Sentimental education – learning from action to become an action learning facilitator

Inside the action learning community there are many very open accounts and considerations of specific challenges and general phenomena such as power, emotion, action and learning. ‘Am I doing it right’ (Pedler and Abbott 2008 ["Am I Doing it Right? Facilitating Action Learning for Service Improvement." Leadership in Health Services 21: 185–199]) is a key question for reflective practitioners, and they are invited to report experiences and ‘produce theory from practice’. Despite all that information and reflection there is, from my perspective, a lack of information about how to become a facilitator. Even when looking back on their own early career challenges, such as Daniel Scott (2019a) ["Becoming a Midwife to Wisdom: A Retrospective Account of Practice of an Action Learning Facilitator, Action Learning." Research and Practice 16 (2): 151–158] most authors seem to be facilitators already, On my journey I identified some crucial experiences and conditions. These are highly individual and personal and they must, therefore, be actual, lived experiences. But I consider some of them to be generally applicable and believe they can help others when thinking about to become an action learning facilitator and/or to train action learning facilitators.