Blackburn with Darwen leading into Networked Learning Community: Aligning, captaining and collaborating through research and enquiry

As the title suggests, the features of this network that have been focused on in this case study are the ways in which purposes and processes have been aligned to facilitate research and enquiry; the nature of the captaining of the team or the facilitation of the research and enquiry; and the process of collaboration, which have led to interesting and powerful practices of adult learning. The term alignment is being used in the sense that Gardner et al. (2001) employ it:

A professional realm is healthiest when the values of the culture are in line with those of the domain, when the expectations of stakeholders match those of the field and when domain and field are themselves in sync. When these conditions exist, individual practitioners are free to operate at their best, morale is high and the professional realm flourishes. We term this a situation of authentic alignment.