A note on Action Learning

A personal learning process developed by Professor Reg Revans a physicist who worked at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge in the 1930’s.

 Action Learning is a means of development, intellectual, emotional or physical, that requires its subjects,

through involvement in some real, complex problem,

to achieve change

sufficient to improve his observable behaviour

Learning-by-Doing may be a simpler description of this process.

In action learning programmes, subjects learn with and from each other by mutual support, advice and criticism during their discussions about real problems.

The learning achieved is not so much an acquaintance with new factual knowledge nor technical art conveyed by some authority such as an expert or a teacher,

It is the more appropriate use by and reinterpretation of

the subject’s existing knowledge.

This interpretation is a social process, carried on among a number of learners who cause each other to examine afresh many ideas that they would otherwise have continued to take for granted.

Action learning particularly obliges subjects to become aware of their own value systems, by demanding that the real problems tackled carry some risk of personal failure.

Action learning demands real-time and observable activity on the subject’s part and thus tests whether the subjects are committed to what they say they are committed to.

http://www.jtiltd.com/al_definitions.htm