Picture the scene: staff sit in a room after a long day watching a Powerpoint presentation offering them definitions of a risk and hazards. You, as the manager, asks the staff team for examples. You make reference to acts of Parliament and official guidelines, and include cartoon images of people falling off ladders, tripping over cables, spilling toxic substances.
You then hand out example risk assessments and the accident book and utter dire threats to those who do not comply. ‘Done in 30 minutes and training box ticked,’ you think to yourself. Yet a week later, an accident goes unrecorded, a box falls out of a cupboard, and a glue gun is left on a table.
If this sounds familiar, you are not alone. Many managers will relate to putting great effort into preparing for staff meetings or training sessions, only to wonder where that learning has gone within a few days. Everyone gets immersed into the busyness of day-to-day life, practitioners feel they don’t have time to put the ideas into practice, and the manager feels the team are back to square one.
Having, in previous articles in this series, looked at how to set the scene for a successful training session, the importance of concrete learning experiences, and of reflecting on the learning experiences that have taken place, we will now explore how to ensure learning is embedded within real practice and carries over into daily working life.
It can be helpful to set the same expectations within a training session as in the daily work environment. This might mean asking the team to interact during a training session within these same boundaries. For instance, using the time as an opportunity to consider tone of voice, volume, verbal and body language used and observational abilities. Through this, we convey how important it is to value this time to come together and develop our professional knowledge and skills.
One of the main challenges for managers is to make sure that learning has actually taken place. ‘Assessment’ isn’t something that would necessarily occur to us to do outside of a formal teaching environment, but it can be useful to include an aspect of assessment in all training sessions and to do so without raising fears.
AN ELEMENT OF ASSESSMENT
Questions
We all know the familiar silence when a group of trainees are asked a question. Don’t be afraid to ask specific team members to contribute. However, do be aware of not putting someone who is very shy on the spot. It’s helpful to ask for thoughts, feelings and reflections rather than expecting them to answer questions where there is a right or wrong answer. One way to encourage participation is to develop a discussion with contrasting views, rather than a direct Q&A – trainees find themselves volunteering information before they know it.
Presentations
Ask each staff member to prepare a short presentation on a specific topic. This can be done alone or in pairs if staff feel more comfortable. Devising a quiz on safeguarding or health and safety can be a good way for practitioners to self-assess their own knowledge, plan how to develop it, and to demonstrate this to their managers.
I would suggest asking trainees to write their answers in one colour, and then for any missing information to be added in a second colour so gaps in knowledge are easy to spot. This is a learning tool, not a test, so they should be made aware that they aren’t going to be judged for incorrect answers.
Observations
Once the training session is over, provide support and motivation to your team by following up with a series of related observations. The manager can carry out some of these, but it is also beneficial to have colleagues observe each other, and to use video – with everyone’s permission, of course.
Watching your practice together on video as a team can be a truly eye-opening experience, and extremely rewarding too (see Further information).
Targets
Provide time at the end of each session for the team to reflect on what they have learned and develop a brief plan for how this will show in their practice over the coming weeks. It is important to make sure this is then revisited in individual supervision meetings so that individuals know their targets are valued and have been observed in practice.
Teaching expert Geoff Petty talks about ‘Medals and Missions’ – telling students what they have done well (the medal) and what they need to improve (the mission) is more motivating than giving grades or any other comparative form of assessment, and is a great way to provide feedback to practitioners.
CASE STUDY
When you engage in teacher education there is lots of talk about active learning and experiential learning. Telling is not enough. You need to have an experience, reflect on it, relate it to theory and then carry that learning into future practice.
So often the ‘get it over quickly’ training session gets you no further than giving the theory. At best it might involve some planning with staff writing risk assessments together for future events. You might ask whether it’s safe to give unsuspecting individuals a health and safety experience: clearly you can’t ask them to climb a wobbly ladder.
One manager I observed, Sue, came up with a good solution. Staff members were given a brief introduction to risks, assigned a partner and directed to a room in which they did not usually work. There, they were to list all the hazards they spotted. Sue had ‘planted’ three things in each room: adult scissors and a glue gun lying on a table, or an extension lead across the carpet. She observed teams with gleeful smiles on their faces finding long lists of ‘hazards’.
Sue was able to assess each individual’s awareness and knowledge of risk assessment by observing them at work. Having seen other environments through a new lens, the team were able to go back into their daily working lives with a clearer perspective on their own.
Going forward, the practitioners were collectively given the responsibility for carrying out the termly risk assessments so that they were fully involved in the process and were given the chance to develop their skills, assessed and guided by their manager.
In other early years settings, this approach has been taken one step further, with practitioners involving the children in their risk assessments, including of the garden. The idea was to increase their own ability to risk-assess and make safe choices.
Adults and children were working side by side on a daily basis, and the manager could observe – and assess – theory translating into practice, and being passed onto the children too.
FURTHER INFORMATION
Medals and Missions, http://geoffpetty.com/grading-students-work-degrades-their-learning-use-medal-and-mission-feedback-instead
Using video for training, www.nurseryworld.co.uk/nursery-world/feature/1160593/nursery-management-training-screen-time
