Social and Collaborative Learning in Action

I’ve been sketching out an idea for a Leadership Development community, exploring how, over time, a Scaffolded approach provides appropriate provocation and diverse perspective, structured sense making, opportunity for rehearsal and prototyping of new behaviours, and a legacy of sharing and storytelling.

There’s a real tension within Leadership Development to create an ongoing conversation, providing opportunity to contextualise learning within everyday practice, versus the reality that learning is typically served up to people in abstract and time bound courses.

A more effective approach is to create a Scaffolded journey, with certain formal provocations to create disturbance and reframe understanding, alongside space to hear the perspectives of all participants.

Central to this are the Loops of Learning that we set up: the ways we carry learning into our communities to make sense of it, the meaning that we create, the ways we use that understanding to plan for action and take action, then structured reflection and further opportunities for sense making.

The ‘sense making’ that sits at the heart of this is both individual and collective, which i have explored in more depth elsewhere.

One of the real challenges to this is that it leads to messy and diverse outcomes, which are inconvenient to measure using fixed assessment mechanisms: instead, we need more creative and triangulated approaches that mix ‘self reported’ learning (i believe i learnt this), with observed outcomes (i/we saw you do something different), as well as more formal metrics. It’s worth remembering that strength may come from diversity, more so than from conformity.