Learning with peers by asking questions

In one line: expert knowledge isn’t enough for new, messy problems; people also learn by asking fresh questions about their own real problems, and peers in the same boat are good at helping them do that.

What Revans did

This isn’t an experiment. It’s a very large book that collects decades of Revans’s papers: part history, part theory, part practical argument.

Revans trained as a physicist at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in the early 1930s. He then worked in education for Essex and for the National Coal Board, and became Manchester’s first Professor of Industrial Administration (1955–65). At the Coal Board, he encouraged pit managers to meet in small groups to share problems and question each other, rather than relying on outside experts. He reported that results improved. Later he did similar work with London hospitals. The book pulls these experiences together into a method he called action learning.

What he argued

• Learning needs two things: L = P + Q. P is programmed knowledge: what experts already know, the guideline, the textbook. Q is questioning insight: asking fresh questions about a situation you haven’t met before. Revans thought P alone works for problems we’ve seen before, but not for new ones.
• Puzzles are not problems. A puzzle has a right answer that an expert can find. A problem is messy, and reasonable people may disagree about what to do. Revans argued that treating problems as puzzles, by just bringing in an expert answer, is a common way for organisations to go wrong.
• Work on real problems in small groups. A small group (often four to six people) meets regularly. Each person brings a real problem they’re working on. The others mainly ask questions, rather than giving advice or swapping stories.
• Learn with “comrades in adversity”. Peers facing similar pressures are often better at this than experts. They know enough to ask useful questions, but they aren’t in charge, so the person with the problem stays in charge of the answer.
• Learning and action go together. A line often credited to Revans is “There can be no learning without action, and no action without learning.” In plain terms: if it doesn’t change what you do, the learning isn’t finished.

How much should you trust it?

An influential idea, backed mostly by stories and case studies rather than fair tests.

• Revans’s own reports describe groups he set up himself. There was no comparison group, so we can’t tell how much the groups caused the improvements.
• Later research on action learning is mostly accounts from people who run it, and case studies. Studies that compare it fairly with other kinds of training are few.
• It grew up in industry and management. Healthcare brings time pressure, hierarchy and patient safety, so it needs adapting.
• The difference between puzzles and problems is useful but fuzzy. A lot of clinical work sits somewhere in between.

If you need to convince someone

In our words (a paraphrase, not a quotation): for a problem nobody has solved before, the most useful thing is often a good question that makes you look again at your own assumptions, not an answer brought in from outside.

What it means for you

1. Ask before you advise. When someone brings you a teaching problem, help them think it through before you offer your fix. Many clinicians find this hard, because fixing things fast is part of the job.
2. Try it in threes. Take a real teaching problem. For the first eight minutes, the other two ask only questions. Then they can offer ideas.
3. Plan for P and Q. If a session is all expert input, people get P and may not know how to use it. Leave time for them to question how it applies to their own real situation. Often the first question is the one at the heart of this programme: what do people need to do differently?

How it appears in Teaching That Lands

Not taught directly in the three core sessions. It’s useful background if you want peer support to continue after the programme ends. The action learning page has a simple way to start.

The small print

• Revans resisted turning his ideas into a fixed system. That makes them rich but hard to pin down and evaluate.
• The well-known “questions only” rule for the first part of each meeting was set out by later writers, notably Michael Marquardt. Revans stressed questions over advice, but the formal rule isn’t his. The “eight minutes” in the exercise above is our suggestion, not his.
• Revans’s 1960s hospital work was the Hospital Internal Communications project, with a group of London hospitals.
• “There can be no learning without action…” is widely quoted, but we haven’t traced it to a page in this book. Treat it as a summary of his view.
• For a step-by-step guide to running sets, see McGill and Beaty, Action Learning (2nd ed., 2001). For a related idea about questioning your own assumptions, see Argyris and Schön.