Isabel Rimanoczy enunciates that there are two different worlds of adult learning:
- The scholarly endeavour of synthesis of existing literature followed by empirical research—conceptual frameworks and theory building to explain practices.
- Practitioners within a community of practice—people daily face challenges, they employ their best judgement combining information available, conceptualisation, intuition and experience. Theoretical recommendations are seldom literally followed and practice is only occasionally converted back into theoretical frameworks, resulting in a gap between the real-life communities of practice and scholarly literature.
Action reflection learning (ARL) is an example of the second bullet—the community of practice grounded learning had only recently been coded formally as methodology. It is based on the 1940s action learning approach of Reg Revans. A group of people (set) periodically meet with the purpose to resolve work related problems—individuals table their problems and the members of the group help the individual find answers by asking questions. The implementation of a set advisor (or learning coach) evolved in that complex problems required specialist input, such as just-in-time knowledge, skills, teaching of new tools/techniques. The ARL approach has many uses, for example: improving team performance; creating post merger interventions; coaching and mentoring of individual members; designing accelerated development for young high potential entrants; organisational change; crisis intervention by task forces; developing synergy across teams; etc.
The coding of ARL practice resulted in the identification of 17 common elements, namely:
1. Taking ownership for one's learning.
2. Just in time intervention.
3. Linking.
4. Balance task/learning.
5. Questioning.
6. Guided reflection.
7. Feedback.
8. Unfamiliar environments.
9. Exchange of learnings.
10. Appreciative approach.
11. Safe environments.
12. Holistic involvement of the individual.
13. Learning and personality styles.
14. Coaching one-on-one.
15. Sequenced learning.
16. Learning coach.
17. Five system levels—professional, personal, team, organisational & business/task.
Rimanoczy, I. 2007. Action reflection learning: a learning methodology based on common sense. Industrial and Commercial Training, 39(1), 43-51.
Rimanoczy, I. 2007. Action learning and action reflection learning: are they different? Industrial and Commercial Training, 39(5), 246-256.
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