Even when people agree what the relationship is for, how do they actually learn to challenge one another well?
Sandy Schuck and Tom Russell had already agreed on the name.
They were going to be critical friends.
That did not mean they agreed what being one required.
In their account of two self-studies of teacher education, Schuck describes uncertainty about what Russell expected from her. She understood that a critical friend should encourage reflection and act as a sounding board. But she also thought the role involved challenge and critique. She was less certain whether that was what Russell actually wanted.
Status complicated things further. Schuck perceived herself as the less senior academic and wondered how much value Russell placed on her criticism. Russell, meanwhile, appears not to have experienced the difference in quite the same way.
Two people could therefore enter the same relationship with different understandings of what they had agreed to do. (Schuck and Russell, 2005)
The conditions did not help. Their first phase was short, conducted largely by email, and gave Schuck little access to the teaching context she was being asked to question. Only afterwards, while preparing a paper about the experience, did some of those difficulties become visible to them.
Their critical friendship became partly an inquiry into how to be critical friends.
Schuck and Russell later suggested that expectations and concerns might have been discussed more explicitly at the beginning, that differences in status deserved attention, and that the person receiving critique might also give feedback on how the critical friend was performing the role.
Being appointed a critical friend had not made either person automatically good at being one. (Schuck and Russell, 2005)
A much larger example in Ann-Christine Wennergren’s study makes the same difficulty visible from another angle.
Teachers in two Swedish schools worked in pairs, observing lessons, documenting what they saw and providing feedback. The structure existed. People had partners. There was a process to follow.
Yet Wennergren concluded that the critical-friend role was difficult to internalise and that most of the teachers did not use it to its full potential for learning. (Wennergren, 2015/2016)
The problem was not simply reluctance to criticise.
Giving useful challenge required several things at once: observing teaching, analysing what had happened, formulating feedback, justifying it and relating the discussion back to the inquiry. Some feedback remained general. Some questions that looked challenging on paper were capable of closing rather than opening reflection.
A question beginning with why could invite examination.
It could also communicate that the observer had already decided what should have happened.
Challenge had a technique.
But it also had a relationship.
Wennergren’s account therefore makes a simple instruction—be more critical—look inadequate. Feedback could be too uncritical to support learning, but challenge could also move beyond what another person was presently able to work with. (Wennergren, 2015/2016)
Sue Swaffield’s work adds another part of the problem. Her study of light touch critical friendship identified trust, mutual engagement and commitment, and knowledge of the school as interrelated conditions for the relationship to work.
Knowing when to question someone therefore depended partly on knowing something about the place, the person and the work being questioned.
Critical friendship was not simply criticism delivered kindly. (Swaffield, 2007)
But even trust does not give us a neat starting point.
Marie-Helene Zimmerman Nilsson, Ann-Christine Wennergren and Ulrika Sjöberg studied teachers and academic facilitators working together in action research. Their findings include three awkward phrases:
absence of ownership
trust without relationship
courage before trust
The last is particularly interesting.
It unsettles the comfortable sequence in which trust is established first and difficult conversations follow later. Sometimes somebody may have to risk saying or asking something before enough relationship exists to guarantee how it will be received.
The authors' wider point is not that trust is unimportant. Communication opened when confidence, mutual reliance and challenge were present. But they argue that the strategies of critical friendship need to become explicit if participants are to internalise the role. (Zimmerman Nilsson, Wennergren and Sjöberg, 2016/2018)
Learning the relationship therefore seems to involve something more complicated than progressing from safe to unsafe conversation.
Sometimes trust permits challenge.
Sometimes challenge contributes to trust.
Sometimes neither happens because the question was never sufficiently owned in the first place.
And sometimes people need help seeing that the conversation has become too comfortable.
That happened in a two-year study by Tim Fletcher, Déirdre Ní Chróinín and Mary O’Sullivan.
Fletcher and Ní Chróinín were critical friends to one another as they developed an approach to physical-education teacher education. O’Sullivan acted as a second layer: a meta-critical friend looking at their inquiry as well as the practice they were investigating.
In the first year, Fletcher and Ní Chróinín later recognised that they had entered the relationship without sufficiently discussing what they expected to give and receive from it. Their criticism was often cautious. Avoiding offence could also mean avoiding some of the very challenge the inquiry required. (Fletcher, Ní Chróinín and O’Sullivan, 2016)
The shift did not happen merely because another year passed.
O’Sullivan challenged the pair to examine whether they were questioning one another strongly enough. They changed their process so that more contentious responses had an explicit place while support remained part of the relationship.
Their second year contained more demanding questions and greater willingness to move outside familiar pedagogical positions. The authors associate that shift with deeper professional learning and development of the innovation. That is their account of this particular inquiry, not evidence for a universal sequence in which increasing criticism inevitably produces better learning. (Fletcher, Ní Chróinín and O’Sullivan, 2016)
The distinction matters.
A critical friendship can fail by becoming too comfortable.
It can also fail by mistaking discomfort for learning.
What these accounts add to the folder is not a formula for finding the correct amount of criticism. They make the role itself part of the learning.
People have to learn what another person needs from them.
They have to learn how status enters a conversation.
How much context they need before questioning what they see.
How questions open reflection rather than close it.
When reassurance supports inquiry and when it protects something from examination.
When to risk challenge before certainty exists.
And how to recognise when the relationship itself needs to be questioned.
A role can be agreed.
A protocol can be supplied.
A person can even be introduced as the critical friend.
None of those things demonstrates that critical friendship is actually happening.
Which leaves a different problem.
If people can arrange these practices, learn them and become better at challenging one another, what makes the relationship a friendship?
References
Schuck, S. and Russell, T. (2005) ‘Self-study, critical friendship, and the complexities of teacher education’, Studying Teacher Education, 1(2), pp. 107–121. doi:10.1080/17425960500288291. University of Technology Sydney repository.
Swaffield, S. (2007) ‘Light touch critical friendship’, Improving Schools, 10(3), pp. 205–219. doi:10.1177/1365480207077845. Publisher record.
Wennergren, A.-C. (2016; first published online 2015) ‘Teachers as learners – with a little help from a critical friend’, Educational Action Research, 24(2), pp. 260–279. doi:10.1080/09650792.2015.1058170. Publisher record.
Zimmerman Nilsson, M.-H., Wennergren, A.-C. and Sjöberg, U. (2018; first published online 2016) ‘Tensions in communication—Teachers and academic facilitators in a critical friendship’, Action Research, 16(1), pp. 7–24. doi:10.1177/1476750316660365. Publisher record.
Fletcher, T., Ní Chróinín, D. and O’Sullivan, M. (2016) ‘A layered approach to critical friendship as a means to support pedagogical innovation in pre-service teacher education’, Studying Teacher Education, 12(3), pp. 302–319. doi:10.1080/17425964.2016.1228049. Publisher record.