Action Learning for teachers, school leaders and other educators
A soul-feeding side hustle?
This is a summary of an article I’ve just written for the excellent Professional Development Today, coming out in the Autumn.
I’m a big fan of Action Learning as a powerful form of collaborative professional development. I’m still a member of my first ever Action Learning Set (ALS), begun in 2007 as part of the Clore Cultural Leadership programme. Last year, I facilitated an ALS for education charity leaders. And during 2024, I’ve had the privilege of leading an ALS for a group of teachers in Slough, commissioned by creative learning organisation Artswork. In 2024-25, I’m keen to facilitate Action Learning with new groups of teachers, leaders, and other educators. Please get in touch if you’d like to know more.
A quick warning: Action Learning is very different from Action Research! Whilst there are some shared principles, I think that using the terms interchangeably can create confusion.
The Soul of Teaching
“If thou of fortune be bereft, and in thy store there be but left two loaves, sell one, and with the dole, buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.”
The late, great Sir Tim Brighouse often recounted the old Persian tale of the Hyacinth and the Loaf. His message was that, while school leaders and teachers of course must focus primarily on the immediate learning needs of their pupils, they also need and deserve to nourish their own intellectual curiosity. I remember, as a recently qualified teacher in the 1990s, an enlightened headteacher paying for me to undertake an Easter holiday mountain leadership training course. This ‘hyacinth’ had no bearing on the ‘loaf’ of my Summer term classroom, but fed my teaching soul, enabling me to lead new approaches to outdoor education, and refuelling me to stay in teaching for longer.
As I return to a close-to-full time role teaching, I can feel both the benefits and the drawbacks of the ‘technocratic turn’ that teaching has taken over the last couple of decades. Everything from school organisation, to safeguarding, to curriculum design, lesson planning, and above all pedagogy, has become much more precise. Much of this is welcome. However, this is creating a constraining, more instrumental and uniform environment for most teachers. Add to this a feeling that schools, their budgets and their staff are more stretched and fatigued than ever, and the space for all but the most confident teachers in the most enlightened schools to ‘feed their souls’ feels squeezed.[i]
This has led to a complex and often contradictory context for teacher professional development. Despite assertions from government that ECF and NPQ should be minimum entitlement - roots from which teachers can grow in ways that are attuned to their own contexts, talents, interests and values - in practice these frameworks have followed the dysfunctional pattern of so many government interventions. What starts as a ‘minimum entitlement’ becomes an overbearing straitjacket. As I’ve written elsewhere, a new government has the opportunity to become a ‘space creator’ for schools, leaders and teachers, creating space for professional learning that goes beyond the ‘implementation’ of the early career framework or the ‘delivery’ of the NPQs.
About Action Learning
Action Learning is an internationally recognised form of professional development, widely used since the 1940s in businesses and the public and charitable sectors. It is a collaborative problem-solving approach where professionals work together in ‘Action Learning Sets (ALS)’ to find solutions to real-world challenges they face. The process is highly scaffolded, with a clear structure and some prescribed ‘non-negotiable’ rules, designed to help participants elicit and act on their own answers to their dilemmas. ALS members provide support and challenge each other, holding one another accountable for progress.
Given its prevalence across other sectors, it seems surprising that Action Learning appears to have rarely been used to support teachers. The only detailed, sustained study available took place in the 2000s in Australia, although my recent Linked In conversations are unearthing other examples (some of which, to be honest I wouldn’t call action learning). John Furlong describes the potential of action learning for teachers as ‘a dynamic and interactive tool that can link the teacher learning processes of reflection, community, leadership, action and feedback. It acknowledges and utilises the creativity, wisdom and practice of teachers as professionals[ii]’.
My emerging hypothesis it that participating in an ALS for a significant period of time Might support educators in:
- Practicing more open and dialogic questioning approaches;
- Becoming more reflective in their outlook;
- Sustaining effective, self-motivated and self-managing ‘problem-solving communities’ – avoiding simplistic notions of ‘sharing best practice’ that rarely have an impact on teacher learning; and
- Providing a window for collaborative autonomy that might just make a crucial difference to retention, including through career advancement.
Action Learning for Teachers in practice
Our ALS of six teachers has met three times, with two more planned for the Autumn term. Held after school, Each session lasts approximately ninety minutes.
Round 1: Checking in
As well as the usual quick check, presenters from the previous meeting discuss any progress made on their issue since then.
Round 2: Bidding
In this round, every person in the group proposes one issue they might like to ‘present on’. The group then come to a consensus about who will present. I suggested that people should think of their issue as a ‘dilemma’ – one that they probably wouldn’t discuss with their line manager or team tomorrow. All good dilemmas are laced with elements of vulnerability.
Round 3: Presenting
The presenter then talks about their issue, without interruption, for around 5-10 minutes. Teachers tend to be good – sometimes too good – at quickly getting to the point. Often teachers needed some encouragement to give good detail and the ‘backstory’ around a particular issue.
Round 4: Clarifying questions
This round enables participants to ask factual questions to provide further information, check any assumptions.
Round 5: Open Questions Discussion
The discussion rules are deceptively simple. I summarise them as ‘no stories, no suggestions’. Teachers are natural tinkerers, helpers and problem solvers. Many found it tricky not to suggest, or relate the presenter’s dilemma to their own experiences. During this question, the presenter normally comes to a realisation around a small number of actions or next steps, which can be further probed by participants.
Round 6: Presenter in charge
Towards the end of any session, the floor given back to the presenter. At this point, they can ask for more direct suggestions, advice or opinions or examples of similar experiences that might inform their actions.
Round 7: Final plenary
The Facilitator recounts the agreed actions (and timescale) for agreement with the presenter and the group collectively reflects on the process.
Some emerging questions
I feel that I am at the start of my own understanding on how action learning could best support teachers and school leaders. A number of other questions are emerging:
- Could an ALS work effectively with a group of educators with diverse range or roles (from teaching assistants to teachers to school leaders)?
- What might be the best combination of face to face and online meetings?
- How might this work best across a group of teachers in the same school or MAT?
- How can action learning support teachers in a school where the leadership culture is not conducive to the solutions that emerge?
Hoping for hyacinths
For me, action learning is as a form of ‘emotion-based professional development’. It creates a window for collaborative learning and problem solving that goes beyond the technical or rational. At a time of hopeful change in our school system, perhaps it’s time, and perhaps there will be space, to reclaim professional learning as a humanising experience, ultimately predicated on the power of human relationships. Action Learning is one example of how this might happen, but others are emerging, designed to complement rather than replace the vital professional learning that is more focused on building specific understanding and skills, or on changing specific classroom practices. If you’d like my support to start an Action Learning Set in your school, MAT or organisation, please get in touch.
[i] As I wrote in Schools Week during the height of the pandemic, ‘A relentless focus on the technical breeds a culture of compliance over curiosity. Principles become prescriptions; possible ingredients become a specific recipe; coaching becomes semi-scripted advice….Will teachers be enabled to identify and make the changes that are pertinent to their own challenges and moral purpose? Will they want to stay in a profession that appears to value the technocratic and reliable over the developmental and unpredictable? And even if they do stay, will they develop the qualities that will enable them to lead change in and beyond their classrooms in future?
[ii] Furlong J. (2012) Foreword to Aubusson, P., Ewing, R. and Hoban, G. (2012) Action learning in schools: Reframing teachers' professional learning and development. London: Routledge, 2012. P2