200-11 WORK OUTCOMES AND LEARNING

Community Learning Development Resource 200 – 11

WORK OUTCOMES AND LEARNING

 

SUMMARY

As workers in our own field, are we able to identify the outcomes that we want to achieve in relation to any individual that we work with? Do our work outcomes and planning prompt the people we engage with, to learn?

 

  • Step One – what are the work outcomes that we want to achieve?

Workers and agencies want to achieve a wide variety of outcomes. Below are some examples of outcomes from the current practice of community development workers:

 

EXAMPLES OF COMMUNITY WORK OUTCOMES

 

  • Our service is being used:  more widely / by new users / by people who can benefit from what we can provide?

 

  • Our events and activities attract people: from non-participating groups / new people / those we want to make contact with?

 

  • More people join our group, who: have never been before / will benefit from joining / we have been trying to reach?

 

  • The people we work with, choose: to progress onto more activities / to join our community action group / to participate in an agency consultation?

 

  • The people we are attempting to work with: make contact with us / ask for our help and advice / refer themselves to our agency?

 

Now we have identified some hoped for outcomes:

 

  • STEP TWO – will people be learning?

 

  • STEP THREE – how do we need to work with them to achieve success?

 

  • STEP FOUR – what will we learn from the experience?

STEP TWO – will people be learning?

Is there learning, which will help them to change their behaviour and act in new ways, which make for success in what they want to achieve. Their gains and benefits evidence our successful work outcomes.

Does learning play a part if what we hope they will choose to do is – become involved,  contribute, participate, take action, make positive choices, etc? More evidence of us achieving successful work outcomes.

Enabling and encouraging people to grow and develop through learning, supports them to gain control over their lives and able to fulfil their potential. Their successes are evidence of us helping to build their capacity and social capital.

 

STEP THREE – how do we need to work with them to achieve success?

If learning plays a part in changing the behaviour of people so that they see and do things differently and so that they become able to act in new ways, we need to understand what that learning is and work out ways of enabling it to be put in place.

We need to understand what the effects of learning are likely to be with any individual – how learning gains will benefit them, so that we can enable and support them to achieve learning success.  We need to work out how best to support them, to enable learning to happen which will be to their benefit.

We need to be active recorders and reflectors in relation to our work and our learners. The area of community-based adult learning is not an exact science where we always know what works and what doesn’t, or where we are able to predict what the learning outcomes and impact will be. Each individual learning experience that we have with an individual is likely to be new and different in some way.

 

Step Four – what will we learn from the experience?

The indicators of success are likely to be bound up with the changed behaviour and actions of individuals, where these are contributing to the success of our work.

If a work outcome has been to increase the number of people using our service, then we are interested in how this has been brought about. What changed their behaviour so that they became users? We should focus on the impact of our work.

We can learn what worked for people, by talking with them about how they feel about their experience. Generally we will not be able to test for learning using traditional classroom methods, because the evidence of outcomes and impact is not going to be that easy to capture. How do we test for an individual’s increasing self-esteem and an ability to speak-up in a public forum – certainly not by setting an ‘end of term exam’?  We will need to listen and observe a lot, record, analyse and reflect on what we find. We can assess the learning success, evaluate and review the part we played in the process and on the basis of this plan for new learning experiences.

We need to collect case lore and build our experience and understanding.

 

Some broad learning areas within which an individual may develop and build their capacity:

Personal Development

Social

Development

Improving communication

skills

Becoming more confident

with others

 

Developing learning skills

Learning to recognize, assess and value learning

Feeling able to move on

 

 

Becoming better able  to participate and contribute

Becoming more able to use the learning

Building their learning – subject

learning

 

Becoming able to

make learning choices

Developing their potential

This is learning that contributes to the empowerment of individuals:

  • Moving them from being reactive to become reflective and proactive
  • Giving them opportunities, options and choices
  • Enabling them to use and apply learning within their lives
  • Freeing them to become creative and achieve their potential
  • Building their individual capacity as people and learners.

 

POINTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:

 

  • Do you think that you achieve successful outcomes with the people you work through your efforts alone?
  • It could be that you believe that there is no learning. Rather any success is simply achieved because of your own good practice or that of your agency.
  • Do you see the need to work with people as learners in order to achieve success with them?
  • Why should n’t adults simply be seen as the passive recipients of what it is we offer them or tell them to do?
  • Is it acceptable for us to believe that we know best when it comes to what is good for those we work with? Are we the experts that know what they need, how they need to change and how this can be achieved?