What We’re Learning about Peer Learning
As the Lilly Endowment program officer responsible for the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program, I am often asked what we are learning from this initiative. It is a question that is at once both easy and difficult to answer.
What we’ve learned from pastors’ response
First, the easy part.
Clearly, we have learned that the basic convictions and premises underlying the SPE program are sound. The Pulpit & Pew project, other research efforts, the Indiana Clergy Peer Learning program at Christian Theological Seminary, the Pastor-Scholar program at the Center for Theological Inquiry, and our own conversations with pastors and church leaders, told us that many pastors, who often labor in relative isolation, hunger for genuine experiences of community and friendship with peers.
Throughout the SPE program, virtually from its inception, we have seen the evidence of that hunger. Overall, the Endowment received 730 applications for Sustaining Pastoral Excellence grants. In the program’s first two years, more than 7,000 pastoral leaders participated in more than 700 peer learning groups. Project directors repeatedly tell us they have been overwhelmed by the large numbers of pastors eager to participate in their programs.
This simple lesson—that pastors want and need community and friendship—in turn brings with it an important insight: Perhaps the most profound organizational changes come from acting on seemingly simple insights. To borrow an analogy from Parker Palmer, sometimes it takes only a slight turn of the prism to bring about a magnificent burst of brilliant new colors. Or as Eugene Peterson’s The Message relates from the first chapter of First John: “This, in essence, is the message we heard from Christ and are passing on to you: God is light, pure light; there’s not a trace of darkness in him. If we claim to experience the shared life with him but continue to stumble around in the dark, we’re obviously lying through our teeth….But if we walk in the light, we also experience shared life with one another….” Following new flashes of insight – by simply turning the prism of vision a bit closer to the light of Christ -- creates fresh opportunities to “experience shared life with one another.”
What we’re learning about “agency” for pastoral learning
For a variety of reasons, it is more difficult to explain what pastoral leaders are learning by taking part in their peer learning groups. First, the 63 SPE projects are a diverse lot. Some are limited within denominations, others are ecumenical. Some are local, others regional or national. The programs focus on a variety of topics and interests that were established by the pastoral leaders themselves, such as biblical study, spiritual formation, skill-building, and much more. Some groups use a project-provided facilitator, while others operate with a shared leadership model and no facilitator. As a result, these and other factors make it difficult to generalize about the 700 SPE peer groups. Perhaps this breadth is itself a significant lesson about the many ways pastoral leaders can learn from and with one another.
But even with the extraordinary diversity among the SPE projects, we are gaining important insights into how to sustain pastoral excellence. Some of the most important have to do with the nature of learning itself and how and where pastors can best find the sustenance they need for ministry.
In our original SPE Request for Proposals, the Endowment encouraged projects to place as much “agency” as possible in the hands of pastoral leaders. Drawing on sound adult learning principles and the previous experience of peer learning pilot projects, we wanted the SPE projects to give their participating pastors the power to design the learning experiences that they believed would best sustain them in excellent ministry. The SPE program assumes that pastoral leaders know what they need to be sustained in excellent ministry. It assumes also that pastors know how to go about meeting that need.
Some SPE project leaders, however, tell us that this assumption might have been a bit optimistic. Perhaps. While I believe it is still too soon to know for certain, I can imagine several reasons why project leaders might think so. Many pastors, for example, are not accustomed to being given the permission and the resources to create their own experiences for learning and growth. Such permission and resources come as gifts of grace. Yet, as we all know, grace is sometimes difficult to accept because we live in a world so graceless. When grace is offered and received, however, great excitement, freedom, energy and creativity are unleashed. Grace often takes time to sink in. We may yet see the fruits of such grace in the most unlikely places.
Another possible explanation for the difficulty that some SPE groups have had in establishing themselves might be that some programs have unconsciously fallen back into old patterns aimed at remediation rather than seeking out and creating fresh new ways to reinforce and promote existing excellence in ministry. In theory, the SPE program is premised on the assumption that excellent pastors are already in ministry and have developed practices that sustain them in excellence. In practice, however, the program may have also drawn many pastors who are eager and willing to learn but who have not yet demonstrated the promise or the practices of excellent ministry. Pastoral leaders who need remediation require a stronger guiding hand to help them than was envisioned for those for whom SPE was intended--already excellent pastors who have the capacity to be the primary agents of their own learning.
Pastoral Peers as Communities of Learning
But for some SPE groups, the greatest obstacle has probably been the sheer novelty, even strangeness, of peer learning. It is simply not what we are used to. In many ways, peer learning is contrary to all our assumptions about how professionals continue to learn after graduate school. Like many other professionals in our society, many pastors likely assume that learning occurs best in a traditional classroom, where an expert (the teacher) comes from the outside to impart a specially acquired wisdom (the lecture) to the student (the unenlightened). In this traditional setting, knowledge and wisdom comes from the outside, either from beyond one’s own experience and knowledge or from beyond one’s circle of peers. Learning is thus “monological” rather than “dialogical,” individualistic rather than communal.
For those accustomed only to this learning model, a peer learning environment where all are both teachers and learners can be difficult.1 While this is true for virtually all professionals, it may be particularly so—and particularly harmful-- for clergy. Indeed, some of the ways pastors have been trained and participate in continuing education reinforce notions of “lone ranger” teaching and learning.2
None of this, of course, is to say that the traditional classroom learning model is not without merit. We have all benefited from teachers and other experts who have genuine knowledge and wisdom that is best imparted in a classroom. But even so, a growing body of educational research is confirming the effectiveness of peer learning and helping us to better understand the group dynamics, assumptions and practices that make it work especially well in sustaining pastoral excellence.
One of the most prominent of those educational scholars is Lee Shulman, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and a leader in developing innovative educational models for teachers and students.3 In an insightful article, “Communities of Learners and Communities of Teachers,” Shulman outlines how a community of learners works best. To Shulman, a successful learning community has the following elements:
- Subject-matter content that is generative, essential and pivotal to the discipline under study and that can yield new understandings that serve as the basis for future learning.
- Learners who are active agents in the process, not passive audience members.
- The ability of learners to “go meta” – that is, to reflectively turn around on their own thought and action and analyze how and why their thinking did or did not achieve certain ends. Meta-cognition – consciousness of how and why one is learning particular things in particular ways – is the key to deep learning.
- Collaboration among learners such that they work together in ways that scaffold and support each other’s learning, supplementing each other’s knowledge.
- Teachers and students who share a passion for the materials, are committed to the ideas, processes and activities and see their work as connected to present and future goals.
- An overarching community or culture that values, supports, legitimates, and nurtures a collaborative, reflective and active learning process and creates many opportunities for it to occur successfully.4
As Shulman points out, such active, reflective and collaborative learning communities are inherently uncertain, complex and demanding. For participants, they present high levels of risk and unpredictability. Amidst such uncertainty, students and teachers require a community that supports, scaffolds, and rewards risk-taking and invention.
In many ways, Shulman’s elements help us frame many of the central lessons we have learned so far about pastoral peer learning groups in the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program:
- Our SPE groups have been formed around generative subject matter such as spiritual disciplines, sermon preparation and preaching, bible study, and self-care of mind, body and soul.
- The learner as active agent is essentially the same conviction that underlies SPE—the notion that pastors will be the primary agents in forming their own groups.
- “Meta-cognition” -- how individuals and groups become conscious of how and why learning is taking place-- is very similar to the ways we are all practicing evaluation. Virtually all SPE programs and their peer groups are learning to take a few steps back, reflect upon what has worked and what has not, and try to make the necessary corrections. Essentially, throughout SPE, we are all “learning about what we are learning.”
- A high degree of collaboration, cooperation and friendship are evident among pastoral learning groups--a refreshing change from the isolation, competition, and loneliness than many pastors experience in their ministry. Throughout SPE, pastors are supplementing each other’s knowledge in community.
- A strong passion for learning is evident to anyone who spends only a few moments with the pastors who are taking part in the SPE peer groups.
Clearly these elements point out some of the key lessons thus far about peer learning groups as “communities of learning”. But perhaps the most striking lesson for the Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program is found in Shulman’s final element: The learning process is legitimated by the larger culture or community around it, one that values this kind of learning experiences and assumes the risk and unpredictability involved in nurturing it.
Too often, in churches today, the opposite is the norm, and it is one we tolerate at our peril. You know the story. Organizations that are intended to support pastors instead struggle to serve within limited resources. Institutions that operate on tight budgets with thin staffs find it difficult to take risks. Failure, they fear, might take them under. Risk aversion, in turn, inhibits experimentation.
But new learning cannot emerge without experiments, failures as well as successes. When risk, experimentation and learning cease within an organization, it becomes like an inversion of the old adage that my grandmother loved to repeat: “Those who cease to learn new tricks become old dogs.”
The Sustaining Pastoral Excellence program is teaching us, however, that old dogmatics can learn new tricks! (Please forgive me.) Rather than suffer the fear and atrophy that comes from avoiding risks, SPE pastors are finding the courage and confidence that grows from experimentation and evaluation. All sorts of religious organizations – denominational judicatories, seminaries, national offices, retreat and counseling centers, colleges, and many more – have encouraged and sustained the “risk and unpredictability” of launching pastoral peer learning experiments and other activities to support pastoral excellence.
Through good evaluation practices, they are discovering how and why some experiments succeed and others do not. This evaluative learning – metacognition – gives rise to what Shulman describes as “scaffolding”: learning that builds upon learning. Just as pastoral leaders learn collaboratively to build a “community of sufficiency,” so too do the organizations that sponsor the SPE projects. Organizations that build programs on scaffolds of new learning reinforce the culture of creativity that dared to risk in the first place. Taking risks, in turn, brings new infusions of learning and resources just as surely as risk aversion diminishes both. Energy, spiritual growth, increasing skill and confidence – and, yes, financial resources and sustainable institutional capacities – flow in new patterns in and through the cultures that “supported, legitimated and nurtured” these new learning experiments. A reinvigorated culture both draws new life and gives it.
When I talk to SPE project directors, the pastors who take part in their programs, and the leaders of the sponsoring organizations, I see and hear signs of this new life. To expand on Shulman’s language, exciting new “communities of faith and learning” are emerging.
Above all, these developments confirm that organizations can indeed have a positive influence when they respond to a perceived need among pastors and congregational leaders. This is a profound lesson that SPE grantees can use with agility to address other needs they diagnose among pastors and congregations.
What other wonderful new programs would pastors and congregations flock to if we always listened, analyzed, dreamed, and planned like we do when we submit a grant proposal? What excellence in ministry can happen when we take our own learning seriously? I hope many more religious organizations that support pastoral leaders and congregations can reflect on these questions.
I wonder. What could happen?
John Wimmer is program director in the religion division of Lilly Endowment Inc.
1 Of course, Peter Senge and his colleagues have pioneered the “Learning Organization” model as an antidote to individualistic learning and “knowledge management”. But also see Etienne Wenger, et al, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Cultivating Communities of Practice (Harvard Business School Press, 2002).
2 Robert Reber and Bruce Roberts, eds., A Lifelong Call to Learn: Approaches to Continuing Education for Church Leaders (Abingdon, 2000). I should note that in using this example a Native American pastor once reminded me that even the Lone Ranger had Tonto as a fellow learner!
3 The Carnegie Foundation is in the midst of a major comparative study of the education of professionals, including physicians, lawyers, engineers, nurses, teachers, and the clergy. Lilly Endowment has funded the clergy portion of this study and a wonderful new book on it by Dr. Charles Foster, professor emeritus of Christian Education at Candler School of Theology, is forthcoming from Jossey-Bass: Educating Clergy: Teaching Practices and Pastoral Imagination.)
4 Lee Shulman, “Communities of Learners and Communities of Teachers,” The Wisdom of Practice (Jossey-Bass, 2004): 493-494.
