 Becay, rydw i'n ddod o'n adeiladau'r adeiladau? Rydw i'n ddod! Rydw i. Rhywbeth y gallwch i'n ddod, rwyf yn ddweud ar gyfer amser, a'r gweithio, rydw i'n ddod, dwi'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod i'n ddod, i ddim yn ymddangos i'r cyfrifiadau o gweithio a phobl yn ymddangos i'r cyfrifiadau, First is learning and teaching lead for the business law faculty down at the University of Portsmouth, but also as a researcher in terms of my focus is degree apprenticeships and also as a teacher as well. So yeah, I've used it in sort of a number of capacities and do find it my sort of go to when we are presented with sort of difficult problems or need of change. It was my, you know, it is, hopefully it will be time for something new for you. It was my then colleague, Dr Cheryl Brook, who really inspired me to try this, sort of something new which was action learning. And I think, Jim, I think you noticed one of my publications about it. So we started having a chat, didn't we? And I started to kind of share with you my sort of love of action learning. So I apologise in advance to anyone in the group that this isn't new for you. And the session really is to sort of give you a quick intro session into action learning, which give you hopefully some kind of new approaches perhaps to your teaching, perhaps to your research or even your sort of kind of everyday problem solving. So the aim really is to provide some understanding of action learning, as I say. So more practically ideas of how you might be able to leverage some of this into your research or your day to day work. I'm going to share some examples as well with you, but then as Jim mentioned there, sort of give it a go, but sort of nothing to worry. We're just going to have a little play around with it just to sort of kind of get you going and sort of thinking, actually, you know, this could be for you or might be for you in certain of the groups that you're in. Now my interest really within action learning, I was really interested in the kind of the roots of action learning because having spent the second part of my career in management education, it was actually developed to educate managers. And it was sort of Reg Revens who sort of looked into that particularly using it with sort of NHS, sort of some large engineering organisations as well. So it is kind of widely used in terms of pockets of areas, but particularly NHS, particularly education, have always kind of used it. And for that, I like the way he kind of poses that there can't be any real learning without action. And for me, this really ran true. I think there's a couple of people in the audience who know me and I sort of really like to get things going, take action. And so it was very much that, you know, if we, if we, if we go on a course, for example, if you don't sort of use that course and get into it relatively quickly, you tend to sort of like, you tend to lose that learning. So that's what I particularly like about action learning, you sort of gain a bit of knowledge, you have an idea, you put that into practice and you make sure there's some application. So it's all very much about application about taking action, but then reflecting on, well, why did that happen when I did that? You know, how did I get that result? If I tweak this a little bit, would it change? And so then you'd go back and perhaps give it another re, you know, have another discussion with your group or your set. And so it's very much about reiterative learning as well as we keep going back and around and around hopefully improving things kind of as we go. The other point is, is that it's about solving real problems. And it's kind of helping to make change. And I'll give you a few more examples of this a little bit later. But it's kind of important to think of, you know, if you do have an issue, firstly to think of that it's about, it's not just a puzzle. And what I mean by that, it can be easily solved. So jigsaw puzzles are a smashing example of this. So, you know, if you've got a jigsaw puzzle, and my sister gives me some really tough ones, if you get a jigsaw puzzle, and you kind of think, oh, I'm never, how am I ever going to resolve this? But actually, you, because you kind of know there's going to be an answer, a solution to this, you try different approaches, you look at it a different way, you go away, make yourself a cup of coffee, have a look at it in a different direction. And you know there's a solution. And, you know, lo and behold, you get that, you know, that final solution. But with a problem, it's slightly different. It's that sort of scenario when you've got an issue and it kind of hangs around. It's the sort of thing you probably see on your monthly agendas that work each week. And you think, oh, we always have a good old mode about that, but nothing ever gets done. We don't sort of kind of take any action. Normally, because we don't know how to take that action. And we haven't kind of focused on it enough. So what action learning does is it sort of gives us, it sort of presents a situation where we can kind of sit around the table and really focus on that, that particular problem. Not thinking that we're absolutely going to resolve the problem, but that we're actually can sort of partially work towards making progress in terms of resolving the problem. So the idea is that you've got kind of six or a survey of people that are sort of, and particularly that they've got lots of different viewpoints. That's really important to have that kind of diversity in your team, whether it's their experience, whether it's their culture, whether it's their attitudes, their mindsets. It's really good, the more different points of views you can have to kind of gather their perspectives and experiences. And then essentially as a group, you work on a life problem. Now it can be a problem that is more sort of your own personal problem. So in more action learning sets where you kind of help each other and support each other through own personal development, that can be very useful. But it can be a shared problem too, so that you take a look at this problem, probably driven by practice and we kind of think, right, you know, let's all get together, let's make a difference here instead of hanging around on that agenda week after month after month or whatever. Let's really take some action here and see what we can do, you know, what's in our control to make a difference. And within that we've got quite a safe environment and an area that we feel that people can question you, they can support you. And it's through that then that we get that sort of real sort of, you know, we can sit back and critically reflect and sort of think, right, well, perhaps I can try some other areas and other things to take a look at. There are a sort of a few main key principles and it's very much about that learning starts from not knowing. And that sounds a bit of a strange thing to say, but when we think about it, often we have a problem and because we don't know, that's when it does hang on the agenda or it's sort of always out there, but we don't, we're not, we're not kind of brave enough to say, actually, do you know what, I know nothing about this, I don't even know where to start on this. And it's, that's through that bravery that actually can start forming some really good sets and groups of people together that are sort of interested because what they have got, although they don't know all the answers yet, what they have got is that absolute commitment to try and solve the problem. They're happy to take responsibility and to take action towards that. And that's where we get the learning. So it's like as a group we're kind of saying that, you know, we've all studied, we've all got experiences, but what we're saying is through our questioning and sort of challenging each other, we have then gaining that learning even more and that's kind of when the magic happens. We also need to be thinking that learning should also be equal to or kind of greater than the rate of change. Otherwise, what we find is we're starting to go backwards because things are changing so much in our environment and certainly in higher education at the moment, that's certainly, you know, is in the case. I don't want to get too well too much on AI, but it does offer a really nice example. So I'm sure a lot of us are involved in sort of in teaching teams, I know our teaching teams, we have those that say, yeah, you know, bring AI on, I'm interested in it, let's look at it and we have others that don't. And what we're finding that in those that are interested is we're naturally asking each other questions, we're kind of sharing experiences, we're saying, oh, don't know about that, we're sort of being brave and honest with each other. And so that's a little bit what sort of, you know, action learning is about, but it sort of more, it sort of brings, it forces people together rather than having those sort of water cooler conversations. And so then we're starting to gain a better understanding because of that, you know, which assessments are AI proof or what's acceptable for use of AI for students and so on and so on. But for those that aren't entertaining, what happens is you start to have a bigger knowledge gap, because what we've got is this rate of change and it's a fast rate of change. So we start to get this real big gap in between. Now, kind of, Reven's was a real keen to on his, quite like his equations and I think for those that you do like an equation, this can be quite interesting in the fact that essentially what he's saying is that, you know, we've got all this programme knowledge that we've had from studying experience and through questioning, that's where the learning is coming from. And again, if the learning is sort of needs to be greater than or at least equal to the rate of change. So again, when we're kind of thinking about AI, it's really or any sort of area of problem, it is so important to keep asking those fresh questions, unless you'll sort of kind of get left behind is kind of what he's saying. So it can be, you know, kind of quite powerful. What I'd like to do is get you proposed to you to actually think about some of the issues and problems that you've got in your kind of day-to-day scenarios. You know, just have a just a few minutes just to, you know, write a few, it's alright, we're not going to share them, but write a few points down in terms of some real issues you feel like you've got at work. So be careful to kind of avoid the technical problems where, you know, the jigsawd scenario where we know there is going to be, you know, through time and procedures and asking the right people, we'll be able to solve them. But take a look at more the adaptive problems that you might have. I suppose the easiest way to look at this is it tends to be more people related on the whole. They tend to be the real sort of what we would call wicked problems. So that might be worth taking a look at. And also it's that, again, it's those no ready solutions. I would probably update them and say you can't find the answers in books, but also not on JetGPT. So again, it's that sort of difficult problems that you've got in your working life. Hopefully sort of two or three things might have, you might have been involved in a meeting this morning and say, oh, God, how are we ever going to, you know, resolve that one. That's the kind of thing that might be or hopefully in the next few days that you'll have something, gosh, that's really tough. Perhaps we do need to get together in terms of action learning. Just one or two, maybe another few minutes. So I'm kind of hoping that this stage you've got a few ideas of kind of issues starting to work around in your brain. I just thought this was quite a nice one because either we've all been through the school system, or perhaps we've got your parents have, you know, we've got the children, and that we're sort of quite associated with school. But you can start to adapt this to find other problems, although it's, you know, particularly, you know, it's got a bit of age there, 2011. But I think it's quite a lot of how to deal with angry, demanding parents. But, you know, I suppose in higher education, we could say how to deal with, you know, demanding students. We could be saying how to deal with demanding staff, for example. This is one that we're looking at in our faculty at the moment. It's how to implement standards of learning throughout the school system. So without our faculty system. So we're trying to get that consistency at sort of, you know, getting a better approach amongst each of the schools. So that's kind of one that we can adapt to sort of help us find or identify the wicked problem that we're trying to define. It's quite important to define the problem, take some time over it. I think one probably that we've all got is how to balance personal and professional lives. I think that probably is one that probably rings a bell with a few of us. And also in terms of, in terms of sort of, you know, interruptions and just sort of our day to day management. So again with that, we can sort of start to kind of help and come up with the different problems that might be a mutual problem with a group of other people. It might be an individual. So what happens in the set? Well, first of all, you would have a meeting. You'd meet up. You would probably lay, you do really need to lay some ground rules, because to have that safe and trusted environment, because actually you are talking about emotions. You're talking about the things that really sort of angu, the things that you find really difficult and frustration. So again, you do need the ground rules. And they aren't normally sort of common sense as you expect, but it's just making sure that you've got that settle. The other thing to remember is in the first meeting, you would sort of obviously get your introductions. You might be a group that is known to each other. And this is what's quite nice about actually learning. There's flexibility. There's no right or wrong way in terms of how you run the sessions. So we've already said it could be that you're presenting a problem, a group-related shared problem. It could be individual problems. That's, you could have your first meeting online. It works very well online. You could have it face to face. So again, it sort of represents different ways of doing it. But on the whole, what you would do is you'd ask for a volunteer. And that volunteer would kind of share their share their problem or how they see the problem. They then speak with absolutely uninterrupted. Now, this is really difficult. It's much harder than you might think it is. So the person sort of speaks for sort of two, three minutes or it can be, you can say to the person, you could speak for as long as you like about the problem. But do bear in mind how long you've got because sometimes I've had sessions where people have spoken for about half an hour about their problem each. And so, you know, the session said, it is worth to be mindful of time. But what you find, even in sort of five minutes, the rest of the group that are listening, and so it's a lot about active listening here, is about the, is you're actually bursting at the scenes to try and help them and resolve their problem. So, oh, I know that. You know, all you need to do is X, Y, Z, but it's not like that. The sort of the way you go about the problems is far more coaching. So it's about the volunteers sort of looking at different ways of doing things for themselves. So what happens after the person has had their sort of, they've shared their problem, is there might be one or two questions that you have clarifying questions. But on the whole then, the idea being is that those listening start to write down some questions. I've seen this done in a number of ways. And one way is literally just writing on post-it notes is really good. And I'll show you a little example of that in a second. But that can work really well. Or it can be if you kind of, and it's quite nice if you're new in the group and it's a bit of an anonymous group, that works quite well. If you sort of really know each other, sometimes it's quite nice just asking the questions. But the idea is the volunteer then sort of kind of collates the questions in some shape or form either by writing down or they've got a post-it notes in front of them. And almost starting to think of say the 10 or so questions they've got thinking, right, which are the ones that really they would like to answer. So they don't have to answer every question they can if they want. They don't have to answer every question. So it might be for instance, they get a question, what steps have you taken so far towards your problem? And it might make me think, well, actually, well, I've done this and I've done that. But actually, perhaps they've got a point, perhaps I haven't explored, perhaps I need to go back to basics again and think of other ways how I can look at the problem and take different sort of techniques to try and solve the problem. So that would then be my action from the question that I would then take away in the following week. I would give a bit of a practice, experience that and then I would report back to the set in terms of how that went. Another example is, you know, why is this problem important for you? So it could be that you've not sort of, you feel it's important to you, but actually you could be thinking, well actually, great question. Who else is it? Is it me that's getting tied up and see it as an issue or does everybody else, you know, does everybody else accept how it is? You know, what do my managers think of that? So I'm going to action myself to perhaps go away, talk to my managers and ask them the question, how important is this issue for you? And again, you'd go away and you'd find out. So what you're doing is you're progressing each week. Another common word would what be the ideal outcome for you. So you really sort of know where you're going with your actual learning journey and what you're really expecting to how you're going to view and solve the problem. So again, it's reiterative. So you would keep going around in kind of circles, which would sort of catch up in subsequent meetings. So it's about getting back with your actual learning set, reflecting on it and then sort of setting new actions as you kind of go through. Just a few examples from you from my sort of different areas. You can see here, you can see the post-it notes. So that was a number of the actions that was used within teaching. So essentially I work with degree apprentices. One of the things they have to do is they have to solve real life problems in their own organisation. So what we did was we got them together. We got them using this action learning style process within the teaching, which actually sort of spurred them along. And because we've also found that what we found that they were actually very motivated about it because they didn't want to go back to their action learning set and say, oh, well, I haven't done anything this way towards my project. So actually they felt it made them feel very accountable. And they'd come away from each of the sessions with a whole list of sort of, right, must do that, must do that, got a new idea for that, more than their thought of themselves. So really sort of pushing that action out a lot further and hopefully, you know, really helping their projects along. There was some other sort of, it was interesting because I've done some other work on degree apprenticeship identity and it was the power of the peer learning group that actually really gave them that, they got a lot out of that and it was the action learning set that really helped that along in a way of sort of teaching initiatives that really kind of helped them. And they found that, you know, they felt very comfortable in that safe learning environments and, you know, really nice little quotes here from the research in that, you know, quite as they call themselves the geeks, but they were actually very close group and they would absolutely ask really quite direct questions, but in the safety of that group. But that was great because they were sort of kind of pushing each other out of their comfort zone, so they could actually kind of learn more as they went along. The other thing was sort of kind of different perspectives was really important. So, you know, within this case, there was somebody who was sort of, in an action learning set, somebody who had loads and loads of experience and someone was relatively new into it, you know, relatively new experience. And it was great because they never kind of told them what to do. They actually made the person with less experience, sort of, you know, in a coaching type style. Actually, right, this, this and this, and it is sort of that really helped their different perspectives, but also, again, built a real, built some real confidence as well. No longer an impostor. Yeah, real sense of belonging, we're all working a sense of belonging in terms of our kind of gathering our students together. So again, that was really helpful because you had that trust within the set, sort of helped by the ground rules, but really felt like they had somebody to turn to. They could have kind of admit that it was struggling, they could admit, and yeah, yeah, so am I. You know, it was those sort of conversations that sort of took place, which was, was kind of great for, great for learning too. Another example was from my research. So, I use, I use action learning as a research method, methodology. And here I was working with degree apprenticeship ambassadors, and probably what I would, I would sort of refer to them as the organisers of apprenticeships within organisations. So, they were the leads. And we started to take a look into this because obviously degree apprenticeship being quite new at that point. It was really complex. It's always historically been very complex to, to work with other organisations within higher education. But how are we going to bridge those gaps between management education and work-based learning as well? So, that's the kind of thing that we, we looked into, which was, you know, we worked together and we had this sort of joint, kind of joint interest to make sure that it happened, that actually the learning that the, you know, the apprentices were doing was actually making a difference in their own workplace. So, that was quite interesting. I won't go too much into that because obviously that's, but the action learning set was great because we actually collected all of this data because of the systematic cycle of planning action observing and reflection, which is the kind of the action research and the narrative from that, from each of those sets, we would then, I would then sort of kind of take away and look at in detail and so that we could answer, I could answer some of the research questions, how might, you know, action research assist in fostering workplace learning using action learning sets. So, again, it was, it was very helpful to say that, you know, actually the trust that we built with the, with all, between all of us because of this common purpose worked really well and we got some fabulous, you know, fabulous initiatives to be able to, you know, to share with others as well as, you know, as well as our own group. The other areas was something I've done a little bit more recently is working with colleagues in terms of the academic integrity awareness. So, obviously, you know, an issue there. So, I worked here with the academic regulations teams that kind of facilitated sessions to essentially the problem there was to address the lack of understanding of the regulatory, I can't say it, you know what I mean, regime for assessment and risks in students. So, basically what we were trying to do is make sure that students absolutely understood that, you know, if they were to plagiarise and so on, that they were going to be consequences. And we thought, well, actually we do sort of, you know, we do the usual, you send it out to the induction, but actually there's a bit of a case that we needed at an academic integrity awareness campaign. And we got certain findings that, so, again, meeting as ground was really explored the difficulties and identified the problems. Then through a group we started to cut this down into themes. We looked at each themes. We looked at the fact that we needed to do some kind of drip, drip marketing almost throughout the course and there was different stages, but we also needed to make sure that they understood that just make the messages far simpler, to give them, you know, policy that they think, well, I'm not going to cheat. Why am I going to look at that? So, and when it comes to Crunchpoint, they're actually not quite sure what is right and what they can and can't do. So, yeah, so we sort of kind of set that up. And then part of the actions we took was also to share our resources with other staff and also with other students. And we kept going a little bit further, actually sharing it again with students unions as well. And because we found actually we had all these sort of quite nice resources, but actually how do we make sure that the students still get to meet them? So that again became a kind of an additional problem that we hadn't actually realised in the beginning, but as we worked through the sets and the rich was thinking, ah, you know, we've got to share all of this, which we then managed to do. So essentially just sort of showing you a few things there. So I don't know if people want to, we've got 16 people. So it might be, Jim, I don't know if we can break up in, do we have breakout groups in this? Yes, we do, yeah. Brilliant. It might be as if we do and sort of kind of start setting up some kind of smaller breakout groups. What size do you want? Probably about five and yeah, probably five groups of five would be good. But individually it's kind of, you've written already done part of it because you've written down a sort of, you've got a number of examples in front of you. And so then you think that it's not going to be easy, so if you might just want to pick just a, you know, not too serious of one, a nice quick one today might be appealing. But write down what makes the problem difficult, have a little think about that. And then what we can do is sort of start to frame the problem. And the easiest way to frame a problem or a question is how do I, what can we do, you know, that sort of kind of helps if you sort of, how do I solve the problem of, yeah, academic integrity, for example, that kind of helpful as well. I'm hoping everybody is okay with that. And literally then if there's sort of four or five of you in the group, sort of one person just to take the lead and just sort of describe the problem for a minute, and the others to actually experience the, oh I've got to keep quiet now. And then online, the really good thing about online is you can properly put some questions in the chat once that person has finished. So we might only have time for kind of one or two rounds, but if we'd like to give that a go, and I can pop in hopefully, Jim, can I to the, to the sessions? Yeah, I'm going to drop you into, into one. How long do you want to go for this? Probably about 10 minutes, shall we? 10 minutes, here we go. Okay.