Anyone who wants to get on in the world must take responsibility for their own learning and development. That's where this pack comes in - it helps individuals become proactive in this vital area, giving them the skills to tackle their objectives. You can use the activities to help individuals plan and control learning opportunities - they'll become more motivated and more effective at work. This unique pack takes away the potential loneliness of self-development and encourages a positive learning culture.
Subjects covered include:
- mentoring
- referred learning styles
- self-directed learning
- career and personal development planning
- informal/formal forms of learning
- evaluation of learning events
- keeping a record of development
List of Activities:
1. What are your expectations?
An ice-breaking activity which makes it easy for people to contribute at an early stage and to focus their objectives for a learning event. It also reassures participants that their views will be respected and valued.
2. Were your expectations met?
This activity (which is linked to Activity 1. What Are Your Expectations?) gets people's immediate reactions to a learning event as part of an evaluative process. It helps people to review their learning and gives the trainer an immediate measure of effectiveness.
3. What have they done to our jobs?
An activity which defines the context for Continuing Professional Development by eliciting a joint view of the current psychological contract between employer and employed, and agreeing the implications for the professional development of people in the learning group.
4. The survivor's toolkit
This gets participants to identify the skills, knowledge and attitudes which are most likely to help people survive in the current climate of change. This provides benchmarks for what they need to learn through CPD and can be used to introduce Activity 15. My Survival Toolkit.
5. What's worked and not worked?
This is an activity to start a second or later module or a learning programme by celebrating people's CPD successes since the previous module, and identifying what has impeded them so that they can work out how to keep moving forward.
6. Tackling the issues
Participants develop their ability to think creatively and generate original answers to the difficulties they meet in working on their own CPD programmes. This helps to grain people's commitment to their action plans.
7. Helpers, not interrogators
Developing yourself on your own can be a lonely business, and this activity shows people how to give one another effective support. Participants learn and practise basic mutual mentoring skills by helping one another to explore their motivators and develop action plans for improving both their CPD and their mentoring abilities.
8. Getting the whole picture
This builds participants' mutual mentoring skills by giving them guided practice in supportive questioning techniques, using the issues of their CPD as topics. Everyone practises questioning and being questioned, and everyone gets feedback to help them develop further.
9. Keeping people going
An activity to broaden and deepen people's ability to support and mentor one another by giving guided practice in some more advanced techniques of solution-focused mentoring. Again, participants get feedback to help them build a repertoire of helpful tactics.
10. Have you got a match?
This activity sets up supportive relationships between the participants by matching what people want to get from being mentored with the style they want to adopt as mentors. This tactic has a good record of producing mutually supportive pairs of people who continue to help one another long after the learning event has ended.
11. That's the limit!
This enables mentoring pairs to explore what they want from one another and what limits and boundaries they want to set on their work together. It gets the mentoring relationship off to a good start.
12. Making it work for you
An activity to provide the mentoring pairs with a structure for planning how they will work together in the weeks and months after the learning event, and helps them to schedule the way ahead.
13. The basics of your CPD
An overview of the CPD process which allows people to explore and question, and provides a route map and structure for the remaining CPD activities. People work out where they are in the process and arrive at their outline plans. Like the other CPD activities, this one also gives participants some practice in mutual mentoring.
14. Auditing your assets
This activity takes people through an audit of their current skills, abilities and knowledge to set a firm foundation for the later CPD activities. Participants work in pairs to review significant events and elicit from these the skills that people deployed in getting good results. The activity arrives at an answer to the important question 'Where are you now?'
15. My survival toolkit
Linked to Activity 4. The Survivor's Toolkit, this activity is an alternative to Activity 14. Auditing Your Assets, as a way of answering the question 'Where are you now?' Participants compare their current skills and abilities with those of survivors, and work from this to the start of a definition of the things they need to learn through CPD. Mutual mentors work in pairs to help one another.
16. Set your objectives
This activity guides participants through the process of first choosing an overall aim for their own CPD and then translating that into valid and realistic personal objectives. People refine their objectives by acting as 'consultants' to one another, which also gives them another chance to improve their mutual mentoring abilities. The activity provides an answer to the question 'Where do you want to be?'
17. Plan your route
People often feel that formal courses are the only way to learn. This is an exercise which shows people how to exploit the learning opportunities in all the things they already do, and how to help themselves to keep learning. Participants examine some effective ways to learn and use these as a basis for building their mutual mentoring skills. The activity leads to an answer to the question 'What will get you there?'
18. Learn in your own way
After summarising the relevance of learning styles, this activity gives participants ways of exploiting their learning preferences and becoming more versatile learners. It leads to an answer to the question 'What suits you best?' There is a strong focus on people's experience, and on developing learning abilities and mutual mentoring skills.
19. Record to prove it
An introduction to a variety of ways of recording progress on CPD, helping people to choose a method which is both congenial for them and acceptable to an employer or a professional institute. It will help them to answer the question 'How will you know you've arrived?'
20. So what will you do?
This draws together all the strands and gives people an overview of their CPD process after they have worked through the learning activities. Again, mutual mentors work in pairs to make sure that everyone's action plans are both comprehensive and realistic.
21. Where do we go from here?
This activity reviews the programme of learning events and identifies any actions which might be taken by organisations or groups. The mutual mentor pairs also set out what they are going to do after the learning events. The activity could lead into Activity 2, Were Your Expectations Met?, which reviews, evaluates and closes the learning events.
298 pages, with 132 OK to copy pages.
