For TLZ R&D practitioners, as we have seen in the earlier discussion about crossing
boundaries, peer review, informal and formal, is a central and explicit element of work procedures and of the work culture. It expresses a number of key features of the TLZ R&D workplace: its relatively unhierarchical collectivity – the strength of the idea of a community of practice, collective expertise, commitment to sharing knowledge and ideas, and to a work process which is highly
reflexive, which is to say that continual peer review is at its core. This characteristic is one of the justifications for the statement that TLZ R&D
has similarities to a university lab, made by the leader of its Induction Programme in an earlier study (Derrick 2014). It is further evidence of the way the TLZ work environment and culture are oriented and organised to support enquiry: practitioners have both time and opportunity for peer review activities in a range of forms, both formal and informal, and clearly see this kind of collective responsibility within teams for the work of every member as part of ensuring that their work is as effective and productive as possible. This view extends beyond the team, as we saw in the last section, and the concept of ‘peer’ is in practice and in principle very wide: it can include new and
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inexperienced colleagues, colleagues with different specialist knowledge and/or working in different teams, and where appropriate, it includes people working in other departments and organisations within what is ultimately a global community of practice. An implication of this broad definition of ‘peer’ is that practitioners need to exercise judgement in terms of (a) at what stage in the work process to seek peer review feedback (b) who might be asked for peer review or feedback and (c) how to assess the value of the review feedback received. Procedures may or may not be developed to formalise these decisions: in practice practitioners seem to operate both formally and informally. This suggests that here we have another example of entanglement, in which
practitioners are, for better or worse, exercising autonomous judgements rather than operating any kind of standardised procedure – these data are evidence of the operating assumption among TLZ R&D practitioners and in the organisation itself, that such a technocratic approach to peer review of enquiry-based projects would be contradictory and self-defeating.
This theme was far more significant for TLZ practitioners than for those at WBC. This doesn’t necessarily suggest that colleagues and team members don’t check each other’s work in WBC, or that second opinions are never asked for. Rather they are evidence that the idea of review of work by colleagues, informally or formally as part of the process of carrying out the work, as opposed to managerial review, as an element of formal quality assurance processes, is not at the forefront of WBC practitioners’ experience. This may be because they see their work as largely technical – as a matter of operating of standardised procedures; or it may be that peer review is seen to take too much time, or because it is felt that the return on the effort involved is not likely to be sufficient; it may be either or both of these. Formal review processes with senior management, or as part of Staff Development Days, for example, focus on the need to adapt to changes in the compliance frameworks: outside these parameters, peer review in any form, formal or informal, is
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not a salient or explicit aspect of work processes at WBC. What is clear from the data is that reviewing work is not in general seen as part of WBC practitioners’ formal roles, rather, this is seen as a management responsibility.
4.3.5 ‘Writing up’
The third salient area in which the data for WBC and TLZ are differentiated is that concerned with the emphasis on ‘writing up’ of work. For TLZ, this focus has a number of interrelated
functions, the first of which is that practice-based learning and innovation depends on existing knowledge, and this requires that, as far as possible, new knowledge generated by project teams needs to be made available and accessible for future use. In practical terms this produces an explicit emphasis at the heart of practice on ‘writing up’: ‘to enable the knowledge to become part
of organisational DNA….this is the way an organisation builds its expertise’, as a TLZ R&D
practitioner said in an earlier study:
‘The learning is as much from what other people in the same organisation have written
before, you’re standing on their shoulders. That’s why ‘writing up’ is so important. It’s part of building that co-operative, collaborative culture, writing up all the time.’ (KI interview, p4:
Derrick 2014)
The second function of writing up, exemplifying a constructivist and social theory of learning through practice, is that reflecting and writing about the form and content of work, however informally, increases the effectiveness and utility of professional learning. This ‘reflective practice’ is often assumed to be limited to internally-directed thinking, but is arguably of greater use if it is taken beyond individual cerebration and extended into externally-oriented speaking and discussion
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with colleagues, and greater still if thinking and conversations are formalised in some form of appropriate representation which can be shared over time and space. Such representations, which in diverse formats are ubiquitous features of the informal and formal practices of the TLZ
practitioners, can be seen as examples of ‘boundary objects’ in the sense theorised by Akkerman and Bakker (2011) with the potential to enable communication and the sharing of insights or hypotheses between practitioners, teams or organisations, and to act as launchpads for further development of both theory and practice. The disciplined and imaginative effort involved in crystallising observations, ideas, questions, hypotheses, etc in sufficiently fixed form to be written down is itself a learning practice, but the writing produced can also act as an ‘artefact’: a working draft the improvement of which can be the focus of the next stage of collaborative work. (‘Writing’ in this context might in principle include any mode of representation appropriate to the context: visual, musical or embodied). In this conception, reflective practice can be seen as centrally important to the process of professional learning, and also to innovativeness, for both individuals and groups. I will have more to say about this link between the activity theory focus on ‘artefacts’ as the focus of projects and of collaborative team-working, in effect the substrate of learning and innovation, and theories of reflective practice, in more detail in the next chapter, in which we will synthesise all the findings enumerated in this chapter, and explore their implications.