Organising Teachers' Learning and Knowledge
SECI: four knowledge conversion stages
| Stage | Direction | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Socialisation (S) | Tacit to tacit | Communication between members |
| Externalisation (E) | Tacit to explicit | Publishing reflections, sharing in writing |
| Combination (C) | Explicit to explicit | Combining shared resources, building shared norms |
| Internalisation (I) | Explicit to tacit | Reflecting on others, using shared knowledge |
What each stage looks like in a school
- Socialisation: staffroom conversations, shared work
- Externalisation: writing reflections, posting to a community
- Combination: building shared lesson resources, agreeing norms
- Internalisation: monitoring others’ reflections, planning own development
A reflective practitioner does not only generate theory; they also organise their knowledge so that it can grow over time and be shared with colleagues. The SECI model gives a structure for thinking about how teachers’ knowledge actually moves between individuals and the wider professional community.
The SECI model
SECI stands for socialisation, externalisation, combination, and internalisation. The model, developed in the field of knowledge management, describes how knowledge converts between two forms: tacit knowledge (what we know but cannot easily articulate) and explicit knowledge (what we have written down or said clearly).
Tacit knowledge is the deep professional knowledge a teacher carries: the way they read a class, the way they pace a lesson, the way they handle a difficult parent meeting. It is real, but hard to articulate fully.
Explicit knowledge is what has been put into clear form: written lesson plans, recorded observations, shared resources, articulated policies.
The SECI model describes four kinds of conversion between these two forms.
Socialisation: tacit to tacit
Socialisation moves tacit knowledge from one person to another without making it explicit. A new teacher watches a senior colleague teach and absorbs how they pace a lesson. The senior teacher could not write down everything they are doing, and the new teacher could not list everything they learned, but the knowledge has transferred.
This is exactly the situated learning covered earlier in this study guide. It is the original form of teacher development and remains one of the most powerful.
In SECI terms, the new teacher and the senior teacher have communicated tacit knowledge through their shared practice. No writing was needed.
Externalisation: tacit to explicit
Externalisation moves tacit knowledge into explicit form. A teacher who reflects in writing on what they have learned about questioning is doing externalisation. The internal, hard-to-articulate sense of how questioning works gets put into language.
Externalisation is harder than it looks. Putting tacit knowledge into words always loses something. The articulation is approximate. But the gain is that the knowledge becomes shareable, examinable, and reviewable.
In a school, externalisation includes published reflections, comments from community members on each other’s reflections, and any other writing that converts professional sense into professional language.
Combination: explicit to explicit
Combination moves explicit knowledge from one form to another or combines several pieces of explicit knowledge into a richer whole. A teacher who reads three colleagues’ lesson plans and synthesises them into a shared resource is doing combination.
Combination is the stage where the school’s collective knowledge starts to become an asset rather than a collection of private documents. It includes building shared learning resources, formulating community norms and visions, and producing the documents that organisations use to coordinate their work.
The gain at this stage is that knowledge becomes structured at the organisational level. The school has a shared body of explicit knowledge that is more than the sum of the individual teachers’ contributions.
Internalisation: explicit to tacit
Internalisation moves explicit knowledge back into tacit form, but at a deeper level. A teacher reads several published reflections by colleagues and starts to use the insights in their own practice without consciously thinking about them. The explicit knowledge has become part of the teacher’s tacit professional sense.
Internalisation is what makes the cycle complete. Without it, externalisation and combination produce documents that nobody acts on. With it, the documents become part of how teachers actually work.
In a school, internalisation includes monitoring community members’ reflections, learning from them, and planning one’s own competence development based on what one has read. The reading turns into doing, and the doing eventually becomes second nature.
SECI as a cycle
The four stages form a cycle. Knowledge does not flow once through the stages and then stop. It moves through the stages repeatedly.
A piece of tacit knowledge, say a teacher’s intuition about how to handle a particular kind of student response, moves through socialisation when shared with a colleague, externalisation when written down, combination when integrated with similar reflections from others, and internalisation when read and absorbed by other teachers. The cycle then continues with new tacit understanding produced by the internalisation step.
This cycle is one of the cleaner pictures of how a learning organisation actually grows knowledge over time. A school that supports all four stages develops faster than one that only supports some.
What each stage needs from a school
Each stage requires specific conditions to work well.
Socialisation needs shared time and space
For tacit knowledge to transfer between teachers, they need shared time and shared space. Staffrooms, joint planning sessions, classroom observations, and informal interactions all support socialisation.
A school that has cut its shared spaces and squeezed all teacher time into individual work has weakened socialisation. The knowledge transfer that used to happen in passing now does not happen at all.
Externalisation needs reflective writing
Externalisation requires that teachers write or speak about their tacit knowledge. This needs structures: time set aside for writing, formats that make the writing useful, places to share it, and a culture that values the work.
In Pakistan and elsewhere, schools that ask teachers to write but do not give them time or value for the work end up with little externalisation. The teachers who do write are the ones who would have written anyway. The wider knowledge stays tacit and is lost when individual teachers move on.
Combination needs editorial work
Combination requires someone to integrate explicit knowledge into useful forms. This is editorial work: reading what has been written, finding patterns, synthesising into shared resources.
This work is often invisible. A school that produces good combined knowledge usually has someone, often unrecognised, doing the work. Recognising and supporting this role makes combination sustainable.
Internalisation needs reading and practice
Internalisation requires that teachers read what their colleagues have written and try the ideas in their own practice. This needs encouragement, time, and a culture in which trying new approaches is supported.
A school that produces a lot of written knowledge but does not ensure teachers read it has a knowledge stockpile that nobody draws from. The cycle is broken at the internalisation stage.
The model applied to a community of practice
SECI fits naturally with the communities of practice ideas covered earlier in this study guide.
In a CoP, socialisation is the regular face-to-face interaction between members. Externalisation is the published reflections members share. Combination is the collaborative creation of learning resources and shared norms. Internalisation is the monitoring of community members’ reflections and the planning of one’s own development based on what the community has produced.
A CoP that runs the full SECI cycle produces deep collective knowledge. A CoP that runs only the socialisation stage stays informal and loses knowledge when members leave.
The reflective practitioner who supports a CoP can use SECI as a checklist. Are we doing socialisation? Yes, we meet regularly. Are we doing externalisation? Sometimes; we should write more. Combination? Rarely; we have not produced shared resources. Internalisation? Mixed; some members read what is written, others do not.
The checklist surfaces what to work on next.
Socialisation, Externalisation, Combination, Internalisation
Socialisation moves tacit knowledge between people through shared practice. Externalisation moves tacit knowledge into explicit form through writing or speech. Combination integrates explicit knowledge into richer shared forms. Internalisation moves explicit knowledge back into tacit professional sense through reading and practice. The four stages cycle continuously.
Why this matters for grounded theory and reflective practice
SECI connects grounded theory to wider questions of how teacher knowledge develops in a school.
A grounded theory study externalises tacit understanding of a process. The theory is explicit knowledge, written down. If the study stops there, the cycle is incomplete. The theory should also be combined with other related work, internalised by other teachers, and brought back into tacit practice.
A reflective practice in general follows a similar pattern. The teacher’s tacit knowledge is socialised through staffroom conversations, externalised through written reflection, combined into shared school knowledge, and internalised back into improved practice. The reflective practitioner who understands the cycle can ensure they are not stuck at one stage.
A common failure mode is a teacher who reflects intensely (externalises heavily) but never reads other teachers’ reflections (no internalisation) and rarely shares lesson plans or norms (no combination). They produce a lot of personal writing but do not contribute to or draw from the wider school’s knowledge. SECI surfaces this imbalance.
A school that wants to grow as a learning organisation can use SECI to design its development practices. Time for socialisation. Structure for externalisation. Editorial work for combination. Reading and practice for internalisation. All four together produce a school that learns. Any one missing breaks the cycle.