motivation and inform on needs and outcomes.