Innovation in Language Learning
From Experience Sharing to Collective Learning: When Trust Is Not Enough for Collaborative Reflection on Practice
Inger Lise Valstad, Nord University (Norway)
Duarte Nuno Farbu Pinto, Nord University (Norway)
Frode Hermann Henanger, Nord University (Norway)
Abstract
Research on school development indicates that new teaching methods rarely succeed on the strength of the method alone, but through the professional processes that accompany their implementation [1]. Within professional learning communities, experience sharing among teachers is often treated as the route to collective learning, and trust among colleagues as the condition that makes such sharing possible [1]. Yet systematic and critical reflection on shared practice remains rare [3]. This study examines how 27 teachers across five Norwegian primary schools understand experience sharing as a contribution to professional and collective learning, and which conditions promote or hinder what the study terms collaborative reflection on practice, a concept that foregrounds mutuality, grounding in concrete teaching experience, and professional identity. Data were generated through five focus group interviews and analysed using thematic analysis [14]. Teachers describe experience sharing as an act of learning at both individual and collective level, in which colleagues' experiences are reworked in light of their own practice rather than adopted as ready-made solutions, and they identify systematic time, psychological safety, and fixed arenas as its conditions. What the study adds concerns what happens once trust is in place. The staffs in the study describe high trust and a low threshold for sharing, and still name a pull towards sharing what works and confirming established practice, compounded by a busy working day and fatigue with successive initiatives. The analysis suggests why. Psychological safety has two functions, enabling the sharing of what did not work and the asking of uncomfortable questions about what appears to work. In this material trust delivers the first, while the second appears to depend on conditions beyond trust, namely structures that give sharing time and reach, continuity that counters implementation fatigue, and a culture in which questioning what appears to work is as legitimate as celebrating it. The study qualifies the view of social capital as sufficient for collective learning; trust opens the door to experience sharing but does not determine what passes through it. The study makes no claim to statistical generalisation but offers conditions with analytical transferability for comparable primary school contexts.
Keywords: collaborative reflection on practice; experience sharing; professional learning communities; collective learning; social capital; communities of practice
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