4. Circle leadership

This section explores leadership of the circle and various key aspects to ensure the success of the learning processes that lead to the group’s goal attainment.

The leadership role is described using a variety of names, including facilitator, supervisor, research lead, or educator. Regardless of name, all these roles are responsible for organising, structuring, streamlining and leading the circle’s learning processes.

The circle leader’s primary task is to interpret and facilitate the understanding of the questions that the circle is addressing. In this process, the leader must strive to establish an ongoing and reciprocal relationship with and between the participants. However, being able to understand and change one’s work assumes that practical experiences will be analysed and reflected upon against the backdrop of a more theoretical understanding. One of the purposes and advantages of working in a research/learning circle is that participants become more reflective and “thoughtful” in their work. Another task of the leader or leaders is to support the work of the circle through ensuring there is a focus on experimentation and experiences, and by helping to analyse and evaluate results. Leaders must also take the initiative to contextualise through the use of theories and to find research results or suitable specialised literature.

Individuals leading a research circle must in practice be able to handle multiple perspectives simultaneously: the participant perspective; the change agent perspective; the teacher perspective; and the researcher perspective. They must be able to serve as the facilitator of learning in the circle. For the leader of a learning circle/research circle, the learning process itself is their focus. Participants must be provided with opportunities to share their experiences, ideas, questions, thoughts and suggestions without the leader adopting a hasty or dominant perception of how the work and learning process will be carried out.

The leader’s language, conceptual apparatus and ability to communicate are all tools that will benefit this investigative method by providing participants with feedback on their questions and their understandings of the facts. One approach is to reformulate statements into questions. Facilitating communication between participants (the facilitator’s task) is key to a circle. As such, communication cannot be one-directional and leader-centric, but must instead be participant-centred and based on co-creation.

The theoretical understanding of models and theories must be constantly renewed in order to be usable when seeking to describe, understand and handle complex activities without a normative and evaluative approach. It is important to invite external speakers, read literature or otherwise offer specialised knowledge in the area under discussion.

Since the goal of the inquiry-based working method is to create something new based on the purpose of the learning circle, the leader should be capable of leading both learning processes and group processes, as well as being able to inspire and handle different participant personalities. There will be different types of people in every circle with a greater or lesser need to communicate and be at the centre of attention. To ensure that one person does not dominate communication requires leadership that distributes “airtime” and draws out those people who do not usually occupy much communication bandwidth. It may therefore be advantageous to go around all members of the circle to enable everyone to express their views and thoughts.

All change provokes resistance which may be difficult to identify and process. It is therefore helpful if there are two different leaders who are able to reflect upon and analyse events in the circle and thereby contribute to better understanding and processing.

Much of the circle leader’s work will take place outside the circle gatherings. This includes recording and compiling what has been discussed during each gathering and circulating this to the participants. This should encompass an initial analysis and interpretation of the group’s shared experiences. The circle leader’s skill and expertise are important for a number of reasons. The responsibility of leading the work of the circle also entails documenting circle gatherings and proposing prospective sources of knowledge, as well as examining, analysing and systematising the shared questions. Evaluations of research circles (Lahdenperä, 2011; 2014) have shown that distributing this responsibility between two people is a successful approach as one assumes the role of “facilitator” for gatherings while the other assumes responsibility for the learning process of the circle.

In order to distance themselves from circle participants and what is taking place in the circle, it is beneficial for the circle leader to be part of an action team along with an experienced supervisor (Lahdenperä, 2011). It is also an important part of the quality of leadership to be able to air issues in the circle and have the opportunity to carry out meta-analyses of the circle’s learning process.

Each learning circle is unique in terms of its participants, leaders and learning processes, ensuring that the work and experience of each individual circle is exciting – no one circle is like any other. As such, it is impossible to provide detailed instructions on how to lead a circle. The learning is a collective creation that must accommodate experimentation and curiosity. The external framework for the work of the circle is important, but the establishment of internal frameworks for participation and engagement is even more important. That is what makes “miracles” happen and results in rich and relevant learning outcomes.