Action Technologies: supporting continuing professional development.

Ann Jackson, East Riding of Yorkshire Community Education Service, UK.

Paper presented at the International Lifelong Learning Conference, 9-11 July 1999, University College Worcester

The Context

Continuing professional development is an essential element in any over-all strategy for lifelong learning. However, there are currently a number of political and economic pressures which result in such development being seen increasingly in terms of discrete, usually accredited courses rather than as something embedded in on-going professional life. These pressures have certainly impacted upon the Youth, Community and Adult Education sectors within which I work.

As the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) noted in their report on Adult Education and Youth Work In Local Authorities, recent years have seen a time of ‘fragmentation and change’ for such services (OFSTED 1996, 15). Local Authorities have faced considerable financial pressures, and non-statutory services have in many cases suffered severe cuts as efforts were made to maintain the statutory sector. Across the country, local government reorganisation has resulted in adult education, youth, and community services being fragmented, restructured or dismantled, as the new single-tier authorities attempt to establish identity within restricted budgets. Where free-standing adult education services remain, they are increasingly expected to be financially self-sufficient, and are consequently highly dependent on the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), to which they bid as external institutions through colleges.

The OFSTED report goes on to point out that in such times, professional support and development for staff is more, rather than less important, and that to cut staff development budgets is therefore a 'false economy’. (OFSTED, 1996,15). Nevertheless, the responses to a survey of local authority adult education services in England which I carried out in 1995/6 showed that staff development had indeed been a casualty of endemic change and of the consequent financial pressures. (Jackson, 1998, 14-16). In some cases, the replies from staff-development officers graphically highlighted the despair which they felt in this situation. One respondent, facing a cut in the staff development budget of over 25%, noted:

I am aware that the programme is largely a product of me (0.5). If I go….. We are very under-resourced to manage the programme well. We are about to be drastically cut.

(Jackson, 1998, 15)

An understandable response to such a scenario has been that adult education services, and youth and community services also, have tended to see staff development more and more in terms of accredited training programmes, which are in the main competence-based, and which are linked to FEFC funding criteria. This shift not only helps to address financial considerations; such programmes also help satisfy political priorities in terms of achieving national training targets. There are further benefits in the situation for staff and organisation:

Certainly, it has led to relatively clearly identifiable progression routes for staff seeking qualifications. It has also meant that Services can meet Quality Assurance criteria to satisfy OFSTED and FEFC requirements. (Jackson, 1998b, 78).

However, restricting professional development to the provision of such training programmes may well result in organisational needs being met at the expense of the needs of individual staff members.

Training is one of several social control mechanisms in an organisation. One of its primary functions is to socialise individuals into the organisation and to help them develop appropriate expectations for role performance in their specific positions. (Jahns, 1981, 103)

There is also a need for staff development to be on-going – truly continuing professional development – and not the stop-go experience which training programmes tend to provide.

Finally, continuing education in the professions must be a continuous process. Occasional doses of information or occasional learning experiences do not usually result in meaningful and lasting learning. (Grabowski, 1981, 92).

The problems addressed

This paper is based on two projects, the first of which arose out of my previous working situation as manager of a large adult education centre in what was, before local government reorganisation, one of the biggest adult education services in England. In addition to my management role, I had a cross-service responsibility for staff development, and in particular for the training of the army of part-time tutors on which such services depend. I was aware that decisions about what constituted appropriate staff development for these tutors were normally taken by those such as myself, who had a management and/or staff development brief. Despite adult education principles of learner autonomy and involvement, tutors were not in a position to materially affect the training, staff development and professional support which they received. Irwin Jahns points to the irony of this situation:

The compulsory nature of training…contradicts the central premise of adult education as a voluntary enterprise. (Jahns, 1981, 95)

It was also something which Graham et al commented on in their survey of training for part-time tutors:

There was no suggestion from trainees on any of the courses that they had been involved in the setting of course objectives, or that they had been consulted….It is less easy to understand why trainees were not more involved in course organisation and planning. (Graham, Daines, Sullivan, Harris and Baum, 1982, 157-8)

I therefore decided to involve a group of part-time tutors in an exploration into what might constitute for them effective professional support and development. Tutors were invited to volunteer for the project, and fourteen did so and remained committed over a period of almost three years. During that time, we met termly in two groups to decide on and plan the staff development techniques we would try out during the following term and to evaluate and reflect upon what had been tested and experienced during the current term. By adopting an action research approach, we were setting up a cycle of planning, action, reflection and further planning which mirrors Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (Kolb, 1984)

The second project again arose out of my working situation, this time as a Community Education Officer in a newly formed Community Education Service within a single-tier authority resulting from local government reorganisation. The Community Education Service was created by amalgamating what had been the Adult Education Service and the Youth Service in part of the previous larger two-tier authority. In addition to all the uncertainties surrounding the reorganisation process, there was therefore the problem of marrying together two services with different histories and different ethos.

One of my cross-service responsibilities was now quality assurance, and I faced a daunting multiplicity of frameworks and criteria – from OFSTED, FEFEC, the Audit Commission, and the Basic Skills Agency, to name but four – all of which, as a service, we needed to satisfy, and all of which would be used at some stage to assess the quality of our provision. We also faced the requirement to set up a system of self-assessment so that we could prove that we were monitoring our provision in an on-going way.

It was agreed that I should set up a team based on principles of peer-assessment to monitor the quality of delivery within the service. Senior Youth Workers and Adult Education Organisers would be invited to volunteer for the team for a limited time, and membership would gradually rotate around the service. At any one time, there would be a Youth Worker, an Adult Education Organiser (Basic Skills) and an Adult Education Organiser (Mainstream) on the team, and the frameworks to be used were to be the OFSTED ones for Youth Work and Adult Education as these complemented each other. One of the benefits I hoped would emerge from this approach was a better understanding across the service of the whole range of learning and development opportunities being provided.

The team was trained using discursive and action-learning techniques so that the criteria and the standards were experienced and internalised well in advance of the first quality monitoring visit.

Learning from action technologies.

There is growing recognition in the literature that action enquiry, by incorporating reflection and experiential learning, is an effective means of encouraging professional development. Pamela Lomax notes the educational potential of action enquiry, when she says:

Action enquiry is educational because it enables practitioners to see their practice as part of a living educational theory that is generated from their own critical enquiries. (Lomax, 1995, 50)

Jean McNiff, looking at action research as a way in which teachers in the school system can develop and improve their practice, comments that:

Action research …encourages a teacher to be reflective of his own practice in order to enhance the quality of education for himself and his pupils. It is a form of self-reflective enquiry…(McNiff, 1988,1)

She warns that:

Action research is not just teaching. It is being aware and critical of that teaching, and using this self-critical awareness to be open to a process of change and improvement of practice. (McNiff, 1988, 6)

In describing the methodology of action research, she identifies an experiential learning cycle, which Ann Brooks and Karen Watkins also recognise as characteristic of action enquiry:

At the heart of all action enquiry is a recurring cycle of action, reflection, hypothesis, and revised or new action based on the reflections and hypotheses about what occurred in our previous action. (Brooks and Watkins, 1994, 1).

Sharon Nodie Oja and Lisa Smulyan specifically point to the potential for professional development resulting from participation in action research.

Practitioner participation in action research also addressed growing concerns in the 1970’s that traditional staff development programmes did not meet teacher needs….Teachers participating in action research would also become more critical and reflective about their own practice. (Oja and Smulyan, 1989, 9)

Action technologies, therefore, derive their power as methods of staff development by being embedded in the actual world of work of the participants, by encouraging reflection on practice, and also by encouraging participants to move towards autonomy and to take responsibility for their own professional development. However, Pamela Lomax adds a word of warning :

A strength of action research is that practitioners have a subjective understanding of the issues; a problem with this is that it is difficult to see things objectively. (Lomax, 1995, 54)

One way of encouraging a greater level of objectivity is by ensuring that the undertaking is a collegial rather than an individual activity, so that perceptions are mirrored and modified and their validity tested by discussion with others with similar experiences. And indeed action research is seen as an essentially collaborative activity, ‘which allows for mutual understanding and consensus, democratic decision making, and common action.’ (Oja and Smulyan, 1989, 12). In both of the projects considered in this paper, action enquiry was undertaken as a collegial activity, and the interaction between group members at our meetings encouraged critical reflection in an on-going discourse. What we were working towards was the process which Michael Collins describes as embodying Habermas’s notion of communicative action.

Communicative action describes an ideal, though conceivably achievable group learning experience where participants put forward their own views on the problem at hand, listen carefully and respectfully to those of others, and seriously examine all relevantly identified information introduced to the situation. It does not take the form of a debate, or the mere weighing of pros and cons. The process is more rational and democratic – a kind of on-going, thoughtful conversation. (Collins, 1991, 12).

The problem addressed in the first project, namely what constitutes effective professional support and development for part-time tutors, was tackled within a case study framework. The part-time tutors and myself discussed and selected possible techniques, planned them, put them into action, evaluated them and made further decisions based on the outcomes. In this way, we were adopting a curriculum development model, and approaching it through a well-tried action research cycle as outlined in and supported by the literature. The techniques explored included peer observation, in-depth interviews, videoing teaching, reflection on practice, evaluation, and training sessions set up in response to needs identified by the participants. While each of these techniques had its own particular merits, all of them were generated as elements of the action research itself, and so the outcomes and the usefulness of the analysis result from that approach. Hence all decision as to what was and was not effective were also made as part of the action research process. It would seem, then, that action research has the potential for encouraging staff development at a macro level into which other techniques can be subsumed.

Two of the strengths of this approach were that the part-time tutors themselves were involved in the decision making, and that the feedback did indeed come from them, and was therefore an assessment from their perspective of the usefulness of the techniques. What emerged was therefore an ‘insider’ perspective. The project gave a voice to these part-time tutors, and also created a forum in which those voices could be listened to constructively.

That the evaluation of what was tried took place within group meetings was also a strength recognised in action research. Some tutors were more skilled at analysing their experience than others, but whatever the level of skill, it was agreed that more came out of a shared process than from individual evaluation.

It was therefore understandable that, as the case study developed, the groups began to function as support groups for their members, and to provide a safe yet challenging space in which to discuss problems of practice. This resulted in a second series of action research cycles being generated within the research design, as responses to specific problems were suggested within the group, were then tried out in the field, and evaluated at a subsequent meeting. The benefits were appreciated not only by the tutor whose problem was being addressed, but also by other group members as a learning experience for them.

It was this aspect of the project – the evolution of the groups into support groups for their members and the discussions around problems of practice within that supportive yet challenging framework – which participants unanimously agreed was most beneficial in terms of learning, development and professional support. This was not something which we had envisaged and planned for from the beginning. As I note elsewhere:

It is significant that the groups were not specifically set up with the intention that they become support groups; they actually developed along those lines. This indicates that it was something those part-time tutors wanted and needed, even though they were perhaps not consciously aware of it from the beginning. (Jackson, 1998b, 128)

So ironically, it was the spontaneously generated second action research cycle, situated within the over-all action research design, which tutors identified as having the greatest value. However, it would be artificial to view this aspect of the project in isolation, as the other techniques which were tested and evaluated were often the source or the trigger for the problems of practice which were raised and the responses suggested.

It is important to acknowledge, however, that tutor groups do not inevitably evolve in this way, and I would suggest that there were some aspects of climate and context which helped the process in this instance. That the tutors participated voluntarily, that the project was long-term and groups therefore had the time to develop openness and trust, and that the groups were sufficiently small to enable this to happen, were all factors which helped the support groups to emerge.

In the second project, the problem for the Quality Monitoring Team was to understand and internalise the criteria for assessing the delivery of youth work and adult education, to ensure that decisions were consistent across the team, and to feed back to staff in a constructive way. Team members had volunteered for different reasons, and an initial phase of intensive discussions between the four of us enabled us to explore those agendas and to share ownership of the purpose of the project and the process which we agreed we needed to go through. Although we were fortunate in having recourse to in-put from our head of service, who is a trained and experienced OFSTED inspector for adult education, we recognised that we also needed to learn experientially if we were really to get an understanding of how to proceed.

We therefore set up an action learning sequence, looking first of all as a group at a series of video-taped sessions. This gave us an initial opportunity to share what we were seeing and to explore how this related to the criteria, and through a process of reflection, to gradually move towards consensus. We then carried out a series of observational visits in the field, at the centres managed by the team members. In each instance, two members of the team carried out the observation, one of whom was the team specialist in the type of provision being observed. This approach provided the benefits of both insider and outsider perspectives. It also enabled the team to share their perceptions and hence, as this phase progressed, their judgements. A further benefit was that two people were naturally able to see more than one, and so more material for analysis was generated. These visits were followed by feed-back to the staff involved, and then further discussion within the team which helped to standardise our practice.