Y165_1

Learning to change

About this free course

This free course provides a sample of level 1 study in Education, Childhood & Youth http://www.open.ac.uk/courses/find/education-childhood-and-youth

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You can experience this free course as it was originally designed on OpenLearn, the home of free learning from The Open University:
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/education/learning-change/content-section-0.

There you’ll also be able to track your progress via your activity record, which you can use to demonstrate your learning.

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Contents

- Introduction

- Learning outcomes

- 1 Introduction

- 1.1 Welcome

- 1.2 What’s in this course?

- 1.3 Learning through activities

- 1.4 Study skills, other skills

- 1.5 Looking back and moving on

- 1.6 Conclusion

- 2 You and your learning

- 2.1 Introduction

- 2.2 Everyday learning – what’s going on?

- 2.3 Why it’s important to be a learner

- 2.4 Gathering evidence – your qualities, knowledge and skills

- 2.5 Mind mapping

- 2.6 Academic skills

- 2.7 Conclusion

- 3 Exploring learning

- 3.1 Introduction

- 3.2 Getting feedback from other people

- 3.3 Your learning – what does ‘theory’ offer?

- 3.4 Preparing to move on – connecting theory with skills

- 3.5 Conclusion

- 4 Where next?

- 4.1 Introduction

- 4.2 The wider social context – policy in the UK

- 4.3 What we mean by an action plan

- 4.4 Setting yourself goals

- 4.5 What might help and hinder you

- 4.6 Developing your action plan and thinking about evidence

- 4.7 Conclusion

- 5 Reflecting backwards, reflecting forwards

- 5.1 Introduction

- 5.2 What have I learned about my knowledge?

- 5.3 What have I learned about my skills?

- 5.4 What have I learned about my qualities?

- 5.5 Reflecting on what I have done differently — what was the effect?

- 5.6 Reflecting forward – what am I going to do next?

- 5.7 Conclusion

- Keep on learning

- Acknowledgements

Introduction

Being unsure of what you want to do in life (or what you want to study) is not unusual. How to deal with the changes that
we want in our lives can be more challenging. You may be unsure about what subject you are interested in or whether you can
cope with study at university level. You may be unsure about what path in life to pursue.

This course takes your life as its starting point. It helps you to think about what you can do already. It then uses this
to build up your confidence in your abilities. It uses a mixture of personal reflection, case studies (including three real-life
case studies) and ideas about how we learn. This combination equips you to move your life forward.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of level 1 study in Education, Childhood & Youth

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

- understand the importance of the word ‘skills’

- think personally about learning

- understand that valuable and important learning goes on all the time

- appreciate that learning can involve thinking, doing and feeling

- understand more clearly what has been learned and what qualities, knowledge and skills are already there.

1 Introduction

1.1 Welcome

Learning to change is a course for people who are interested in learning about making changes in their lives. We think that you will find the
course interesting and that it will give you ideas that are useful for bringing about personal change.

The aims of this section are to:

1. provide you with a clear idea of what the course is about and how it is structured

2. help you understand the importance of the word ‘skills’

3. start you thinking about your own learning.

This course is based on the assumption that learning and change are features of all our lives, including those of these three
people:

Case Study: Karen

I left school w hen I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications were basically nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A levels. I went to secondary modern school and I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when
I left school. Three pounds ten shillings a week was my wage then. My first job was a filing clerk and I actually realised
that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I
was doing at that time and I admitted I was getting a little bit confused. And he said, ‘Well carry on. That’s a good idea.’
Oh – I would rather have the files in the correct order rather than have them wrong!

Figure 1 Karen

View description - Figure 1 Karen

Case Study: Levene

I left school at the age of sixteen with three basic qualifications – CSE qualifications, as they were known.

Figure 2 Levene

View description - Figure 2 Levene

Case Study: Shehnaz

I left school about sixteen years ago and I left with GCSEs and I was studying A levels which I weren’t up to because I got
married. I was supposed to carry on with my studying but I didn’t because my mother-in-law was ill and so I ended up looking
after her. And then we moved away and we moved to America for two years. We lived there and so that is why I had to have a
break in my studies. And in between that I had my children. And because I was so young I didn’t want to leave them and go
back to university. So while they were younger I used to child mind at home with them.

Figure 3 Shehnaz

View description - Figure 3 Shehnaz

These three stories are the starting point for this course, Learning to change. Each story says something about real experience in the lives of Karen, Levene and Shehnaz. You will be finding out more about
these three people, but this course is primarily about your experience, particularly your experience of learning. The unite
aims to suggest how you can use this experience as a starting point. We think that by getting a clearer picture of your knowledge,
skills and qualities you will be able to use learning for personal development and change.

This focus on personal change does make Learning to change quite an unusual course in some ways. One way to think about this difference is to imagine what you would say if someone asked
you what this course is about. Usually, someone asking this question would be satisfied if you said something like, ‘history’
or ‘the environment’. They may be slightly more puzzled if you say that it is about ‘learning’ or ‘change’. They may be just
as puzzled if you say, ‘it’s about me’. (By the way, we think that all these would be reasonable answers.)

However, in other, important ways, this course is very much like others. For example, just like other units, it asks you to
read and make sense of information. It is also similar to other units because, like them, it asks you to think about what
you do in order to develop a deeper understanding. Even the fact that this course draws on information from different viewpoints
is not so different from other units.

The course offers three sorts of viewpoint for you to explore how you can use learning to achieve personal change:

1. The first viewpoint is your own. We think that by exploring your own experience of learning you will have a much better idea
of your own viewpoint. This exploration may even make you change bits of your own perspective.

2. The second viewpoint is provided by Karen, Levene and Shehnaz and by other people. Their experiences of learning show how
it is possible to use learning. They are a resource that enables you to see what can be achieved.

3. The final perspective is a different sort of resource and comes in the form of theories about learning.

Although these three viewpoints can be found in all parts of the course, the balance between them changes as you move through
it. The next section sets out the structure of the course and gives you an indication of these changes.

1.2 What’s in this course?

As you have probably realised from reading this far, there are also other aspects to the course. We will have a look at these
in a moment.

This course is divided into five sections including this introduction. Each section encourages you to see how learning can
underpin personal change.

Section 1 (this section) – Introduction. This section introduces the course. It gives you an idea of how the course is structured
and what approaches to learning and change it takes.

Section 2 – You and your learning. This section is the first of the three steps that organise the course’s approach to learning
to change. In this section the most obvious focus is on the perspective that you have on your own learning. However, as you
gather evidence about this perspective, we hope that you will begin to re-evaluate it and to think about the possibility of
change.

Section 3 – Exploring learning. This section encourages you to consider two additional perspectives that can illuminate your
learning. The first is the perspective that other people you know can provide. The second is the perspective that can be provided
by academic theories about learning. We think that these two perspectives can help you prepare for personal change.

Section 4 – Where next? This section completes the discussion of academic theories. It also acts as a guide to help you establish
where you want to go and what you want to achieve. In this part of the course you are encouraged to develop a personal action
plan. In this section the focus returns to your own viewpoint, while encouraging you to change or modify how you think about
using Learning to change.

Section 5 – Reflecting backwards, reflecting forwards. This section is an opportunity to review what you have learned while
you have been studying Learning to change. We are sure that you will feel that you have had an enjoyable and important learning experience.

We hope that you will also be able to think about how you will take what you have learned from the course forward, perhaps
building and developing your action plan in order to support other aspects of change.

Throughout this course there is video material, and we refer to them as our ‘case studies’. Many of the activities that you
are asked to do on the course focus on their experiences. We hope that you will find this an interesting way to see how ‘real’
people have used learning. We also hope that you will see their experiences as a source of ideas and, perhaps, as a source
of inspiration. Later you will also be introduced to two further case studies, which we hope will help you as you work on
your own action plan. You will return to the video material as you move through Learning to change; for example, it contains ideas about how to use something called a Johari window which you will use in Section 3.

We would also like to point out that this course is not just about reading this course and watching the video. It is about
what you put into it. This is what makes your responses to the activities so important. Adding your responses will make this
course much more relevant to you personally. Discussing your ideas and writing about them helps them to become ‘real’ and
better shaped – in other words they will be more useful to you.

The next section aims to give you a better idea of what it will be like to study this course.

1.3 Learning through activities

The course has been designed to actively involve you in your own learning. One of the most important aspects of this are the
activities that you are asked to do.

For each activity, there is a suggested time, for example, ‘Allow about 10 minutes for this activity’. These estimates are
intended to give you a sense of the amount of effort required. However, you may find that you spend longer on each activity.
That is fine, so long as you feel you are learning. If you come across ideas that you have encountered before, you may work
through the activities more quickly. Effective learning does not have to take hours at a stretch; in fact, trying to concentrate
for too long can be less efficient as you become tired. You are the only one who can tell what works best for you. At first,
it may be worth noting the actual time spent on each task, so you can decide whether to change the way you study.

Once you have done an activity, read the comment that follows. These comments aim to highlight what we think may be important.
But, again, do not be too worried if your ideas differ. Your own viewpoint may produce ideas that we have not thought of or
included.

Probably the best way to see how activities work is to have a go at one right now. This activity takes you back to the three
stories at the start of this section.

Activity 1 What can Karen, Levene and Shehnaz tell us about learning?

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

The experiences of these three people are shown in the Case Studies videos below. Watch each video now to see what Karen,
Levene and Shehnaz have to say about their experience of learning.

Think about what each person’s story says about their learning.

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

Video content is not available in this format.

Levene

View transcript - Levene

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

View comment - Activity 1 What can Karen, Levene and Shehnaz tell us about learning?

If your responses were different from these comments then you may think that you have given the ‘wrong’ answers. In this course
there are few, if any, ‘wrong answers’. For each activity there is a range of possible answers. The key here is to ask yourself
whether the answers that you have given help to develop your understanding.

Karen, Levene and Shehnaz all seem to suggest that learning can happen in many different situations including work and family
life. Some aspects of adult learning seem to occur because there is a need or desire to learn. Karen’s way of coping with
the filing is an example of this. At other times, learning may happen anyway, with little control over it. Shehnaz having
to look after her mother-in-law might have led to this type of learning. But Karen did not learn to file as a result of being
taught by someone. In the same way Shehnaz was not taught by an ‘expert’ about how to look after her mother-in-law or her
children. Much of their learning has not happened as a result of being told things by someone like a teacher; it has occurred
as a result of the ways that they have responded to experience.

This is a very important point about the way that we see learning in this course. We do not think of students as being like
an empty container that someone else fills up with their superior knowledge. The learning we receive at school can seem like
this. This type of learning is often associated with exam qualifications. This sort of learning can make learners feel that
they have very little to offer and what they have learned in their own lives counts for very little. This barrier to involvement
in learning may have been overcome by Karen, Levene and Shehnaz, but it remains a formidable one to many other people.

As you work through the course you will find that there are many other activities that ask you to stop reading. Generally,
this will involve you writing down your thoughts about some aspect of the text or video material.

Your study on Learning to change does not just mean that you have to read (or watch) the course materials and do the activities. There are other important
aspects to studying, such as being organised to study. This includes working out where you are going to study and when you
will find the time for your studies. It is also helpful to think about how you are going to organise the notes that you make
as you study.

The next section focuses on the different ways in which the word ‘skills’ is used in this course.

1.4 Study skills, other skills

You will find many references to ‘skills’ in this course. Before we explain how we will be using this word, we would like
you to think about what you understand is meant by ‘skills’.

Activity 2 What’s in a word – skills?

Allow about 10 minutes for this activity

Spend a few moments thinking about what you associate with the word ‘skills’. Write down, as quickly as possible, what you
connect this word with. There are no right or wrong answers.

View comment - Activity 2 What’s in a word – skills?

The problem with the word ‘skills’ is that it can be, and is, used in very many different ways. This might be the case in
your response to Activity 2. There is one aspect that sees skills as something that we are good at doing. We might say that
someone is a skilled football player or cook. This may be connected with work. We might need particular skills to do a certain
type of work. Some jobs need specialised skills; for example, the skills required to work as a brain surgeon are very different
to those needed to work as an airline pilot. Beyond this there is the idea that some skills are needed in most jobs; for example,
both the brain surgeon and the pilot need to be able to communicate with other people. These skills are sometime called transferable
skills (because you can use them in many different settings).

In this course, we also want you to think about the skills you use as a student. This course aims to develop your confidence
in skills that are useful for successful study. However, we also want you to think about the skills you have already. This
means that in Learning to change there are two sets of skills for you to think about.

The first set comprises the skills that are used on a day-to-day basis in the ‘real world’. As there are many of these we
have decided to focus on three very important ones:

- communication skills

- problem-solving skills

- organisational skills.

In this course we will refer to these as ‘everyday’ or ‘real world’ skills.

The second set of skills includes the skills that are more associated with studying. These are:

- reading

- note taking

- writing

- selecting and using evidence

- evaluating ideas (including your own plans) and theories

- thinking about your own learning (reflection).

In this course we will refer to these skills as ‘academic’ skills.

It may look quite neat and tidy to have these two sets of skills listed in this way. But doing this can cause difficulties.
Calling the first set ‘real world’ or ‘everyday’ skills and the second set ‘academic’ skills might imply that the real world
and study are completely separate from each other. Yet this course looks at how you interact with the world. This is not so
different from many other academic subjects which also explore different ways of making sense of the world. However, many
people do see the real and the academic worlds as being completely different from each other. This can act to put them off from participating
in academic study. The separate lists might also imply that real world and academic study use different skills. This can reinforce
the belief that academic skills are of little or no value in the real world.

We ask you, in this course, to question both these notions. We think that many ‘everyday’ skills can be useful in becoming
a successful student and that ‘academic’ skills can have useful applications in everyday life. Using academic skills in this
broader context can also help you see yourself as a student.

‘Reflection’ is something that is important in the real world and for studying. In this course, you will find that we refer
to ‘reflection’ quite often. This is the time you spend thinking about what you have done, or how effective your approach
to study has been so that you can do better next time. But reflection is useful in the real world, where it is often the basis
of people changing how they work. This means that it is found in paid work, where, for example, social workers and nurses
have to develop as ‘reflective practitioners’. Reflection can also be an important aspect of some unpaid or voluntary work,
such as counselling.

The next activity helps you to reflect on your study of this section.

Activity 3 Thinking about your studying

Allow about 10 minutes for this activity

Think about how you felt about Activities 1 and 2 and the comments afterwards. Next time you come across the words ‘learning’
and ‘skills’ will you approach them differently?

Jot down a few notes summarising your thoughts.

View comment - Activity 3 Thinking about your studying

1.5 Looking back and moving on

This course has introduced you to the main learning components of the course and also outlined some academic skills. However,
the key question is: what have you learned that you did not know when you started the question? When you reach the end of
a section it is a good idea to review the work you have completed.

Although most people feel fairly confident reading steadily through a section from start to finish, there will be situations
where it is more important to read through quickly to identify a key bit of information, or to look through several sections
to get an overall view of the main ideas. In these cases, reading every sentence carefully would not be appropriate and would
waste quite a lot of time.

Suppose you wanted to find one bit of information quickly, for example, some fact that you knew you had read about in the
current section. What would you do? You could look at the contents. The first sentence in each paragraph often introduces
the main idea too. Or, if you have a good idea where you read the information initially, you can quickly glance over each
page just looking for that one piece of information.

1.5.1 Using a mind map to summarise information

To quickly summarise a lot of information, some people find it helpful to draw a ‘mind map’ which shows how the different
topics are connected.

Start with a large sheet of unlined (plain) paper and coloured pens or pencils. A mind map can be produced for any subject
or topic. They all begin in the middle of the paper with a word, picture or symbol that represents the subject being explored.
The next stage is to let your mind wander as freely as possible around the subject, thinking of key words or phrases that
trigger ideas. The most important of these are placed nearest to the central image and are connected with lines to the centre.
The next stage is to add associated ideas to each of the key words, again using lines to connect them. The process of creating
the map can help to sort out ideas and how they fit together. These maps are very personal and can be as elaborate or as simple
as you wish – there is no right or wrong way to do it. Some students like to add a lot of detail, for example including colour,
pictures, page references and examples, while others prefer a simple plan, concentrating on the key points.

Do not worry too much about how to do this at this point in the course as we will build on the technique of mind mapping in
section 2.5. It is more important that you just have a go at producing your own mind map.

Activity 4 Looking back

Allow about 15 minutes for this activity

Summarise what you have studied in this section using a mind map. Even if you have never used one of these before, have a
go, then compare yours with Figure 4. In this case the central theme is ‘Section 1’, so put that in your central bubble then
go back through the section picking out the main ideas and points that relate to them.

View comment - Activity 4 Looking back

1.5.2 Planning your study time

One of the most difficult aspects of being a student is fitting in your studying with everything else in your life. This is
why this course focuses on organisational skills including time management. It is important both to find enough time to study
and then to try to make the most effective use of your time. Finding enough time can be quite a challenge! It often means
giving up some activities you currently enjoy or perhaps negotiating with your family and friends to pass on some of the daily
chores, or to allow you some time to yourself. Nonetheless, it is surprising how much can be achieved in short five- or ten-minute
slots, such as recapping on previous work, sorting out paperwork or planning future work. Having found some time, it is also
worth thinking about whether this is the best time for you to study and, if it is not, changing it.

Activity 5 Planning your study of section 2

Allow about 10 minutes for this activity

Now quickly read through the main headings in section 2. Using your experience of studying section 1, write a rough plan of
the times for your study sessions for section 2. Remember to include some emergency time in case your timetable does not work
out as planned, or you want to include further work on section 1.

View comment - Activity 5 Planning your study of section 2

If you tick off the activities you can do, you will be able to see clearly which areas to ask for extra help on or practise
further. This will help you make the best possible use of both your tutorials and your own study sessions.

1.6 Conclusion

At the start of this section, there was a list of what we hoped you would get from your study of this section. To save you
looking back, the aims of the section were to:

- provide you with a clear idea of what the course is about and how it is structured

- help you understand the importance of the word ‘skills’

- start you thinking about your own learning.

It would be useful to think back over this list before moving on to section 2 to see if you feel that these goals have been
achieved. The first two parts of the section explain what the course is about and how it is structured. So, in addition to
your mind map you could look at your notes on these sections. Section 1.3 focused on the importance of active involvement
in this course, so you could think back about how active you have been. For example: have you given yourself time for the
activities or have you worked out when and where you are going to study? Some of the activities in Section 1 relate to working
out what is meant by ‘skills’ in this course. You could check whether you understand which skills play a part in Learning to change. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, have you begun to reflect on your own learning?

2 You and your learning

2.1 Introduction

This course is about using learning to bring about personal change. This assumes that learning can help achieve such change.
Section 2 aims to be the first step in showing you how this is possible. This section has three separate but related aspects:

1. Section 2 looks at what the word ‘learning’ includes. This turns out to be a very wide ranging idea that suggests that human
beings learn all the time. What we learn has important consequences for the direction in which we develop and change.

2. The section moves on from these general points about learning and offers you a sequence of opportunities for you to see what
qualities, skills and knowledge you have already. This part of the section includes a number of activities. It is important
that you set time aside to do these activities for two reasons:

1. On a practical level, the information you collect by doing these activities is useful throughout Learning to change.

2. On a personal level, we hope that the outcome of the activities helps you to realise that you have a range of qualities, skills
and knowledge which you can feel confident about.

3. Finally, the section looks at ways that can help make sense of what you know about your learning. You will come across these
as you work through the activities in this section. They include the use of the mind mapping technique that you met in Section
1. The section also asks you to think about how other people have developed their qualities, knowledge and skills. It is for
this reason that we have the case studies that you will find in this section.

These aspects underpin the aims of this section. By the time you have reached the end of Section 2 you should be able to:

- understand that valuable and important learning goes on all the time

- appreciate that learning can involve thinking, doing and feeling

- develop a clearer idea of what you have learned and what qualities, knowledge and skills you already have

- better understand the importance of everyday skills of communication, problem solving and organisation.

2.2 Everyday learning – what’s going on?

This section will start with two examples of the sort of learning that occurs on an everyday basis. The aim here is to start
you thinking about the ways in which learning goes on all the time. To illustrate this, read Jim’s story. As you read, you
might like to begin to think about whether any aspects of Jim’s story might also be a part of your ‘story’. (In this context,
we are using the word ‘story’ to mean what has happened in your life so far. We are not using it to mean something that is
‘made up’.)

Case Study: Jim’s story

Jim has recently found out that his work as a plasterer is affecting his health. This has made him think that he might need
to find other sorts of jobs, so he has decided to build on what he already knows about computers. He has enrolled in a class
at his local college – Introduction to word processing. Let Jim take up the story.

Figure 5

The class I had enrolled for – Introduction to word processing – took place at my local college. It was years since I had been there and it had changed a lot. There were lots of new buildings
I didn’t recognise from when I did my plastering course.

Eventually I found the reception desk and they gave me directions. Just as I was about to set off, someone came up to me and
said that he was the teacher (‘tutor’, he said) for Introduction to word processing. He said he would take me to the right classroom. He gave me his name, which I promptly forgot. I think I must have been nervous
about starting the course. (Although I thought that I had been fairly relaxed about it all.) I’m always forgetting names –
especially of people who are new to me.

When I got to the ‘classroom’ I found that it was called something like the ‘Learning Resources Centre’ and that it was filled
with dozens of brightly lit computers. My tutor (I still could not remember his name) led me over to one corner. ‘Here’s your
group,’ he said. And he started to introduce me to a dozen people. ‘This is Avril, this is Jade, this is Zoë, this is Steve
…’ I was feeling worse and worse. I had forgotten the teacher’s name and now I had even more names to remember.

‘You can use this computer, Jim,’ said the teacher. I was really pleased to be able to sit down in front of it so that I did
not have to talk to any of the people whose names I had forgotten. The teacher gave me a sheet with a word processing exercise
that looked like something I could manage. What a relief this was. It was so much easier than having to talk to these people
I had never met before.

However, after a few minutes I realised that most of the other students in what was supposed to be my group were all talking
to each other. Some had met on another course last year and had decided to do this course together. And they all knew each
others’ names!

I slid slightly further down in my chair and concentrated on the screen in front of me.

Activity 6 What does Jim bring to his learning?

Allow about 15 minutes for this activity

The ‘story’ you have just read focuses on what happened when Jim went back to college. However, as he tells his story he is
also revealing things about his past learning and showing us that he is learning as things happen to him when the class gets
started. Jim’s story can be seen as a ‘snapshot’ which tells us about why he wants to learn and what he thinks he may not
be very good at. Later in this section we ask you to think about the qualities, knowledge and skills that you bring to your
learning. However, for the time being, see if you can answer these questions:

1. What clues are there about what Jim learned in the past? For example, you might think about what courses (or other education)
Jim has completed.

2. What aspects do you think might be useful to him? For example, do you think that Jim has learned how to ask people for information?

3. Are there any unhelpful aspects? You might want to think about how Jim feels about having to talk to people who are new to
him.

4. Is personal change part of the reason why Jim wants to take the course? Here you could consider why Jim decided to make the
effort to go back to college to learn about something that is unfamiliar to him.

5. What has Jim learned about himself from past experience? Here you might like to think about whether some aspects of Jim’s
learning make him feel more confident about himself. Are there other aspects that make him feel less self-assured?

6. What do you think Jim will learn from this experience? You could decide whether this experience will help Jim achieve change
or whether it might reinforce any unhelpful learning.

View comment - Activity 6 What does Jim bring to his learning?

In this course, we are arguing that learning is involved in everything that happens to people and in everything that they
do. Arguably, it is impossible to find an example where learning is not involved. If you have had experience of a classroom,
you will have learned a great deal about what happens in classrooms and how they are different from, for example, a bus queue
– assuming that you know about bus queues. Experience of a classroom is likely to include learning about the different sorts
of people who are involved, such as teachers and pupils.

Sometimes this learning can be helpful. For example, your previous experience of a particular classroom might make it possible
to have a better idea of what goes on in other classrooms. At other times, this learning can be unhelpful. In Jim’s story,
his learning about where classrooms were is now outdated as the college has knocked down many of the buildings Jim remembered
and replaced them with new ones. Sometimes learning can have even more negative consequences. For some people, their experience
of classrooms has taught them that they are no good at learning or that classrooms are unpleasant or intimidating places.

This raises important points about learning. First, learning is always related to, and shaped by, our experiences and what
we make of these experiences. Our experiences and what we make of them are different for everyone and thus form a unique combination
for each individual. Different people will think about experiences in different ways and have different feelings about them.
This suggests that what we learn will be unique too – even if some of our experiences can be compared with those of other
people.

Jim’s story focused on learning on a course set up and run in a college. However, even in this story, it was clear that learning
was occurring in other aspects of Jim’s life. Angela’s story shows how learning is going on when courses or college do not
form part of the picture.

Read through Angela’s story. As you read you might like to reflect on whether you can see features that you can identify with
from your own experience.

Case Study: Angela’s story

What time is it? Three o’clock? Surely not! Where has the day gone? I did promise Grace her favourite meal today to cheer
her up after her least favourite day at school. I don’t think she will ever be an Olympic athlete even if she does get used
to games afternoon in her new secondary school. I’m really not too fussy about what she eats. I think if you are then children
can get really picky about their food. What is her favourite at the moment? I suppose it’s pizza and chips. I’m not totally
happy about this. It doesn’t seem much like a balanced meal to me – there’s no fruit or vegetables for one thing and it’s
a bit high in fatty foods. Perhaps I could add a salad to it – that would add a bit of goodness and I could reduce the number
of chips to help cut down on the fatty stuff.

Figure 6

Some time later

“Mum, have you done my favourite? I’ve been looking forward to it all day. They made us run round the sports field – in this
weather! I’ve been freezing ever since.”

“Yes, Grace, I’ve done your favourite – pizza and chips. I’ve added a bit of salad – it’s good for you.”

“Oh, Mum. I told you – that was my old favourite. My friend, Shona, says it’s much healthier to be a vegetarian, so the salad
is OK but I can’t have that pizza – it’s got meat on the top, hasn’t it? I told you last week I wanted to try those veggie
sausages. Shona says they’re brilliant.”

“Well I haven’t got any of those, but you are in luck! The pizza is cheese and tomato.”

“I suppose that will have to do.”

“Is that all the thanks I get?”

Activity 7 Thinking about Angela’s story

Allow about 10 minutes for this activity

Angela’s story is about an everyday encounter. But it involves all sorts of learning – most of these do not involve formal
learning on an organised course. (Although Grace, as a school student, is involved in such learning.)

Before going on to the next section, take some time to note down the different sorts of learning that Angela’s story suggests
to you. For example, you might like to think about what Angela has learned about feeding her teenage daughter.

View comment - Activity 7 Thinking about Angela’s story

2.3 Why it’s important to be a learner

We hope that you will go along with the suggestion that learning permeates most, if not all, aspects of our lives. The quote
that follows is from Peter Jarvis, an academic who has spent many years trying to set out why learning is so important. In
the opening to a recent book he suggests:

Figure 7 Peter Jarvis

View description - Figure 7 Peter Jarvis

Learning is like food, ingest it and it will enrich the whole human being: unlike food, it is difficult to have too much.
It is possible to eat the wrong things and it is likewise possible to learn the wrong things … the processes of learning are
a fundamental stimulus to life itself and without it the human body could never transcend its biological state, nor could
the individual function effectively in the wider society. It is essential to our humanity …

(Jarvis, 2006, p. 3)

Jarvis is making a very strong claim about the importance of learning here. It is worth unpicking this statement in order
to see what it really means and to see whether you agree with it. Jarvis compares learning with food. Do you think that this
is a fair comparison? Do you think that if people do not learn, they will die? At first this seems quite a startling thing
to say. However, when you consider that if someone fails to learn about things that are dangerous (like hot objects or speeding
cars) they may put themselves at considerable risk. Jarvis also suggests that while it is difficult to have too much learning
it is possible to learn ‘wrong things’. These wrong things can include negative beliefs about ourselves as well as facts that
are inaccurate. This densely packed quote then finishes with three more very big claims about learning. The first is that
learning is a fundamental stimulus to life. The second is that without learning human beings can never transcend their biology.
The third is that learning enables people to function effectively in society.

Activity 8 Reading Jarvis

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Take each of the three statements below and note what you think Jarvis might mean. Also say what you think about his comment.

- learning is a fundamental stimulus to life

- without learning human beings can never transcend their biology

- learning enables people to function effectively in society

View comment - Activity 8 Reading Jarvis

Jarvis argues that learning occurs as a result of each and every experience that we have. Being aware of this can put people
in a stronger position to change – as it can increase our control over our experiences and give us a greater ability to deal
with what life throws at us. This puts people in a position to achieve personal change. According to Jarvis (2006, p. 13),
learning is the basis of personal change because it enables us to use our experiences in ways that can transform us.

2.4 Gathering evidence – your qualities, knowledge and skills

We hope that at this point in Learning to change, you are prepared to accept the argument that learning is vitally important to how we live our lives and that learning will
be involved in any change we make. It could, to borrow a phrase from Jarvis, act as a stimulus to change. In other words it
is possible to learn things that make us want to change or make it possible for us to change. Equally, learning is likely
to result from any change that occurs.

This section really begins the process of encouraging you to see how you can, to quote Jarvis (2006, p. 16), transform and
integrate the experiences that you have in order to bring about change. We are going to suggest that your unique combination
of personal qualities, knowledge and skills is the key. Let’s take each of these in turn.

A quality is quite difficult to explain. One way is to think about the words that you might use to describe someone. These
could be words like ‘kind’ or ‘generous’ (which are examples of positive qualities) or ‘deceitful’ or ‘untrustworthy’ (which
are negative qualities).

Knowledge is what you know. At a basic level this can be information about a particular topic. For example, a plumber would
know a lot about different taps and bathroom fittings. The same plumber might also be self-employed and know a great deal
about tax forms. They might have worked in a particular geographical area and may know that area very well. The point here
is that the mix of what anyone knows is highly individual to them. It depends, to a great extent, on the experiences that
they have had in their lives.

Skills are the things that you can do. These might include things like being able to ride a bike or cook a meal. Generally
it is possible to see when someone is using a skill like this. But there are many different sorts of skills. It is possible
to talk about interpersonal skills such as being a ‘good’ listener, for example. When someone talks to another person, we
might be able to see them using body language which suggests that they have a genuine concern for the other person. It may
even be possible to hear them talking and realise that they are skilled in how they use their tone of voice. There are other
skills that are important for successful academic study that may be far more difficult to observe in action. These include
many of the academic skills that we discussed in Section 1.

None of these is fixed. They can all expand; they continue to change over the course of our life. But it is important to begin
to establish for yourself as clear an idea as possible of what your qualities are, where you are particularly knowledgeable
and what skills you can use. You might ask why it is important to develop your self-awareness in these areas. There are a
number of reasons. To begin with, it means that you are working from the positive assumption that the qualities, knowledge
and skills that you already possess are valuable. This positive assumption of value has important implications. If you believe
this, you are more likely to feel confident and positive about yourself than if you think they are of limited value. If you
value them in this way, you will probably see them as something worth nurturing and developing. There is the added bonus that
the more you believe in your unique combination of qualities, knowledge and skills, the more likely it is that other people
will believe in them too.

2.4.1 Qualities

Clearly, some qualities are easier to recognise than others. We might be able to identify some of our qualities, but we might
choose to skate over some of which we are not very proud, or have little awareness. We might be inclined to be too hard on
ourselves and ‘beat ourselves up’ unnecessarily. However, it is impossible to deny that qualities are important. They influence
how we come across to other people. Our qualities are also shaped by our values. To give an example, someone’s quality of
being generous can be linked to an underlying value in the importance of sharing. In contrast, if someone appears to be miserly
they might place a higher value on saving money.

The qualities we have are important to other people. This means that they will play a part in shaping how others respond to
you. In turn, these responses are significant in how you come to view yourself. A good example of this can be seen when it
comes to getting a job. At a job interview, the interviewer is interested in what the applicant has to offer. This will include
what they know and what they can do. But the personal qualities that the applicant shows are vital too. Job interviews are
not unique in this respect. In most situations we are weighing up the other person. At the same time, they may well be trying
to work out what they make of us.

Activity 9 You’re the interviewer

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Watch the videos below Levene, Shehnaz or Karen. Imagine that he or she has come for an interview for a job. What qualities
do you think he or she might display

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Levene

View transcript - Levene

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Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

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Karen

View transcript - Karen

View comment - Activity 9 You’re the interviewer

You may well have spotted different qualities. This does not mean that your answer is wrong – you may be more skilled at noticing
people’s qualities. Also, this is very subjective. Just because someone thinks that another person has a particular quality
does not necessarily mean that they do really have that quality. However, it does mean that he or she is doing something that
conveys a particular message. This is further complicated by the fact that such messages can be intentional or unintentional.
They are intentional if someone is trying to deliberately create a particular impression. They may be unintentional if someone
reveals something about themselves that they had not meant to.

Activity 10 What qualities are there?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

As you have been thinking about qualities, now would be a good time to create a list to act as a reminder about the qualities
it is possible to have.

Quickly note all the positive personal qualities you can think of. Many of these are descriptive words (adjectives) such as
‘kind’, ‘honest’ and ‘tolerant’.

If you can, do this activity with someone else. Ideas are more likely to flow if you have someone else’s ideas to react to
(and they have yours).

Once you have finished, go back over your list and make a note of the qualities you think you have. If you are not sure, use
a question mark.

You can use this list to give you ideas for the next activity.

Activity 11 Imagine you’re the job applicant

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

This activity stays with the idea of using the job interview as a situation in which we need to be especially aware of our
personal qualities. However, a similar awareness can also be of benefit in many other contexts. These might include caring
for children, or how we think we should respond to an awkward customer.

Imagine yourself in a job interview. The interview is going really well. You are being asked questions for which you have
good answers. The interview concludes and you are asked to wait outside while a decision is made. It is all looking very promising.

If this happened to you, what qualities do you think you would show? Write these down as a list – with each quality on a separate
line. Then for each quality try and think of an actual instance where this was involved. This does not need to relate to an
interview.

It might start like this:

Quality I would show in an interview

When it was involved

Patience (when asked similar questions)

Yesterday, someone phoned me about a family get-together. They tried to alter plans we had agreed on – but I (patiently) explained
why this was not possible and they eventually accepted this.

Sense of humour

An example …

There may be some of your positive qualities that you think you would be unlikely to use in an interview. Start another list
for these. It might begin like this:

Quality I might not make apparent in an interview

When it was involved

Generosity

I am generous with my time – I help to run a voluntary play group and often do extra days when other parents can’t help.

(Bear in mind that it can often be very useful to make such qualities more obvious, especially if you really want that job!)

View comment - Activity 11 Imagine you’re the job applicant

The other aspect of qualities is that there may be qualities that you have which you think may hold you back or get in the
way of achieving personal change. Sometimes these are ignored, but then they can trip us up when we least expect it. At other
times there is a danger of focusing too much on these, with the result that we can see ourselves just in terms of our less
than positive qualities. It is probably best to recognise that we all have some of these qualities but that they are not the
ones we are going to focus on. Many apparently negative qualities can be used to suggest other, more positive ones. So, for
example, someone might see a lack of confidence as a negative. Despite this they keep on going, so this can be re-framed as
a quality of persistence and not giving up.

2.4.2 Knowledge

Learning is often associated with ‘knowing facts’. You may associate this sort of learning with what you did at school where
you might have thought that you had to learn lots of facts associated with a subject in order to pass an examination. Evidence
of learning is sometimes linked to building up an increasingly impressive store of such facts. TV quiz programmes tend to
make us think that learning is about knowing more facts than other people.

Figure 8 The audience waits to be impressed by how many facts the contestants know

View description - Figure 8 The audience waits to be impressed by how many facts the contestants kn ...

Charles Dickens portrayed the facts-obsessed schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind with little sympathy in his novel Hard Times:

Now what I want is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else.
You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them … Stick to Facts
…

(Dickens, 1854/1989, p. 1)

Figure 9 Thomas Gradgrind

This course does not see facts in the same way. You have already come across the suggestion that we learn things – that we
acquire knowledge – as a result of the experiences that we have. Facts themselves are of little value unless they help make
sense of some aspect of the world that is either important or interesting to you.

Usually this interest would be reflected in the content of a course. So if you had an interest in an aspect of history, you
might take a course that presents you with more information about this topic. As you will have realised by now, this course
is rather different. It does not give you additional facts about history, economics or maths. Instead the focus is on developing
your own understanding of yourself and, in particular, how you can use this learning to plan for personal change.

To support you in doing this, Learning to change does offer ideas about learning and suggests techniques for approaching change. In that sense, we hope that you will develop
your knowledge or, as it is also known, your understanding. You may even feel that you have learned some additional facts
along the way.

The next two activities ask you to focus on your qualities as a learner. By looking at these qualities, you are really looking
at how you approach knowledge. They are also important because they relate to ‘skills’, the focus of the section which follows
these activities.

Activity 12 Qualities of a learner

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

To get you started, watch the videos below.

Then note down your answers to these questions:

1. What aspects of being a learner does Shehnaz mention?

2. What qualities do you think she displays as a learner?

3. Does Shehnaz mention anything that might have stood in the way of her learning?

4. Does this help you to identify any more qualities to add to your notes?

5. Does Shehnaz seem to have any qualities that you would see as less-than-positive? If so, note these down too.

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

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Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

View comment - Activity 12 Qualities of a learner

It may be that you have found points of similarity between Shehnaz’s story about being a learner and some of your own. We
also hope that you can see how Shehnaz has been able to use learning as the basis of personal change – and that you noted
that this has happened despite some of the barriers and negative thoughts that she had to cope with.

If you are finding that you can identify, at least to a small degree, with the case study you have just been discussing, then
you might find the next activity slightly easier. If you feel that you have not very much in common with Shehnaz, do not worry
– remember that we are all unique as a result of our particular combination of qualities, knowledge and skills.

Activity 13 How do you learn?

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

Think of something you know about. This can be anything at all. It might be how to cook a particular type of food or it might
be how to repair a bicycle tyre. What is important is that you feel reasonably comfortable or confident about it.

Note down your example and try to explain how you learned to do this. This might include whether you were taught by someone
else, whether you found out by reading about it, or whether you picked it up as a result of a process of trial and error.

This first part might look something like this:

My example is learning to drive a car. When I think about it I learned to do this in many ways. I had a driving instructor
who told me what to do. I also had written information about things like where the pedals (the accelerator, brake and clutch)
were placed. My father also took me out in the family car. He told me things about driving – these were not always the same
as the instructor, so I had to decide which was more helpful. Practice during lessons and with my Dad was important.

Now try and answer these questions:

1. In this example, what did you find was easy to learn and what did you find was difficult to learn?

2. Why did you want to learn in this situation?

3. Is this a typical example of how you approach learning something new?

4. In what ways is it typical?

5. Are there any ways in which aspects of your learning in this example are unusual for you?

6. What does this example say about your qualities as a learner?

View comment - Activity 13 How do you learn?

2.4.3 Skills

When it comes to thinking about using learning to achieve personal change, this is often couched in terms of acquiring skills
that are useful for work. As we suggested in Section 1, this can lead to a rather narrow definition of change which translates
as ‘getting a better job’. The importance of secure and satisfying work cannot be denied. But there are many other important
aspects to life that do not involve paid work. These include relationships with family and friends, voluntary activity and
caring for children or people who are older or have a disability. It might even involve changes which move us away from paid
work. The narrow definition of skills also ignores the sometimes very impressive skills that can be built up as a result of
involvement in leisure activities. It also ignores that the skills of a swimming coach who is an unpaid volunteer may be very
similar to those of someone else who is paid.

So talking about skills comes with a ‘health warning’ to the effect that this word is often used as a sort of shorthand to
refer to what is required to get or stay in employment.

Perhaps talk about skills is so widespread for two main reasons. First, many skills can be seen in operation. For example,
you can see (and taste) when a skilled cook has prepared a meal. Second, if something can be observed, it may be possible
to measure it and to teach it. It is possible to see where the inexperienced cook goes wrong and what he or she can do about
it. This means that it seems much more possible to improve the skills that people use rather than to get them to adjust some
of their personal qualities. To an extent, the same applies to knowledge. It is possible to test some knowledge but it can
be very difficult to know what knowledge (or understanding) people acquire. Anything we are taught undergoes complex change
as we try and fit it in with what we already know. So if ten people have the same teaching input there will be at least ten
very different ways of understanding this.

To summarise, a focus on skills is in many ways reasonable and understandable, but it is not without its problems and we should
avoid any sense that, as human beings, we are just the sum of our skills. As Learning to change is a relatively short course, it is impossible to consider all the skills that are involved with personal change. In the next
sections we focus on just three: communication skills, problem-solving skills and skills involved with being better organised.

2.4.4 Communication skills

You may be interested to know that our word ‘communicate’ comes from the Latin word communicare meaning ‘to give’ or ‘to share’. So from the start communication is seen to involve more than one person. Whenever we are
interacting with other people we are communicating with each other. Communication can, of course, take many forms. It applies
to interaction when one person talks to another. But the listener is also, at the same time, communicating. They may be communicating
through their body language, their tone of voice and other aspects of their non-verbal communication that they are fascinated
with what the speaker has to say. Alternatively, they may be using these same channels to communicate that they are bored.
So, the verbal or spoken aspects of communication form only a part of what is going on.

All these aspects of communication have to be interpreted before we can decide what we think they might mean. We might think
that messages sent by someone’s non-verbal behaviour are a better guide to their ‘real’ thoughts and feelings. On the other
hand, we might think that people are good at changing their non-verbal behaviour in order to hide what they really think or
feel. So we may believe, for example, that politicians can modify their body language so that they do not give away too many
clues about themselves. Most of us have some awareness of the impact of body language, so it is likely that we do, at least
to an extent, try to make sure that it suits the particular situation we are in at any one time. Most of us act quite differently
when we are in the middle of an excited crowd compared with when we are in a public library. We might also think that it is
relatively easy to manipulate the messages given by verbal communication – most of us watch what we say so as not to offend
or upset someone.

Figure 10 Communication

View description - Figure 10 Communication

Communication skills are complex and varied. Imagine that two people, Bill and Sadiq, are talking to each other. Sadiq starts.
He has to work out what to say and how to say it in a way that Bill is likely to understand. As he speaks, he has to check
that Bill does indeed understand. This will involve observing Bill’s gestures, the expression on his face and many other signs.
If Sadiq thinks that Bill is not following, he may attempt to modify what he is saying. While this is going on, Bill is, as
we have seen, communicating what he makes of Sadiq’s communication. He may not understand or he may agree or disagree. He
might, or he might not, communicate this back to Sadiq. This might or might not be intentional. When Bill begins to speak
in response, these aspects come into play with Sadiq as the listener.

Given this complexity, it is not surprising that communication can get misunderstood or misinterpreted. It is perhaps surprising
that so much of our communication does appear to achieve at least some success.

Communication is something that is going on for most of the time while we are awake. It even seems to go on while we are asleep.
When we dream, it appears that parts of our brain are communicating with other parts of our brain. The ever-present nature
of communication is reinforced by the fact that communication does not just involve person-to-person events. Human societies
have developed many other ways of communicating. Often these make it possible for one person, or groups of people, to communicate
with many other people. These people may or may not be present when the process of communication is started. These types of
communication include the media (TV, radio, the Internet and newspapers). It is also possible to include Openings courses
as an example of this form of ‘few to many’ communication.

To summarise, communication takes many different forms and uses many different channels. This means that communication is
pervasive in our lives. But communication is important not simply because it is going on all the time. The noise from the
road outside or the clock ticking on the wall goes on all the time – that does not make either especially important. In complete
contrast, communication is vitally important to how we live our lives.

The next activity is a chance to test out this very big claim.

Activity 14 The importance of communication skills

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Think back over what you have done so far today. (If you are working on this early in the morning, think about what you did
yesterday.)

Write down what you have done. Use a separate line for each activity. This list should form the left-hand column of your sheet
of paper. Then, for each item say how communication was involved. Finally, how important is being able to communicate in this
way? Below are two examples to get you started:

Activity

Example of my communication

Importance

Made breakfast

Asked my wife if she would like a cup of tea.

By itself, not very important but helps to maintain relationship.

Drove to work

Gesture to thank other motorist who let me into traffic.

Similar. By itself not very important, but might encourage the motorist to do it again for me (or someone else).

View comment - Activity 14 The importance of communication skills

The importance of communication on a minute-to-minute and day-to-day basis could make it appear to be almost impossible to
exert any influence over communication. However, by seeing communication in terms of a set of skills it becomes far more possible
to review and to change how we communicate. It is possible to break these skills down into three main groups:

1. The words, or the language, that we use to communicate.

2. The range of body language and other non-verbal communication.

3. The impact of our communication on other people. If we are able to ‘get on the same wavelength’ and to have rapport with them,
it also makes it more likely that we can adapt our communication skills so that we actually communicate what we mean to communicate.

You may have noticed that the focus here is on one person communicating on a face-to-face basis. This means that we are not
paying much attention to situations when one person communicates with many using broadcast media. We are also not focusing
on written communication, although this is another important aspect of everyday communication. For one-to-many communications,
many of the same components of words and body language are just as relevant. Written communication is an important part of
the course – you are asked to write assignments. So it is considered as part of academic skills.

A useful point to remember about how communication skills are used is this one:

The meaning of communication is the response you get.

(O’Connor and Seymour, 1995, p. 18)

It is worth thinking about this and imagining the effects of acting as if this is true. The words in this core text for Learning to change are intended to be helpful as you think about personal change. However, if you do not find them useful, if they annoy you
so much that you may want to close the course, then the intention does not matter. The meaning of this particular written
communication would be annoyed frustration on your part. O’Connor and Seymour’s suggestion makes it very difficult to hide
behind good intentions. We have to face up to the likely consequences of our communication and take responsibility for the
outcomes.

2.4.5 Reflecting on communication skills

Communication can be approached in terms of the skills needed to get a hoped-for response. By seeing communication in terms
of skills, it is easier to focus on what skills you already have and use. Once you have a reasonably clear picture about this,
it is much easier to see where you might want to act to increase your communication strengths and decrease any weaknesses.

It can be useful to try assessing what you see as someone else’s communication skills before you think about your own. It
is for this reason that the next two activities ask you to assess the communication skills of Karen and Shehnaz.

Activity 15 Reflecting on Karen’s verbal communication skills

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Watch the video below. Watch it a few times in order to build up a detailed picture of Karen’s communication skills. This
activity focuses on the ways that Karen uses words and language – her verbal behaviour. Use the checklist that follows to
identify four key aspects of Karen’s verbal communication:

- Speed – Did Karen talk quickly or slowly?

- Tone – What tone of voice did Karen use? Did this convey anything about how she was feeling?

- Pitch – Did Karen talk in a high or in a low pitch? What messages did this send?

- Loudness – How loud was Karen? Again, what messages did you think she sent as a result?

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

View comment - Activity 15 Reflecting on Karen’s verbal communication skills

Activity 16 Reflecting on Shehnaz’s non-verbal communication skills

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Watch the video below. This time your focus needs to be on Shehnaz’s non-verbal behaviour.

Non-verbal communication can occur in many different ways. For example, the way that we dress will result in non-verbal communication
occurring. Even objects that we have around us can be the basis of non-verbal messages being sent. How close we are when talking
with someone is another important aspect of non-verbal communication, as is the way that touch is used. However, in this activity
we would like you to identify the following three aspects of Shehnaz’s non-verbal communication:

- Facial expression – What facial expressions did Shehnaz use? What messages did they convey?

- Eye contact – What sort of eye contact did Shehnaz appear to be having with the person who was talking to her? What effects
do you think this had?

- Posture – What posture did Shehnaz adopt? What messages did this result in?

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

View comment - Activity 16 Reflecting on Shehnaz’s non-verbal communication skills

Activity 17 Communication skills – their overall impact

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

We hope that the two activities involving Karen and Shehnaz will have given you a ‘feel’ for the sorts of communication skills
that are important in helping us to understand what another person communicates to us. This should put us in a better position
to communicate with them. Think back to either Activity 15 (which involved Karen) or Activity 16 (which focused on Shehnaz).
You can always, if you wish, go back to the same video extracts that you watched for these activities.

Note down your answers to these questions:

1. Did you think that Karen or Shehnaz communicated well with the person who was talking to her in the video extract? (Please
note that you did not hear the interviewer’s voice on the video.)

2. Which aspects of verbal and non-verbal communication do you think might help Karen or Shehnaz communicate successfully with
other people? (This could relate to people she works with or other people, such as family members.)

3. Were there any aspects of her communication skills that you think it might be useful for Karen or Shehnaz to improve?

View comment - Activity 17 Communication skills – their overall impact

2.4.6 Your communication skills

The next activity is an opportunity to reflect on your own communication skills. Recognising which skills you already have
and use is an important first step towards being able to value and develop them. If you are considering embarking on significant
change then you will need to communicate with other people at some point. You may need to explain to people who are close
to you what changes you are thinking about. Or you may need to use communication skills to enlist the help of other people.

Activity 18 Reflecting on your communication skills

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

Think of a recent interaction you have had with someone. Write an account, giving as much detail as you can. At this stage
of the activity do not worry too much about the communication aspects of your ‘story’.

Once you have finished writing put it down for a few moments before you come back to it. This means that you will create a
gap after your first attempt which will give you some time to think about what you have written. This increases the chance
of being more critical about what you write and to be able to add to or improve it. This is also very useful when it comes
to your written work in this course.

Now return to the story you have written. Note down any communication skills that you can see in your interaction with the
other person. For each of your listed communication skills, decide for yourself whether it is a skill that you are confident
in. Then say how often you notice yourself doing this. Your notes could be organised like this (we have given an example to
get you started):

My communication skill

Confident/unconfident?

Happens often/rarely

Speed of talking

I do tend to speak too quickly – so not very confident.

Usually when I think people do not agree with or like what I am saying.

The final stage of this activity (and again you might want to allow some time between this stage and the previous one) is
to go back over the comments you have put into your table.

Does your personal pattern of frequency and confidence help you communicate with other people? In what ways does it do this?

We will be returning to the importance of involving other people in your learning to achieve change later in this section.

The next section focuses on another useful skill – problem solving.

2.4.7 Problem-solving and decision-making skills

Although they are closely related, problem-solving and decision-making skills are different. Problem-solving skills help you
to solve problems by breaking them down into smaller, more manageable chunks. Decision-making skills, on the other hand:

… help you to make the best decisions possible with the information you have available. They help you map out the likely consequences
of decisions, work out the importance of individual factors, and choose the best courses of action.

(www.mindtools.com, 2008a)

As you consider your options for change, they are bound to highlight problems which might seem to be very daunting. Applying
problem-solving skills to them will make it far more likely that you will be able to see through your plans for change. As
you break down your plans for change into smaller chunks, you will need to decide between possible options. This is where
decision-making skills are useful. In some ways, problem-solving skills are very similar to decision-making skills. For both,
you have to weigh up possible choices and decide on the most satisfactory course of action. Ideally, to solve problems and
to make decisions, you need to gather as much relevant information as possible. Governments often claim to solve problems
and make decisions on the basis of evidence.

However, sometimes there is very little time to gather the evidence that might be needed to make a decision that is completely
thought-through and rational. In fact, it is possible to argue that it is always impossible to gather every last scrap of
evidence before taking the decisions required to address any problem. If you accept this argument, it means that problem solving
has to be based on decision making that is never fully supported by having all the possible evidence or information. This
further implies that our decisions always have to contain at least one element of decision making that is based on our feelings
and emotions about a problem – by our ‘gut feelings’. These feelings come into play even if we only use them to decide that
we have enough information to make a decision.

It is worth noting that these limits on the value of evidence will also apply to the evidence gathering you are doing in this
section. It will be useful to have evidence about your qualities, your knowledge and your skills, but this evidence can never
be totally complete. Also it is important not to let a need to gather more evidence get in the way of making a decision and
taking action.

The same process applies to aspects of your study too. When you are interested in a topic there is a real temptation to go
on reading around this subject in the hope that you can turn up more information. This may not cause any problems if you are
just gathering this information for your own enjoyment. However, if you are on a course of study such as Learning to change, there will come a point where you have to decide that you have enough information to be able to write an answer to a question
that the course poses. So writing an answer to a question can be seen as one form of decision making – one where it is usually
a good idea to gather a reasonable amount of information before you tackle the problem represented by the question.

The other end of the decision-making and problem-solving spectrum is where you have to respond to a problem with an instant
decision. If you are having a meal with someone and they suddenly start choking and turning blue in the face, it’s probably
not sensible to attempt to solve this by gathering as much information about choking as possible – they are going to be much
more appreciative if you save their life and get the food out of their windpipe by using the Heimlich manoeuvre.

We develop different approaches to problem solving and decision making. Some people love the challenge posed by any sort of
problem. Others feel that they cope best when they have to use their intuition or when they have chance to think about any
necessary decisions. There are also many people who find it difficult to make decisions, no matter whether these are required
to sort out immediate problems or those that are still some way off.

People in many different settings have become interested in both problem solving and decision making. This has led to a variety
of ideas being developed to help people think about these skills. Let’s move on by looking at one such ‘tool’ for problem
solving – Drill Down.

Box 1 Drill Down

Drill Down is a simple technique for breaking complex problems down into progressively smaller parts.

To use the technique, start by writing the problem down on the left-hand side of a large sheet of paper. Next to this, on
the right-hand side, write down the points that make up the next level of detail on the problem. These may be factors contributing
to the problem, information relating to it, or questions raised by it. This process of breaking the problem down into its
component part is called ‘drilling down’. For each of these points, repeat the process. Keep on drilling down into points
until you fully understand the factors contributing to the problem. If you cannot break them down using the knowledge you
have, then carry out whatever research is necessary to understand the point.

Drilling into a question helps you to get a much deeper understanding of it. The process helps you to recognise and understand
the factors that contribute to it. Drill Down prompts you to link in information that you had not initially associated with
a problem. It also shows exactly where you need further information.

(www.mindtools.com, 2008b )

Activity 19 Using a case study – problem solving

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Choose from one of the case studies as your focus for this activity, and watch the relevant video below:

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

Video content is not available in this format.

Shehnaz

View transcript - Shehnaz

Video content is not available in this format.

Levene

View transcript - Levene

Each of these highlights a problem that one of the case study subjects has had to resolve. These include Shehnaz having to
leave school to look after her mother-in-law and Karen being unsure about the order of letters in the alphabet.

Write this problem down and see if you can ‘drill down’ into it. Don’t worry too much if you don’t have all the detail you
would like. Base your ideas on what you think Karen, Levene or Shehnaz might have done.

What decisions did your chosen person make to try and deal with these problems?

View comment - Activity 19 Using a case study – problem solving

Activity 20 Using Drill Down to solve a problem

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

For this activity you will need to think of a recent ‘problem’ that you have faced. This can be anything as long as you feel
reasonably comfortable thinking about it. You may wish to discuss this with someone who is involved in your learning – you
should also feel comfortable about discussing this example with them.

Apply the Drill Down technique to your chosen problem. Check back over the earlier guidance if you are still unsure about
how to use this technique.

View comment - Activity 20 Using Drill Down to solve a problem

2.4.8 Decision making

Let’s move on to think about decision making. Remember that when we talk about decision making we are focusing on the smaller
chunks that become clear when you use problem-solving skills. Each of these chunks will need decisions to be made. A technique
which has been found to be useful is called PMI, which stands for ‘Plus’, ‘Minus’ and ‘Interesting’.

For this, you need a table with 3 columns, similar to the one below. We have given the example of Jim going back to college.

In the ‘plus’ column, write down all the advantages that you think would result from a particular decision; in the ‘minus’
column, all the disadvantages. The ‘interesting’ column is for possible results of taking the decision.

Give each point you have written down a score. For the ‘plus’ column these scores should be positive (+) scores; for the ‘minus’
column they will be negative (-) scores. The ‘interesting’ column can include both positive and negative scores. You choose
which values and numbers to give to each entry.

Add up your scores. A positive score should encourage you to take action; a negative score might make you want to think again.

Figure 11 PMI for Jim going back to college

View description - Figure 11 PMI for Jim going back to college

Activity 21 Decision making using PMI

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Think of a decision that is facing you at the moment. Draw up a PMI chart and put as many comments in each column as you can.
Add up your scores. Did this exercise help you to reach your decision? Write a comment about this.

Finally, write down what you feel Drill Down and PMI have added (if anything) to your problem-solving skills and your decision-making
skills.

View comment - Activity 21 Decision making using PMI

It would be helpful (even at this early stage of the course) to begin to think about what you might do differently in the
future. So, the second aspect here is to say what you learned from using Drill Down and PMI and how you might use these techniques
in future. You can be sure of one thing – if you do things differently, you are bound to get different results from the ones
you may be accustomed to.

Activity 22 Future problem solving or decision making

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

This activity asks you to choose either problem solving or decision making and select a problem or decision that relates to
changes you might want to make. If you choose to focus on problem solving, use Drill Down for this activity. If you select
decision making, use PMI.

View comment - Activity 22 Future problem solving or decision making

Using problem-solving and decision-making skills to good effect can play a big part in transforming our lives. Let’s give
the last word on this to Shehnaz:

Case Study: Shehnaz

Well, five years ago now I had no qualifications and which is one of the reasons why I started studying with The Open University
in order to give me a qualification to get a job, which I successfully did, and I have got a job now. In five years time from
now I would like to have completed my degree and hopefully work towards getting a full teaching qualification.

2.4.9 Being organised

Did you think that the way Shehnaz can think about ten years of her life suggests that she is quite well organised? Being
organised is the third skills area on Learning to change. It has been chosen from among the huge number of skills that are talked about, for a number of reasons. It is really relatively
easy to adapt and, yes, improve the way we organise our lives. Why is this important? Well, being organised means that we
waste far less of the time that we have at our disposal. And if we waste less time it means that we have more time for the
things we want to do. Although this skill is often referred to as ‘time management’, it might be more appropriate to view
it as ‘self management’, as it relates mainly to how we manage ourselves in order, as far as is possible, to do what we want
with our lives.

In 1910, Arnold Bennett wrote a book called How to live on 24 hours a day. Bennett’s comments are still very relevant today. He describes time as ‘the … raw material of everything. With it, all is
possible; without it, nothing. … It is the most precious of possessions.’ Bennett captures the central problem of time management
when he points out: ‘But if one cannot arrange that an income of twenty-four hours a day shall exactly cover all proper items
of expenditure, one does muddle one’s life definitely’ (Bennett, 1910). This highlights that if time is not managed, it has
consequences in the real world which make our lives harder. Bennett urges the need for a ‘minute practical examination of
daily time expenditure’. More recently, Norma Adair (1999, p. 12) has pointed out: ‘There is often a gap between what we think
we are doing and what we are actually doing’. Adair suggests that we should all act like scientists and carry out research
to find out where our time is really going.

Figure 12 Arnold Bennett

View description - Figure 12 Arnold Bennett

Activity 23 Your ‘daily time expenditure’

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

This activity is taken from Adair and Allen (1999).

By keeping a record of how you use your time, it aims to help you to develop what Adair and Allen (1999, p. 9) calls a ‘personal
sense of time’. It would be useful to keep this record over the next three days. For each day you plan to record, take a sheet
of paper and divide it up into 20 minute intervals. At the end of every hour, record how the previous hour was spent. It might
look something like Figure 13.

When you have done about three days of recording, set some time aside so that you can go back over your record sheets. You
can see these sheets as evidence for how you spend time. As with other activities in this section, see if you can think about
them initially as though they were evidence about someone else. Now answer the following questions:

1. What surprised or delighted you about your use of time?

2. What puzzled or worried you?

3. Were the three days typical or not? Why?

4. What does this evidence say about how you use time?

Keep these record sheets in a safe place – you will be using them for the next two activities as well. (Doing this will help
you save time!)

Figure 13 24th January

View description - Figure 13 24th January

View comment - Activity 23 Your ‘daily time expenditure’

But the benefits of being well organised in how we use time also apply to many other areas of life. It may make it possible
to allocate the time you want to a favourite pastime or to a voluntary activity that is important to you. Using your time
well is also an important skill when it comes to successful study.

Learning to change is an opportunity to develop skills that you will find useful when you go on to other study. For example, in producing a written
answer to activities there are a number of stages, including:

- reading course materials

- watching the course video material

- reading the questions (and trying to understand what it is asking from you)

- taking notes on course materials

- writing a first draft of the answer

- reading through the first draft

- making changes and writing a final version

This list shows that there are a number of clear stages that you have to go through to successfully complete a written answer.
They have one thing in common – they all take time. If you do not allow yourself enough time for any of these stages, then
it is likely that your answer will suffer. In other words, effective use of your time underpins all your work on this course.
Your note taking may be fantastic, but you have to have the time to do it.

This discussion has focused on the idea of time management as a skill. As with the other two skills (communication and problem
solving), this implies that it can be built on and developed. But these three skills can also draw on our qualities and what
we know.

Activity 24 What qualities are revealed in my use of time?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Have another look at the sheets you completed for the time management activity above. Do they provide any evidence about what
sort of person you are and what is important to you? For example, your time log might show that you spend a lot of your time
caring for other people. Ask yourself whether this use of time reflects your qualities. Alternatively, it might reveal that
you are not presently giving enough time to what you think is important. If this is the case, you could begin to ask yourself
what you might do so that your use of time better reflects what you see as being important.

View comment - Activity 24 What qualities are revealed in my use of time?

The next activity asks you to think about what you may already know about time management.

Activity 25 What do you already know about managing time?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

A good place to start is with the records you have already made. Look through these to see what you already know about methods
of time management. These may be quite simple – you may, for example, use a journal to keep track of meetings or appointments,
or you may have a ‘to do’ list attached to your fridge with a magnet.

Make a list of all the methods of time management that you already use and add a short (single sentence) comment about how
effective they are in helping you to manage time. It might start like this:

Figure 14 Managing time

View description - Figure 14 Managing time

View comment - Activity 25 What do you already know about managing time?

Authors like David Allen (2001, p. 24) have suggested that it is vital to manage ‘work flow’. Although Allen tends to focus
on work, many of his suggestions are relevant to other aspects of life. He suggests five stages to ‘Getting things done’ (the
title of his best-selling book). These stages are:

1. Collect information that is important to us.

2. Process what this information means and what to do about it.

3. Organise the results.

4. Review what options are available.

5. Do something.

You can see from this list that being organised is an important aspect of achieving personal change. You might also see connections
with what you have been doing in this section. For example, we can see aspects of Allen’s first two stages:

- you have been collecting information (Stage 1)

- you might feel that you have begun to think about what it might mean for you (Stage 2).

The next section of this section returns to mind mapping as a way to process the evidence you have collected in this section
as well as a way to organise it. Later sections of Learning to change are intended to take forward these processes and help you organise your information, review your options and do something.

This section has focused on three skills – communication, problem solving and being organised. It is important to bear in
mind that there are many other skills that are seen as useful, both in work and in life generally. However, we felt that these
three were a good starting point as they all connect with each other. In addition they have important links with qualities
and knowledge. So, gathering evidence about these skills is likely to provide you with information about your qualities and
knowledge too. We have also focused on these skills because they have clear roles in everyday life and they are of value for
academic study. You can probably think of examples of the ways in which all three of our case study subjects have benefited
from organising their time. For example, Shehnaz’s organisational skills are important for both work and study:

Case Study: Shehnaz

Well, when I was a child minder, I used to have to work with the children. I had to plan my own activities with them. Now that’s come into my work as well and, obviously because I had
to plan activities for the children, have a time limit, that’s helped me towards my doing my course and setting the time limits
to actually complete my assignments and things like that.

2.5 Mind mapping

The focus of this section has been on encouraging you to gather evidence about what qualities, knowledge and skills you have
already. This is an important first step, especially if it helps you to realise that you have more than perhaps you realised.
It is also an important step as it starts to make the case that it is important to value your qualities, knowledge and skills.
If you value them, it is far more likely that other people will value them too.

However, it is also important to maintain and develop what you have already. This section has suggested that involving other
people is useful in order to use learning to achieve personal change. It is also possible to use other people – both people
we know and others whom we have not even met – by reading about their ideas. This section has introduced you to some ideas
from other people. Section 3 takes this a step further. Before concluding this section, we will build on the technique of
mind mapping that you were introduced to in Section 1.

The big advantage of using mind maps is that they get us out of what can be habitual ways of thinking. Often thoughts can
follow well-trodden lines. Mind mapping is a technique that has been developed by Tony Buzan (2006). It can help us to think
more creatively and to come up with new and fresh ways of looking at things.

Activity 26 Mind mapping

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

For this activity, we would like you to create a mind map called ‘My Section 2 evidence’. If you are uncertain about how to
produce a mind map you should go back to the one you created in Section 1.

Let your mind flow freely around this focus.

Then review all the evidence-collecting activities that you have been asked to do in this section. It is important to do this
with as little editing or pausing as possible. Try and develop your mind map as colourfully and imaginatively as possible
as you add new ‘lines’ to it.

When you have finished doing this you will have the first version of your mind map.

Go over it again to see if you want, or need, to change it in any way.Finally, make three brief comments about your map (this
could be on the other side of the piece of paper).

View comment - Activity 26 Mind mapping

2.6 Academic skills

This section has encouraged you to gather evidence about yourself. This process of learning about yourself is put forward
as being a useful first step in achieving personal change. It is also a process that has used skills that are useful in becoming
a successful student. You will remember from our previous discussion that these skills can be described as ‘academic skills’.

The mind mapping activity above asked you to go back over what you have done in this section and produce a mind map. The next
activity asks you to use this mind map.

Activity 27 The academic skills used in Section 2

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Have a careful look at the mind map you created in Activity 26. Use this to pinpoint what academic skills you feel you have
used – remember that academic skills include any skills which help you to study. (Using your mind map in this way is a good
way to check out whether it gives you useful information.)

Make a note of anything that you think might count as an academic skill. You can either keep this as separate list or add
to your mind map.

If you want to, feel free to have a look back over other notes you have made or return to any part of this section.

It has already been pointed out that the skills of communication, problem solving and self-organisation are important for
successful study. You can think about these as possible starting points, but you will get a more detailed picture of academic
skills if you can break these down into things that you have actually done as you have studied this section. For example,
if you use time management as a starting point you might say that you allowed time to read this section or make notes. Reading
and making notes are the academic skills that you might add to your list.

View comment - Activity 27 The academic skills used in Section 2

It is important to note that many of these so-called academic skills are similar to what we do in everyday life.

2.6.1 Referencing

Referencing is a good way to illustrate this similarity. You will have noticed that when the course refers to someone, the
name and some other details (often a year and a page number) are given. An example in this section would be: Allen (2001,
p. 24). Here, the year (2001) and a page number are provided because reference was being made to a particular aspect of this
book. If the discussion had been about the book in general it would have been fine just to give the year. If you look at the
list of references at the end of this section you will find Allen given in a list in alphabetical order. This time the name
appears with some more details (his initial, the title of his book, where it was published and the publisher).

This is a formal academic reference (it is actually using the Harvard system of referencing) – so it is another academic skill.
It is quite an important academic skill. It shows that you acknowledge where information and ideas have come from and that
you are not trying to pass them off as your own.

The connection with what is done on an everyday basis becomes clear when you think about why referencing is used. If we are
using evidence, we want to show people that it is from a trustworthy or respected source. From a very early age we judge how
much weight to put on evidence depending on the source it has come from. For example, if a child comes home and tells a parent
that their school is shortly to be merged with another, the parent would probably want to know where the information came
from. If the child says that another child told them in the playground, their information would be taken less seriously than
if they had been told by the head teacher and had a letter from the school too. In the same way you might be inclined to believe
information from certain sources. Suppose your neighbour told you that they knew it was going to rain because a joint in their
little toe ached. However, the BBC weather forecast is for glorious sunshine. Which source would you believe?

All academic referencing does is to use a slightly formalised way of showing that the evidence presented can be relied on.
However, when you use it in your written work it not only shows that you know how to present academic references, it also
suggests that your written work demonstrates the quality of honesty.

2.7 Conclusion

This section has asked you to do a great deal of work on gathering evidence about what qualities, knowledge and skills you
already have. There are two main reasons why this is important if you are going to use learning in order to achieve change.
First, it is really important for you to have the self-confidence to know that you can achieve change. The activities in this
section have been designed to provide you with opportunities to build up this much clearer picture. Another important aspect
of this section is to help you to appreciate the value of qualities and skills that seem unimportant, insignificant or commonplace.

It is also important to ‘know’ yourself better because this is the basis for communicating to others what changes you want
to make in your life. The course has already used the example of a job interview. In this situation, it is important to show
that what you can do already is the basis for the change involved in taking on a new job. This is just one example; any projected
change will involve other people in some way or another.

The next section focuses on how other people can be involved in using learning to achieve personal change. It shows that it
is possible to add to the information we have about ourselves in two main ways:

1. By asking people we know for feedback on our qualities, knowledge and skills.

2. By drawing on ideas that academic writers have put forward about learning.

Adair, J. and Allen, M. (1999) Time Management and Personal Development, London, Hawksmere.

Allen, D. (2001) Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity, London, Penguin Books.

Bennett, A. (1910) How to live on 24 Hours a Day [online], http://www.web-books.com/Classics/AuthorsAD/Bennett/How/Home.htm (Accessed 18 October 2006).

Buzan, T. (2006) The Mind Map Book, Harlow, BBC Active.

Dickens, C. (1854, 1989) Hard Times, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Jarvis, P. (2006) ‘Towards a comprehensive theory of human learning?’, Lifelong Learning and the Learning Society, Volume 1, London, Routledge.

MindTools (2008a) Decision Making Techniques [online], http://www.mindtools.com/pages/main/newMN_TEI).htm (Accessed 25 March 2008).

MindTools (2008b) Drill Down [online], http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMC_02.htm (Accessed 25 March 2008).

O’Connor, J. and Seymour, J. (1995) Introducing NLP, London, Thorsons.

Thompson, N. (1996) People Skills: A Guide to Effective Practice in the Human Services, Basingstoke, Macmillan.

3 Exploring learning

3.1 Introduction

This section is the second step in using learning to help you achieve your own personal goals for change and development.
This second step is really about developing additional ways to build on the evidence you gathered about yourself in Section
2. In particular it considers how other people can help you change. There are two main aspects to this. The first is about
involving other people so that you can get feedback from them and increase the depth of your own self-understanding. The second
involves people who you meet only through what they have written. These people are academic writers who have suggested ways
of thinking about learning that we hope you will find personally useful.

By the time you have reached the end of Section 3 you should be able to:

- use feedback to add information about your qualities, knowledge and skills from another perspective

- use academic approaches to learning to increase your understanding of your qualities, knowledge and skills

- reflect on the academic skills you have used.

3.2 Getting feedback from other people

We recognise that getting feedback from another person and integrating theory can pose real difficulties. Getting feedback
from someone might pose personal difficulties and it is never easy to relate theory and personal experience. Let’s take getting
feedback to start with in order to see why this may be useful as well as looking at what difficulties it may cause. Hopefully,
this exploration will suggest some ways of dealing with these possible difficulties.

3.2.1 Why can it be useful?

It is possible to argue that getting feedback from other people is useful because it gives a perspective that would not, otherwise,
be available to us. There are many different theories that suggest there are aspects of ourselves of which we are only dimly
aware. You may well have heard of Sigmund Freud’s idea that our minds are made up of both conscious and unconscious elements.
Freud argued that the working of the unconscious part of the mind is almost impossible to access. However, these hidden aspects
might contain some useful information that would be valuable for personal development. The idea of using feedback builds on
the notion that other people, because they have a different perspective, can help us out with information that would be difficult
to gather if we worked alone. This idea has been extended and is the basis of what is known as 360 degree feedback. This is
used in work contexts to give someone as wide a picture as possible about how well they are doing.

It involves having feedback from everyone whose views are seen as being helpful and relevant.

3.2.2 What problems might you have with getting feedback?

Only you can answer this. However, you might think that you will not find it easy to ask someone else to be a mentor and give
you feedback about your own qualities, knowledge or skills. There may be all sorts of reasons for this. You might not feel
that you know anyone that you would trust to give you feedback in a way in which you would find helpful. Acting as a feedback
giver can put someone in such a powerful position that you might feel uncomfortable. You might feel that you do not know anyone
who has the right qualities and skills to help you in this way.

3.2.3 How it might be possible to get another perspective

When setting out on a process of personal change it is really important that you take good care of yourself. Part of this
might be a decision that it would be unwise or unhelpful to approach anyone that you know for feedback. If you think that
this will be your decision then you will be pleased to know that there are alternative ways to include the perspectives that
other people can provide. There is a well-established tradition of using different approaches in order to bring in what other
people might have to say about us. Perhaps the best known is the ‘empty chair’ technique used by gestalt therapy. This involves
choosing someone to sit in the ‘empty chair’ and imagining what they would have to say to us if they were present. In therapy,
this is intended to make up for things that were not discussed in the past, but which should have been. In this context, we
are suggesting that you could adapt this technique to imagine what feedback someone you trust would give you. As you are imagining
what someone might say you have unlimited scope to decide who your mentor might be. You could, for example, take one of the
case study subjects and imagine that they are giving you feedback. Alternatively, you could choose someone for whom you have
great respect or affection – even if you do not know them personally. Of course, this ‘imagined’ feedback may be very different
from what Shehnaz, or even someone like Nelson Mandela, might actually say to you. The point is that this technique can help
you explore ideas from a perspective that will be different from ones you may usually use. If the idea of imagining what people
would say to you sounds second best to actually getting feedback from someone, remember that students who do get this sort
of feedback still have to decide how to interpret and make sense of such feedback.

In the previous section you gathered evidence about your qualities, knowledge and skills, and some of the activities asked
you to think about the case studies. Hopefully, you now have a clearer idea about your learning. However, it is important
to recognise that all these activities have asked you to reflect on yourself.

So other people are important. Later in this course, we will look at how other people may be involved in helping you achieve
personal change. However, this process can start with using other people to help you gather information about your current
qualities, knowledge and skills.

The advantage of gathering evidence from other people is that they will have a different view of you from the one you have
of yourself. Drawing on this perspective can help enrich how you think about yourself. But there’s a ‘health warning’ too.
Other people’s opinions can make you feel less confident about yourself and may get in the way of creating a clear picture
of your strengths. It is really important to choose someone who you trust to have your best interests at heart. Remember that
you have scope on this course to decide if you would find it impractical or difficult to approach someone directly. If this
is the case, you will need to adopt the ‘imagined perspective’ technique and imagine what your feedback would be.

3.2.4 Johari window

This idea is being introduced at this point so that you can use it as you think about the impact of feedback.

The Johari window is named after its originators, Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingram (for some reason there is only ever one
‘r’ in ‘Johari’). It consists of four different areas which are shown in Figure 15 and looks rather like the separate panes
of a window.

The open area covers what you know about yourself. You know about this aspect and are happy to share it with others. An example might
be if you are happy to tell someone about your job.

The blind area includes what other people know about you but of which you are not aware. You might, for instance, be unaware of always
using a particular phrase that irritates everyone you come into contact with.

Figure 15 Basic 4-pane Johari window

View description - Figure 15 Basic 4-pane Johari window

The other two areas are the hidden area and the unknown area. The hidden area is what you know about yourself, but would prefer other people not to know. For example, this could include opinions
that you do not want to share with others as well as any aspects of your life that you feel ashamed or guilty about.

The final area is unknown both to you and to others. This might include hidden talents, unconscious feelings or abilities and qualities that have never
been brought to the surface. In other words, it may represent resources that could help your learning. Knowing about the likelihood
of these, as yet, unknown resources is also a good reason for getting involved in new activities with new groups of people.
Doing this opens up new possibilities of working with other people to find out more about your unknown area.

None of these areas is fixed. We can increase the size of the open area by asking other people to tell us what they know about
us – in other words by asking them for feedback. We can also increase this area by revealing hidden aspects of ourselves to
other people. We can reduce the size of the unknown area by looking into ourselves (self-discovery) or by finding out about
ourselves with the help of others (shared discovery).

These possibilities for movement are explained in a short video below, called ‘Johari window’ – watch this now.

Video content is not available in this format.

Video 1

View transcript - Video 1

The next activity asks you to use Karen, one of the case studies, to get some practice with using the Johari window before
you apply it to yourself.

Activity 28 What is in Karen’s open area?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Watch the Case Study videos about Karen below. Use these to help describe what you see as being in Karen’s open Johari area
– remember that this area includes what she is aware of and is happy to share.

1. What qualities and skills does she describe?

2. Can you notice any other skills? These may be verbal or non-verbal – so they may include not just what she says but how she
says it.

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

View comment - Activity 28 What is in Karen’s open area?

Case Study: Karen

I think particularly my mother was quite a strong character and she could be quite demanding at times. But, I think looking
after mum and working on the home help, I understood that you have to listen to what people want not just to assume that you
know best … You can’t sort of dictate to them if you want to be a carer. Then you have to be prepared to listen to the person
that you are caring for. And I sort of transferred that over into my social work role as putting that person at the forefront
of what they want and not particularly what I want if it’s going to fit in.

Activity 29 The effect of feedback on Karen

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

This activity uses Karen to show how asking for feedback may help increase the size of someone’s ‘open’ area. Watch the videos
below and then answer the following questions:

1. Who has Karen asked for feedback?

2. What has she asked? What response did she get?

3. How has this additional information been useful?

In addition, see if you can answer these questions:

1. What qualities and knowledge might Karen have used to ask for and receive feedback?

2. How might she have used communication skills?

3. How might she have used problem-solving skills?

4. How might she have used self-management skills?

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

Video content is not available in this format.

Karen

View transcript - Karen

View comment - Activity 29 The effect of feedback on Karen

Thinking about how Karen might have used the feedback she has had should help you think about how you might use feedback.
It may be that other people have already helped you. The next activity has this as its focus.

Activity 30 Feedback you have had

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Think back and choose a time when you have received feedback that has had a marked and positive effect on your learning. For
example, you might have had a maths teacher who has given you a lasting confidence in your ability with numbers. As a result
of a comment from them, you still enjoy working with figures and use then in daily activities, such as planning your household
budget.

Write down the main aspects of the feedback you received. Did this feedback help reduce the blind area you might have on your
Johari window and, at the same time, increase your open area?

View comment - Activity 30 Feedback you have had

An example of the dire consequences of asking the wrong person for advice is found in Shakespeare’s play Othello. Othello asks Iago for advice about how to be sure of his wife Desdemona’s affection. He thinks Iago is his best friend. In
fact, Iago is jealous of Othello and gives advice which leads to Othello killing Desdemona and himself.

You might also want to use this activity to decide how you are going to approach getting feedback. You might decide that there
is someone who would be willing to help and whom you trust; or you might feel that this is not going to be possible for you.

Figure 16 You need to be careful who you trust to give you good advice

View description - Figure 16 You need to be careful who you trust to give you good advice

Activity 31 Can you change your Johari window?

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

Have a look back over the activities you have done already. Draw a personal Johari window for yourself. It may look like this
diagram:

Figure 17 Personal Johari window

View description - Figure 17 Personal Johari window

The first part of this activity is to use your responses to the earlier activities in this section to see what you can put
in the open area of your Johari window. This also provides another chance to review your qualities, knowledge and skills.

Once you have done this, you will need to put your Johari window somewhere safe until you have done the next part of this
activity. This involves getting feedback from someone. Remember that the alternative is to use an imagined mentor to work
out a new perspective on your qualities, knowledge and skills.

If you are using a personal contact, you will need to obtain their agreement to giving you feedback. You can decide what type
of feedback you would like. It could relate to some of the aspects covered in this section, or you could opt for something
else.

Once you have had your feedback, go back to your personal Johari window. Has the feedback helped increase the size of your
open area? You could add in a description of this new element in your open area and even, if it was very helpful feedback,
adjust the line between open and blind areas, so that the blind area is smaller.

If you have opted to try to imagine what feedback you might get from someone, you should attempt to do much the same. Have
you increased the size of your open area and found out something about yourself that you were not very aware of?

View comment - Activity 31 Can you change your Johari window?

The Johari window acts as a good way to think about the role of other people and our relationships with them. The window shows
that other people are significant in two ways:

1. We can share aspects of ourselves in order to increase our ‘open area’ by decreasing the size of the area that is unknown
to others.

2. This means that other people are then in a better, more informed, position to give us accurate (and more helpful) feedback.
In other words, there is an assumption that people have to know something about us to provide us with information we can use.

3.3 Your learning – what does ‘theory’ offer?

The previous section of this section focused on using feedback to enhance what you already know about your qualities, knowledge
and skills. This section explores how you might draw on theory in the same way. However, it can be very difficult to include
theory with other sorts of understanding.

Let’s start by thinking about why it might be useful to pay some attention to what theories about learning have to say. This
leads on to a brief discussion about the difficulties that can arise with using theory in this course. Hopefully, this exploration
will start you thinking about how you might resolve these possible difficulties.

3.3.1 Why it might be useful

The main similarity between using academic theory and getting feedback is that both can offer you a perspective that may be
different from your own. We have already seen how additional perspectives can be valuable in rounding out the understanding
that you have about yourself. One possible big advantage with academic theory is that this additional perspective can come
from someone who has become recognised as an expert or authority. Drawing on theory opens up the possibility of building on
the ideas that have been worked on for many years. The work of Peter Jarvis, which was touched on in Section 2, is a good
example of this. Often academic writers, like Jarvis, try to develop frameworks. These frameworks can sometimes help us to
organise or structure information or ideas so that we are able to make more sense of them.

3.3.2 What problems might you have with this?

One way to think about the problems you might have with using academic theory on Learning to change is to think about the difference between getting personal feedback and using academic ideas. Academic theory about learning
is unlikely to have considered your particular experiences or the story of your life. This may mean that some parts of theory
may not seem to apply to you. Often theory is found written down in books or journal articles which are read by other academics;
they are written in an academic style which has particular ‘rules’. Some of these rules can be seen if you read an article
in an academic journal. They include using referencing to say where the information in the article comes from. Other rules
can be less obvious, but they often include the need to avoid personal comments. For example, it would be seen as strange
if an academic author were to say (in the middle of an article): ‘I don’t think I have explained that very well. It was because
I was worried about my pet hamster.’ Why would this be seen as being outside the usual style of academic writing? There are
two reasons:

1. Personal issues and concerns are supposed to be separate from academic thinking, which is supposed to represent a sifting
and filtering of the relevant information in a balanced and unbiased way.

2. It would be unusual to own up to personal issues and then blame these for some problem with the writing.

An important aspect of this course is that it invites you to think about how you can bring together academic theory and personal
experience. This is very apparent in writing assignments. They may have one part which asks you to use an academic approach
to answer a set question. However, they may also ask you to reflect on your study. This means that you have to adopt a more
personal style. The difference can be summed up by thinking about ‘I’. When you are asked to use an academic approach, it
is likely that using ‘I’ will be less appropriate. However, it is acceptable to use ‘I’ when you engage in personal reflection.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to reflect without using ‘I’. You may think that whether or not you use ‘I’ is only a small
point. By itself, that would be true, but there are some wider effects. Using ‘I’ gives your writing a very personal ‘voice’.
It also is likely to suggest that you are focusing on your own thoughts, feelings or actions. For example, you might write:
‘I felt confident about asking Joanna for feedback.’ In contrast, academic writing aims to develop a more detached view of
what is being discussed. So you might write: ‘This assignment considers different ideas about learning.’ To put it simply,
if you use ‘I’ in this context, it can make it harder to sound ‘academic’.

3.3.3 How might it be possible to integrate theory and personal understanding?

The answer to this question depends partly on the outcome of your work on the rest of this section. This should help you to
bring academic theory and personal understanding together in ways that you find interesting and enriching. Sometimes it is
important to realise that you are being asked to produce different sorts of writing. To do this you will need to draw on a
skill that you probably already have. This is the skill of adapting your communication, in this case your written communication,
so that it achieves its purpose. For example, writing a letter asking for a free sample is likely to be very different from
writing a complaint letter.

So far this section has discussed ‘theory’ without saying what this word means. In academic writing, it is often a good idea
to define any key words or phrases that you need to use. One way to do this is by using a dictionary. A dictionary definition
of theory is: ‘a supposition or system of ideas intended to explain something … a set of principles on which the practice
of an activity is based’ (New Oxford Dictionary, 1998, p. 1922). Using a general dictionary can have its drawbacks, especially if the key word is being used in a specialised
way. However, in this case, the definition ties in well with what we hope you will do with theory. We hope that you will use
theory to guide what you do (your practice). In this course the practice that we focus on is your learning.

As you might guess, there are many, many theories in existence. You might have heard, for example, of Darwin’s theory of evolution
or Einstein’s theory of relativity. On Learning to change we are focusing on theories about learning – there are a number of these too. We do not have the time to go into all of these
and, in any case, the purpose of introducing theory into the course is to give you the opportunity to use it for your own
development and change. It can be difficult to understand bits or snippets of theory without having an idea of the context
these theories come from. So, the next section gives you a brief overview of some of the main strands of ‘learning theories’.
This overview aims to make it easier to understand the important aspects of two particular theories which are discussed later
in more detail.

This is a good time to remind you that the reason we are introducing theory is that we think you will find it useful to understand
your own learning and, as a result, be in a stronger position to decide about personal change. We hope that this sounds like
a reasonable idea. But actually, it is surrounded by all sorts of possible difficulties. To start with, you might feel that
you manage perfectly well without having to stop and think about theory. You might even think that having to do this might
get in the way of living your life. If this is true for you, then we are going to have to convince you that theory can have
practical and even personal uses.

To do this, the authors of Learning to change needed to be sure that they focused on the direct usefulness of any theory. Academics have favourite theories but, in this
course, we have tried to control the impact of our interest in a particular theory. You might want to decide whether you think
we have been successful in doing so. One way that we have tried to set limits is to select only a limited number of theories.
In this section we are going to focus on three different sets of theory. These have been chosen to present different viewpoints
about learning which we think show ways that we can use theory to understand our learning. These three theories (or sets of
theory) are:

1. Learning theories developed by psychology.

2. Communities of practice – which focuses on the social aspects of learning.

3. Student approaches and strategies – a theory which explores how individual students approach learning.

The next activity will give you an overview of some learning theories. We think that this will help put later sections in
a broader context. However, it is also the basis of another activity which asks you to begin thinking about possible connections
between this sort of theory and your own learning. In other words it is really asking, ‘How useful do you think this might
be?’

Activity 32 The value of learning theories

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

Read the overview of learning theories that follows. You are asked to read this twice. On the first read through, make notes
on what you see as the main points of the content. When you read through for a second time, note down whether it helps you
understand your own learning in any way.

An overview of learning theories

Many theories see learning as what happens when an individual animal or human being responds to something that happens. This
has been described as the way that a biological organism responds to their environment.

Some theories see these responses as being outside our control, as being automatic. A good example of this is Ivan Pavlov’s
theory of classical conditioning. This theory argues that all animals (including humans) have little or no control about what
they learn in response to what happens to them. Pavlov tried to show this in famous experiments which caused dogs to learn
to salivate when a bell was rung, not just when they were given food. This is known as classical conditioning.

Later theorists like B.F. Skinner argued that individual human beings, and other animals, played an important part. Different
reactions meant that different learning might take place in response to external events that appear to be similar. It is worth
noting that both Pavlov and Skinner saw learning simply as the result of responses to events in the environment. There was,
according to them, no need to think about the events.

This was challenged by some theorists, including Albert Bandura. He argued that learning did occur as a result of people (or
animals) thinking about events and attempting to make sense of them. There is an emphasis in Bandura’s learning theory on
the importance of observational learning. As its name suggests, observational learning is ‘learning through watching the behaviour
of another person’ (Gross, 1996, p. 173). This is sometimes referred to as ‘modelling’. In this form of learning, the observed
‘model’ is the key aspect of the environment which is required for learning to take place. The focus is still on how an individual
‘organism’ learns; but the inclusion of another person into the picture means that learning is no longer seen as a straightforward
response by the learner to their environment.

The next type of learning theory is called ‘insight learning’. This is associated with Wolfgang Köhler who argued that the
chimpanzees he studied could change how they saw a problem when they were supplied with a previously missing ingredient –
such as a stick to reach an object (Gross, 1996, p. 174).

These theories are seen as the basis of ‘learning theories’ in psychology. Despite their differences stances, they all tend
to see learning as something that is concerned mainly with what goes on within an individual. With the possible exception
of Bandura’s learning theory, they pay little attention to the way the learning occurs as the result of interaction between
people.

View comment - Activity 32 The value of learning theories

However, there is a problem that is caused by the way these theories focus on the environmental factors that are involved
in learning. The theories in the overview give different roles to the individual – compare the role of Pavlov’s dogs and Köhler’s
chimps, for example. Within each theory each individual is assumed to be much the same. So neither Pavlov nor Köhler suggests
that there may be dogs (or chimps) that react differently. Even Köhler suggests that all chimps who have reached a particular
stage in their development and find themselves in the same situation (with bananas that can be reached by sticks) will act
in much the same way. If this is applied to human beings (as done by B.F. Skinner) the assumption would have to be that all
human beings in similar situations will experience similar learning.

The second important problem stems from the focus on the role of the environment. Some of the theories suggest that our environments
need to provide particular things at just the right time in order to be able to take our learning forward. For example, Köhler
developed the idea of ‘ripeness’ to describe when the chimps were ready to use a stick to reach the object. If they were not
‘ready’, the stick would go unused and the object would stay out of reach. This means that for useful learning to take place,
the environment needs to fit in with our ever-changing learning. There are some special environments that aim to be especially
well tuned in to changing learning needs. These include schools and colleges and other situations. Similarly on-the-job training
attempts to provide learning that suits those it is being given to.

The mention of schools and other providers of education should also remind us that the environment includes other people.
Indeed, it is possible to argue that other people are the most important aspect of any environment. This is certainly true
of ‘learning environments’. It is not a coincidence that the outcomes of school and college inspections are mainly decided
on the basis of the quality of the work done by the teachers. However, it may have occurred to you that ‘other people’ are
absent from the theories we have been discussing. These theories do not seem to say very much about the importance of other
people in our learning. As you may have realised from the previous section of this section, other people are important because
we can learn from, and with, other people. Other people may even learn from us. Other people are also important because they
get together and form groups. These groups may be quite small or local, for example, a local dance or salsa club.

At the other extreme, people group together as nations; for example, they are identified as being Japanese or Spanish. The
majority of people studying this course will be based in the United Kingdom (UK). A combination of factors means that the
UK is made up of a number of different countries including Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. At the time this book was
written these nation-regions had the power to make their own laws about how learning opportunities were provided to people.
So the ‘other people’ are important because they pass laws and create frameworks, not just for learning, but for policies
on employment and skills.

So there are areas that do not seem to be covered in the theories we have looked at so far. It is therefore possible to say
that the ‘scope’ of these theories is limited. This is an important way to think about theory. It is often useful to ask yourself
what the theory covers and what it does not. Once you have worked out the scope of a theory it becomes much easier to see
whether you need to look elsewhere for a theory that covers some of the aspects that are important to you.

Figure 18 Dance club flyer offering lessons

View description - Figure 18 Dance club flyer offering lessons

Let’s move on to think about the gaps in the first set of theories that you have looked at. These can be summarised as:

- the lack of attention paid to the differences between individuals in how they learn

- the importance of other people in our immediate social and learning environments

- the importance of the wider societal or national frameworks created by other people, like politicians.

We have noted the importance of other people in the previous part of this section, but this ‘everyday’ evidence does not seem
to figure in the theory we have looked at so far. Later in this section, you will come across theoretical attempts to take
account of this aspect of learning. We will explore theories that include the importance of the wider frameworks in the next
section.

3.3.4 The importance of other people in our immediate social and learning environments

Case Study: Levene

Yes, I had a lot of support from my family. You know, I suppose you could say you take that for granted but, yes, I did have
a lot of support from my family. But in terms of feedback and a sounding board – colleagues for instance over the phone. Your
tutor is another example.

Some of the learning theories that have been produced by psychology have tended to underplay the role of other people in our
immediate environments. However, other theories have been developed to try to remedy this. Before we start to think about
some of these theories, please complete the following activity.

Activity 33 Who’s been involved in your learning and where did it happen?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

The aim of this activity is to encourage you to think about who you have come into contact with while learning. You should
try to focus on examples of your learning where you feel you have gained new skills, knowledge or qualities. For example,
you may have learned a new skill when your older sister showed you how to mend a puncture in a tyre. If you have learned to
drive a car, you may feel that you have learned a skill (driving a car). You might also feel you have gained knowledge of
what a particular road sign means, for example, and certain qualities, such as being a patient and careful driver.

You could use a chart similar to this one:

Figure 19 Chart showing who has been involved in my learning

View description - Figure 19 Chart showing who has been involved in my learning

When you have completed this chart, answer these questions:

1. Did the examples you selected have anything in common? Are they typical of learning that has been important to you?

2. How many different people were involved? Who were they?

3. Did your selected examples share similar locations or were they very different?

View comment - Activity 33 Who’s been involved in your learning and where did it happen?

Did your examples show a mixture of informal ways of learning and more formal ways of learning? The informal ways would include
those where you involved people without a qualification to teach you what you learned. These informal examples of learning
would also be more likely to happen in a variety of situations where learning is not the main purpose. In contrast, formal
learning tends to take place when people with special qualifications provide learning at places like schools or colleges whose
main business is teaching and learning.

Coombs and Ahmed describe informal learning as:

… the lifelong process by which every individual acquires and accumulates knowledge, skills, attitudes and insights from daily
experiences and exposure to the environment – at home, at work, at play: from the example and attitude of families and friends;
from travel, reading newspapers and books; or by listening to the radio or viewing films or television. Generally informal
education is unorganized, unsystematic and even unintentional at times, yet accounts for the great bulk of any person’s total
lifetime learning – including that of a highly ‘schooled’ person.

(Coombs and Ahmed, 1974, p.8)

The nature of informal learning is that it can happen almost anywhere and involve the widest range of people. For example,
a huge amount of informal learning goes on at work. As Boud and Middleton have pointed out:

There is a diverse range of people that we learn from at work, very few of whom are recognised by the employing organisation
as people with a role in promoting learning ….

(Boud and Middleton, 2003, p. 201)

In contrast, formal learning includes the structured, authorised courses and workshops that take place in dedicated educational
institutions such as schools, universities and training departments. These courses and workshops often include assessment,
such as exams, and lead to certificates or qualifications. (So studying on Learning to change is actually an example of formal learning.) You will probably find that when you are involved with some formal learning other,
more informal, learning takes place. You may find out about other things while studying this course.

Coombs and Ahmed (1974) suggest that we are continually learning. They also suggest that the distinction between formal and
informal learning is not the only difference. They suggest that we sometimes deliberately set out to learn new things. This
is referred to as ‘deliberate learning’. In contrast, other learning may be ‘accidental’, occurring as a result of something
that has happened to us. For example, if we are burgled, we will learn quite a lot about how the local police force works.
Another contrast is between learning alone and learning with other people. A further distinction is between learning that
can act to free us or increase our choices (sometimes called ‘liberating’) and learning which has the result of controlling
or restricting us (referred to as ‘domesticating’). Each and every experience will be a different mixture of these different
aspects – each will lead to a different form of learning.

Figure 20 Madhur Jaffrey

View description - Figure 20 Madhur Jaffrey

Madhur Jaffrey is a good illustration of this. Madhur is a bestselling cookery book writer and television presenter. She has
been awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) for services to drama, culture and cuisine, but as a child she never
learned to cook. She failed a domestic sciences exam because she could not cook something that used spices often found in
Indian food.

Madhur Jaffrey travelled to London at the age of 19 to study drama. As a student, she desperately missed home-cooked food,
and wrote letters to her mother back in India asking her how to cook different dishes. Her mother sent her airmail letters,
each explaining one recipe at a time. Madhur slowly increased the number of dishes she could cook. Her friends were so impressed
with her cooking that they persuaded her to publish her recipes.

Madhur’s formal learning was focused on her drama course. However, at the same time she was informally learning how to cook.
As things turned out, Madhur’s rather unusual style of informal learning was far more important in her life than the formal
learning she did on her drama course. Madhur has been liberated by her learning. This is perhaps a real contrast with many
women whose learning about cooking can be viewed as domesticating. Can you see how some aspects of Madhur’s learning can be
seen as individual, others as social? Some of her learning seems to have been accidental – a result of needing to cook for
herself in a new country.

Karen seems to show her own combination of deliberate and accidental learning. You may remember her comments from a previous
video:

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications basically were nil. I had no GCSEs. No
A levels. I went to secondary modern school and I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I
left school. Three pounds ten shillings a week was my wage then. My first job was a filing clerk and I actually realised that
I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was
doing at that time and I admitted I was getting a little bit confused. And he said, ‘Well, carry on. That’s a good idea.’
Oh – I would rather have the files in the correct order rather than have them wrong!

Activity 34 Your learning – informal or formal?

Allow about 15 minutes for this activity

To help you see how your learning has involved both formal and informal learning, use the matrix that follows to sort the
examples of learning you identified in Activity 33. Feel free to add any more examples that you think of. The matrix has two
axes – informal/formal is the horizontal axis, running left to right, and the vertical axis represents alone/with others,
running from top to bottom. This creates four quadrants or boxes:

- Top left: learning informally and alone

- Top right: learning formally and alone

- Bottom left: learning informally with others

- Bottom right: learning formally with others.

Try to find an episode of your own learning that fits into each box. We have put one example in each box to get you started.
As you complete the matrix, try to recall what each experience was like. Did you enjoy the episode and learn well, or not?

Figure 21 Types of learning

View description - Figure 21 Types of learning

View comment - Activity 34 Your learning – informal or formal?

You have been thinking about theories about learning. We hope that you have found these of interest. However, in the context
of this course, you need to ask whether theory can help you think about personal development and change. For this reason,
you are asked to do the next activity. This activity asks you to summarise what you think, at this point on the course, about
the possible uses of theory. Remember that so far you have encountered two main sets of ideas in this section. These are:

1. Learning theories developed by psychology.

2. Ideas about the different contexts of learning (including the difference between informal and formal learning).

Activity 35 Theory – describing and reflecting

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Spend a few moments summarising your thoughts about these theories. Start by describing their main points.

When you have done this, reflect on (think about) what they might mean to you personally.

View comment - Activity 35 Theory – describing and reflecting

It is clearly impossible to guess what you think about the theories and ideas you have met so far. It is possible to argue
that the psychological learning theories are useful. This springs from the fact that they adopt a basic stance towards learning
that suggests we all learn because we all interact with our environment. This means that learning is not just something that
‘clever’ people do. This can help place our past learning in context. It can also highlight that some past learning may not
have been very useful to us. So it could underline the need for our future plans to include learning that supports our development
rather than getting in the way of it.

With the ideas about different contexts of learning, we are getting much closer to the situations in which learning happens.
Thinking about the detail of these contexts highlights some important issues. There is the issue of other people being involved
in your learning. Sometimes who these other people are, and the role they have, help to establish whether the learning is
formal or informal. An awareness of the range of learning contexts seems to be useful in similar ways to the psychological
theories. It helps to emphasise that learning goes on in many different contexts and that we are able to respond to many of
these contexts. This is really another reminder that we have a basic tendency to learn in whatever social situation we find
ourselves. This raises an interesting question. If we are able to learn freely in some situations, what stops us from learning
in others?

The next section explores two particular theories. These theories are:

1. Communities of practice.

2. Student approaches and strategies.

3.3.5 Communities of practice

Figure 22 Lev Vygotsky

View description - Figure 22 Lev Vygotsky

As you have seen in the overview of learning theories, it is possible to view learning as something that happens on a purely
individual basis. There are other sorts of theories that question this individual focus. There are psychological theories
that suggest learning is an activity that occurs in a particular social context. A good example of this is the theory put
forward by Lev Vygotsky (1896–1934).

According to Vygotsky (1978), learning occurs when human beings are part of activities that are provided by the society in
which they live. You may detect some similarities with Köhler’s theories. However, Köhler tended to focus on an animal’s readiness
to use particular objects to carry out particular tasks. Vygotsky’s ideas are useful because they extend the scope of thinking
about what is used by people as they learn. Although Vygotsky focused on what children need to learn as they grow up, here
we are applying this thinking to the needs of adult learners.

Vygotsky argued that it is impossible to understand learning without taking into account the effect of living in a particular
society at a particular time. One example of this would be the learning that used to occur on the Scottish island of St Kilda.
The people who used to live on this island needed to collect eggs and catch some of the birds that nested on the island. These
were an important source of food for a population that could be cut off from the mainland by bad weather for many weeks. However,
the cliffs where the birds nest often reach 350 metres above sea level.

Figure 23 Catching birds and eggs for food was a dangerous but important occupation

View description - Figure 23 Catching birds and eggs for food was a dangerous but important occupat ...

In order to collect the eggs, St Kildans had to learn how to climb these cliffs. This learning would not have been encouraged
in other societies with other needs. As a young St Kildan grew up, there would come a point where they might be taken out
onto the cliffs by a more experienced climber. Perhaps they would start with parts of the cliffs that were not quite as dangerous
as others and gradually progress to the trickiest climbs. The point is that St Kildan society used to provide a framework
to enable people to develop important skills and knowledge. This knowledge was held by the society and made available to people
as they become ready for it.

Figure 24 Etienne Wenger and Jonathan Hughes

View description - Figure 24 Etienne Wenger and Jonathan Hughes

Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) suggest that when you learn you become involved in what they called a ‘community of practice’.
There are two key words in this term. ‘Community’ is used to suggest a group of people with a common interest. This common
interest might be because they share a hobby; it might be because they work for the same organisation; or it might be because
they live in the same place. The word ‘practice’ highlights that these people do something together. For example, the St Kildans
shared the ‘practice’ of collecting eggs in a very dangerous place. So the concept of a community of practice refers to the
learning that occurs when people who have a common interest in some subject or problem work together to share ideas and find
solutions. Because people are working together, a community of practice can provide opportunities to learn how to do something
or to improve and do it better. Communities of practice can also act as a sort of collective store of wisdom and experience.
It is not very difficult to imagine the St Kildans telling each other stories, which would be full of useful information about,
for example, which cliffs were more dangerous after heavy rain.

The features of communities of practice can be summarised as:

- a common or shared interest in something

- a group or community of members who interact and learn together

- shared or collective resources that members have developed over time.

Lave and Wenger point out that communities of practice are widespread. Often people are involved with more than one of them.
Communities of practice can be found at home, in work or in connection with leisure interests. In the example from St Kilda,
you may have noticed that there seemed to be different positions within the community of practice. The experienced ‘old hands’
were the people who had developed the essential knowledge and skills. They were the people who passed on what they knew to
the younger St Kildans, who were just beginning to learn about the difficulties and dangers of working on the cliffs. Lave
and Wenger suggest that the people who act as the store of knowledge are central to a community of practice. They are ‘core’
members. There are likely to be others who are on the edge of a community of practice. These will include those who have only
just become involved with the community of practice, such as the younger St Kildans. But those on the margin of a community
of practice could also include those who are in the process of moving out of the community, perhaps through age or ill health.
What Lave and Wenger call the ‘periphery’ would also include those with only a slight or passing interest in the community
of practice.

Many sporting clubs would meet the criteria for being a community of practice, as would local gardeners’ associations. You
can probably think of other examples that also meet the three criteria.

The next activity is a good opportunity for you to reflect on how the groups in your life influence your learning and studying.
By doing this you are also evaluating the relevance and usefulness of communities of practice as a theory.

Activity 36 Your groups – are they communities of practice?

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Lave and Wenger suggest that being a member of a group is a key part of learning in general. Such membership might also be
important for your study on Learning to change. Have you told people that you have started this course? Have you tried to involve them as a result of doing some of the activities?
If you have done, you might like to think about their responses. Were they positive, or just ‘not bothered’? They might even
have made negative comments about your studying.

Use a chart like Figure 25. In the first column, list the groups that you belong to. In the second column, comment on how
these groups support your learning. For example, you might say that your family members have done household chores to give
you time to work on Learning to change. If they do not know you are studying, you could put in what you imagine their reaction would be. In the third column you
could say whether the groups seem to have any of the three features of a community of practice. For example, you might note
that your family knows about three or four easy-to-cook meals which they can produce when you are not able to cook for them.

View comment - Activity 36 Your groups – are they communities of practice?

Do you think that our case study subjects are involved in communities of practice? This comment from Karen suggests that she,
at least, may have found one while she was studying:

There’s lots and lots of support. There is support on the computer – if you have one. There’s always someone at the end of
the telephone if you are having a problem. There’s your fellow students. There’s lots and lots of support there if you come
to a block and there is always someone there to help you through it …

The other result of the last activity is to give you a clearer idea about communities of practice and to make you think about
the extent to which this concept applies to you at the moment. By seeing how it might apply, you are exploring its relevance
and usefulness. Even if you decided that few or none of your current groups have features of communities of practice, you
will have given yourself the chance to see how these key features may be applied.

3.3.6 A ‘health warning’ about groups

It can be great to belong to a group, especially if you are a highly respected ‘core’ member. Other people can look up to
you and ask you to share your expertise. The process of moving from being a peripheral member to being a core member can also
be very satisfying. However, groups are sometimes defined as much by whom they exclude. Groups may not just have ‘insiders’;
they have ‘outsiders’ who are not seen as part of the group. Often this may not matter much. No one can be a member of every
single group. However, being a member of some groups means that there is access to privileges that are denied to outsiders,
who may be viewed as inferior or undesirable.

Figure 26 bell hooks

View description - Figure 26 bell hooks

American author bell hooks (she prefers her name to be given without capital letters) describes the effect of coming from
a class and having an ethnicity that can lead to exclusion:

It was assumed that any student coming from a poor or working class background would willingly surrender all values and habits
of being associated with this background. Those of us from diverse ethnic/racial backgrounds learned that no aspect of our
… culture could be voiced …

I see many students from ‘undesirable’ class backgrounds become unable to complete their studies because [of] the contradictions
between the behaviour necessary to ‘make it’ … and those that allowed them to be comfortable at home with their families and
friends …

(hooks, 1994, p.182)

So far in this section, you have looked at some learning theories from psychology and at communities of practice. The next
section introduces a third set of ideas.

3.3.7 Entwistle’s theory – students’ approaches to learning

Noel Entwistle’s ideas are much more concerned with the ways in which individuals approach learning. They focus on how people
go about learning a body of knowledge. This contrasts with community of practice theory which is more interested in how groups
of people together create knowledge or understanding, as the St Kildans did about ‘high-rise’ egg collecting.

This might suggest that we are going back to where we started on this course. You may recall that this starting point involved
thinking about yourself as an individual learner. However, here we are encouraging you to think about how reflecting on a
theory can inform your understanding of your learning. We ask you to begin to assess its usefulness and personal relevance.

You may have heard of the term ‘learning styles’. Although learning styles are widely used in both education and at work,
some approaches which use them have been criticised. If you want to find out more about this criticism, see the report Should We Be Using Learning Styles? (Coffield, et al., 2004). Reports like these argue that there is little evidence to back up some of the claims that are made
for them. We have selected Entwistle’s theory, which has not been criticised in this way, because it is based on evidence
that has been gathered over a number of years. We hope you will find it interesting and useful in extending your thinking
about how you might use learning to achieve change.

Entwistle’s ideas draw on those of Roger Säljö (1979). In what became known as the Gothenburg study, Säljö interviewed 90
people about their approach to learning. He found that there were important differences in how people saw their own learning.
He suggested that some had a ‘taken for granted’ perspective in which learning was seen as a ‘memorising activity where the
task of the learner is seen as that of “getting all the facts into your head” (Säljö, 1979, p. 446). This perspective contrasted
with one in which people in the study said that they were ‘becoming aware of the influence of the context of learning on what
you should learn and how you should set about it … they started to try to adapt their learning to various kinds of demands
(teachers, tests …)’ (Säljö, 1979, p. 448). Säljö also points out that learners who use this ‘thematic’ approach to learning
also thought that there was a difference between ‘learning for life’ and ‘learning in school’. Many saw learning in school
‘as an activity which to a large extent has become stereotyped and routine … a particular type of learning … that is not perceived
of as being … related to anything outside the school situation’ (Säljö, 1979, p. 449). These ‘thematic learners’ also reported
that they had started to think about what they learned. As Säljö comments:

As introduced by the people we interviewed, this is a distinction between either learning and real learning or … between learning
and understanding … [The] main feature [of ‘real learning’] is that it in some way involves the abstraction of meaning from
learning materials rather than a mere reproduction of them. … the nature of what is learned is seen as more complex and more
holistic; it is a perspective, a point of view, an interpretation, a general principle … rather than the plain ‘facts’ which
people previously report having perceived as what is to be learned.

(Säljö, 1979, p. 449)

Entwistle (Entwistle et al., 2001) has conducted similar research to the Gothenburg study. On the basis of this he modified
Säljö’s original ideas and suggested that there are three different approaches:

- surface learning

- strategic learning

- deep learning.

Surface learning is associated with the idea that learning is about acquiring facts. For example, students may try to pass
a course by memorising what they are told. When engaged in surface learning, students prefer to be told what to read and what
notes to make. The ideal exam for someone who has based their learning on a surface strategy would be one based only on the
information that a course has provided. Such students are also liable to feel that they are drowning in information that contains
many separate elements, which seem to have few, if any, connections with each other. They struggle to make sense of these
ideas.

Strategic learning involves those who are trying to get a good mark on a course by organising their time well, by finding
the right conditions for studying and by putting consistent effort into their study.

Deep learning occurs when people are more concerned with their own personal development – they are interested in what the
course is about and are excited by and like sharing new ideas. People engaged in deep learning are looking for meaning in
what they study rather than trying to memorise it. They are curious and questioning and are constantly examining whether what
they are told makes sense in the light of their past experience. In fact, by drawing links between different aspects of their
learning, they are better able to make sense of it and therefore more likely to pass the course, as well as developing more
fully as human beings.

The three approaches are summarised in the following table:

Approaches to learning

Deep approach: Seeking meaning

Surface approach: Reproducing

Strategic approach: Reflective organising

Intention – to understand ideas for yourself, by:

Intention – to cope with course requirements, by:

Intention – to achieve the highest possible grades, by:

Relating ideas to previous knowledge and experience

Treating the course as unrelated bits of knowledge

Putting consistent effort into studying

Looking for patterns and underlying principles

Memorising facts and carrying out procedures routinely

Managing time and effort effectively

Checking evidence and relating it to conclusions

Finding difficulty in making sense of new ideas presented

Finding the right conditions and materials for studying

Examining logic and argument cautiously and critically

Seeing little value or meaning in either course or tasks set

Monitoring the effectiveness of ways of studying

Being aware of understanding developing while learning

Studying without reflecting on either purpose or strategy

Being alert to assessment requirements and criteria

Becoming actively interested in the course content

Feeling undue pressure and worry about work

Gearing work to the perceived preferences of lecturers

(Adapted from Entwistle et al., 2001)

Figure 27 A shared interest: Salsa dancing

View description - Figure 27 A shared interest: Salsa dancing

We can apply Entwistle’s model to this dancing scenario. The learners in the photograph seem to be concentrating hard. Perhaps
they are displaying a deep approach through their choice to take lessons. Now, imagine that some have partners who have reluctantly
been persuaded to go along and learn to dance – they might be more likely to adopt a surface approach, to cope with their
partner’s demands. Finally, if the intention of some dancers is to achieve the highest possible grades in competitions, they
might be expected to adopt a strategic approach, to satisfy the expectation of the competition judges.

It is clear that Entwistle’s three categories involve value judgements. The way that some of these approaches are described
suggests that some of them are ‘better’ than others. It sounds good to be a ‘deep’ or ‘strategic’ learner; it does not sound
so good to be a ‘surface’ learner. However, Entwistle’s ideas should not be taken as meaning that people fall into one category
or another. The key suggestion here is that everyone is capable of becoming a strategic, or even a deep, learner. Indeed,
we would want you to use these as your approaches to learning. We do think that it is important to use learning for personal
change; it is also important to be able to use your learning to pass a course, such as this one. So when you need to pass
a course, get a qualification or understand what others are trying to teach you, strategic learning is useful. If you are
primarily interested in getting a qualification, deep learning could get in the way. You might get hold of new ideas and be
more interested in seeing where they take you. You could get sidetracked by things you are really interested in, rather than
concentrating on the job at hand. If, on the other hand, your main interest is personal development, deep learning is very
useful. (In this course, we try to achieve a balance and would encourage you to draw on both strategic and deep learning.)

However, the real value of knowing about these different approaches is that it opens up the possibility of using different
approaches in different circumstances. Even surface learning may have its uses if you need to learn a lot of new information
to pass a test. Entwistle’s research suggests that when students become more aware of their own approaches, they are in a
better position to decide what they are trying to achieve from their studying and to understand the implications of adopting
deep and surface approaches to learning.

The next activity is a chance to develop your understanding of Entwistle’s theory and to begin to test out its personal relevance.

Activity 37 Deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

For this activity you can use the some learning episodes that you identified in Activity 34. Or you can select some more examples
of your learning, perhaps ones linked to your study on this course. Complete the activity by making a chart similar to the
one below:

Figure 28 Learning approaches chart

View description - Figure 28 Learning approaches chart

View comment - Activity 37 Deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning

3.4 Preparing to move on – connecting theory with skills

This section has been encouraging you to think about using two additional sources to help you prepare for change. The first
of these sources has been other people that you know. The second has been a selection of ‘academic’ theory that can be linked
to learning. We hope that this has added to your knowledge and understanding of your own learning.

In this next section, the focus shifts to gauging how your work with these two sources has used and (we hope) developed a
number of your skills. As you know, ‘skills’ is quite a loaded term. It is important to be clear about what skills we are
talking about here. Learning to change refers to two different, but related sets of skills. The first set is academic skills. The second set comprises those which
you met in Section 2 – communication skills, problem-solving skills and the skills involved in being organised. Let’s look
at how you may have used each set in this section.

3.4.1 Academic skills

We hope that one result of studying this course is that you will feel more confident about using your academic skills. In
this course, these skills include:

- reading for meaning

- note taking

- selecting and using evidence

- writing in an academic way that includes different points of view

- reflecting on your learning.

However, referring to these skills as ‘academic’ creates the risk that they are only seen as useful for a course of study.
In this sense they might be seen as part of a surface or perhaps a strategic approach to learning. Yet all the academic skills
that are listed above can be useful in other situations. For example, when you read something like a cookery book or a newspaper
article, it is likely that you are reading to understand the main points about how to cook something or about a topic in the
news.

There are also situations in real life where you might have to take notes or summarise key points. This occurs in many areas
of work, for example, where it is useful to keep notes about decisions reached at a meeting. To make these notes, you have
to select which parts of the discussion are recorded. Although you may have to use written communication in many areas of
your life, it is probably true that writing in an academic style is perhaps the most ‘specialised’ of these academic skills.
For example, the assignments for a course of study are not exactly the same as other sorts of writing. They have their own
rules which may include, for example, the need for an introductory paragraph in an essay.

Activity 38 Reflecting on how you have used academic skills

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

This activity is an opportunity to reflect on some of the academic skills that you have used while studying this section.
In order to do this you need to select an activity from this section. Draw up a chart similar to the one below.

My academic skills chart

Activity from Section 3

What academic skills did I use?

Are there any other ways I could use this skill?

Activity 32 – The value of learning theories

I read this a couple of times to really try and understand the key points.

My daughter’s school has just been inspected. I want to read the inspection report to understand why the school did not do
very well.

I made notes about what I thought was important.

I might need to make some notes on the report to explain it to my partner.

View comment - Activity 38 Reflecting on how you have used academic skills

Case Study: Shehnaz

Obviously, as my family grew, I had to start to think about how many people were involved in our house and how much I was
cooking for – like, budgeting. How much ingredients I would need to get, things like that. Budgeting, a monthly budget, paying
the bills and things like that. And still having money left over to go and enjoy ourselves as well at the end of the month,
which we tend to do. I had to be in a routine in order to make sure that the food was ready on time. Now that routine is the
same kind of thing that you need to have when you are studying because you need to set yourself a timetable in order to finish
your assignments and get them in on time. Well before I went back into studying I thought that my life skills and academic
skills were completely different, but when I did go to learning I found that what I had learnt through life I could apply
to my academic learning to help me succeed in what I was doing.

3.4.2 ‘Real world’ skills

Although we are describing these as a separate set of skills, we hope that you can see the value of these skills in supporting
your learning, as well as being important for many other aspects of your life. In this course we have been focusing on:

- communication skills

- problem-solving (decision-making) skills

- organisational (self-management) skills.

The next activity is similar to the one you have just done, but here the focus is on the skills that we have labelled as ‘everyday’
or ‘real world’ skills.

Activity 39 Reflecting on how you have used the three ‘real world’ skills

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

This activity is an opportunity to reflect on how you have used these three skills in this section. For this activity, select
an activity from this section. Again, you are asked to draw up a chart similar to the one below. We have included an example.
For this activity try to include an example of how you have used all three ‘real world’ skills.

My real world skills

Activity from Section 3

What ‘real world’ skills did I use?

Are there any other ways I could use this skill?

Activity 31 – Can you change your Johari window?

I used communication skills to ask my friend to give me feedback.

I could use the same skills to ask for feedback from someone at work.

View comment - Activity 39 Reflecting on how you have used the three ‘real world’ skills

The next section can also be viewed as an opportunity to develop a ‘deep’ approach to your learning.

3.5 Conclusion

In this section you have explored two aspects of learning. The first has encouraged you to consider the importance of the
views of people you come into contact with. These views can give you additional perspectives. This can be really useful, as
a new perspective can make you stop and think and reconsider aspects of your learning in ways that may not have occurred to
you before. However, these additional views can give you new problems to solve. You have to decide what you are going to do
with this information and how, if at all, it affects the way you see yourself as a learner.

You have also been encouraged, over the course of this section, to think about a range of theories about learning. These form
an important aspect of your academic study on Learning to change. They give you the chance to practise using some academic skills. You have also been invited to use these academic skills
to see if these theories demonstrate their value in terms of helping you better understand your own learning.

The next section aims to bring together the work that you have done in this and previous sections. As you work on your own
personal goals for change and development, we hope that you will draw on your awareness of how you learn, the feedback from
others and your understanding of theory.

Boud, D. and Middleton, H. (2003) ‘Learning from others at work: communities of practice and informal learning’, London, Journal of Workplace Learning, vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 194–202.

Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E. and Ecclestone, K. (2004) Should We Be Using Learning Styles? What Research Has to Say to Practice, London, Learning and Skills Research Centre.

Coombs, P.H. and Ahmed, M. (1974) Attacking Rural Poverty. How Nonformal Education Can Help, Baltimore, John Hopkins University Press.

Entwistle, N., McCune, V. and Walker, P. (2001) ‘Conceptions, styles and approaches within higher education: analytic abstractions
and everyday experience’ in Sternberg, R.J. and Zhang, L-F. (eds) Perspectives on Thinking, Learning and Cognitive Styles, London, Lawrence Erlbaum.

Gross, R.D. (1996) Psychology: The Science of Mind and Behaviour, 3 rd edition, London, Hodder Arnold H & S.

Hooks, Bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, New York, Routledge.

Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (1991) Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Säljö, R. (1979) ‘Learning about learning’, Higher Education, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 443–51.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind and Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press.

4 Where next?

4.1 Introduction

In Sections 2 and 3 you have been thinking about the past and the present. You have gathered evidence about your current knowledge,
skills and personal qualities. You have also explored the value of other perspectives on your learning. These perspectives
have included the views of other people and the ideas in some academic theories. This section continues the exploration of
academic ideas. In particular, it picks up on the issue that was first raised in Section 3 in relation to the theories of
learning developed by psychologists. This is the problem that some theories from psychology tend to overlook the role played
by wider society. To counter this, the section starts by looking at theories of globalisation and a theory known as ‘human
capital’.

In Section 4 we encourage you to think about the future – to set yourself some goals for your ongoing learning and development
and to draw up an action plan for achieving them.

The first part of the section begins with a brief look at what we mean by an action plan. You will then be developing goals
for the future and learning how to write these as clearly as possible. Having thought about what you are aiming for, you then
need to think about what might help and hinder you – so that you can make a start on increasing your sources of help and support
and reducing the obstacles. And, finally, we encourage you to think about drawing up an action plan and collecting evidence.

By the time you have reached the end of Section 4 you should be able to:

- explain how the wider social and political context may affect your learning

- choose at least one goal that you would like to work towards and explain why you have chosen that goal

- identify what you can do to help you achieve your goal

- draw up a plan for achieving your goal

- explain how you have used any ideas presented in the course to identify your goals and develop your action plan, and comment
on their usefulness to you.

4.2 The wider social context – policy in the UK

In Section 3, you were introduced to a range of theories that have been developed within psychology to try to explain how
learning takes place. These theories act as a starting point for how you might apply theory to your own learning. They also
act as a starting point in applying academic skills. These skills include reading and note taking, but they also include thinking
about what these theories might have to offer and what their weaknesses are. You may remember that we suggested three such
weaknesses:

- the lack of attention paid to the differences between individuals in how they learn

- the importance of other people in our immediate social and learning environments

- the importance of the wider societal or national frameworks created by other people, like politicians.

The first two of these were the focus of much of your work in Section 3, as you thought about communities of practice and
Entwistle’s ideas about different approaches to study. This section deals with the third weakness – that of the wider social
context. There are many ways that we could have approached this ‘bigger picture’ but we have opted to start by looking at
lifelong learning policy in the UK. (We are focusing on general points that apply to the whole of the UK, but you should remember
that there are important differences between England and the devolved nation-regions of Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland.)
As we begin this discussion, it will quickly become apparent that there is a strong policy focus on work and skills. We realise
that for some students on Learning to change, change will indeed involve work. We also recognise that other students will look to make other sorts of changes. However,
whatever changes you are thinking about will be in the same context as far as national policy is concerned.

There is one other point to be made. Policy can be subject to many shifts and changes as individual politicians, and even
whole governments, come and go. So there is a real danger that whatever we say at this point in time may quickly change. On
the other hand, we think that it is likely that the fundamental issues will remain the same. Despite the appearance of constant
changes in policy, concern about how the UK competes with other nations goes back to at least 1852 when Lyon Playfair, in
a lecture on ‘Industrial Instruction on the Continent’ warned that ‘improvements in technical education were urgently required
if Britain’s manufacturers were to maintain their lead over foreign competitors’ (Keep and Mayhew, 1988, cited in Esland,
1990, p. 194).

Activity 40 What are key aspects of policy about learning?

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

This activity is based on your reading of two contrasting extracts. The first is taken from an article in a magazine called
Adults Learning. This is produced by the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), an organisation that tries to influence
government policy about adult learning. The second is taken from what is known as the Leitch Report. This report was accepted
as the basis of government policy in 2006, but it is also fair to say that it reflected developments in policy which occurred
before then.

There are two aspects that you should think about. It is probably best to read the extracts through twice. The first time
you should focus on what seem to be the main aspects of policy. The second time you should decide how this is different or
similar to your own experience. For example, on your first reading you may think that ‘skills’ seems to be an important aspect
of policy making. You might be able to relate this to your own experience or to your knowledge about the range of learning
opportunities that is available to you in your locality.

‘It’s not just the economy, stupid ’

By Colin Flint

The public that used to queue up to enrol for adult education classes at the beginning of the academic year is doing so in
ever-declining numbers, because what they used to queue up for is becoming less available and more costly. And this, of course,
is the direct result of the iron hand of government and its agents. Educational opportunity for adults has been uncompromisingly
reshaped in an attempt to get it to produce what the Government has decided is required. The public was consulted neither
before the ‘reforms’ were set in motion, nor since. The Government has decided what is of public value.

This, then, is public value defined as that which it is believed will give most value for public money. Very large sums of
money are spent on education and training, and it is entirely reasonable that governments make strategic decisions about how
it is spent.

Eight in Ten, the report on the state of adult learning in colleges of further education in England, published by NIACE in
2005. The title referred to the fact that, at the time, eight in ten of the students enrolled in the FE system were adults.
That fact was beginning to change while the report committee was meeting, and it has gone on changing ever since.

Eight in Ten agreed that the key mission of colleges is the provision of vocational education to adults and young people beyond
the age of compulsory schooling, but it also emphasised that colleges contribute significantly to the achievement of other
educational objectives. It identified three key themes in the work colleges undertake with adults, all central to their mission:
access to employability; workforce development; and the creating and sustaining of cultural value. In addition to their economic
functions, the report argued, colleges provide learning opportunities: that foster a critical and informed engagement with
social, political and moral issues, and thus support the development of a tolerant participative democracy for all citizens
and communities; that encourage appreciation and participation in the arts, sport and cultural activities; and that secure
the role learning can play in the achievement of public and collective good.

Nobody seriously questions the importance of the development of a highly skilled workforce. What concerns many observers is
the impact of Government strategies on much of the rest of adult education, and the radical restructuring of further and adult
education. David Blunkett’s much-quoted preface to The Learning Age (1998) – the only part of the Green Paper document that
anyone now remembers – was inspirational and holistic in its vision. His remit letter to the Learning and Skills Council (LSC)
in 2000 was similarly visionary, noting the ‘major contribution’ learning plays ‘in sustaining a civilised and cohesive society’,
in strengthening families and in building stronger neighbourhoods. However, the 2005 skills White Paper had a different emphasis,
with a clear shift towards the utilitarian:

Skills are central to achieving our national goals of prosperity and fairness. They are an essential contributor to a successful,
wealthcreating economy. They help businesses become more productive and profitable. They help individuals achieve their ambitions
for themselves, their families and their communities.

What has changed is the relative importance that is now placed on the objectives of post-compulsory education. Ministers still
seek to reassure that lifelong learning remains a key aspiration and they vehemently claim that social justice is as high
a priority as economic growth, but these claims are belied by the policies and the resources that support them. Around a million
learners have been lost to adult classes in the last two years, because of rising fee levels but also because of a reduced
offer in many colleges and centres. There are fewer foreign language classes, fewer ICT courses and fewer students. The shift
to a so-called demand-led system in practice means students are actively encouraged to learn as long as they demand what the
Government and the LSC are willing to provide: literacy, numeracy or a first ‘full’ level 2 qualification. ( In this context, Level 2 refers to qualifications that are the equivalent of GCSEs (A *– C). These include NVQs and BTEC First Diplomas and Certificates. ) Anyone demanding anything else will be paying a good deal more. The new ideologies have shifted massive resource away from
adult and community learning to vocational provision, and towards training defined by employers.

(Flint, 2007, pp. 8–11)

This next extract is the two opening paragraphs of the Executive Summary of the Final Prosperity For All in the Global Economy – World Class Skills, otherwise known as the Leitch Review of Skills (Leitch, 2006).

The Leitch Review was tasked in 2004 with considering the UK’s long-term skills needs. The UK is building on economic strength
and stability, with 14 years of unbroken growth and the highest employment rate in the G7 (the seven most highly developed
countries in the world). Its skills base has improved significantly over the last decade with rising school standards and
growth in graduate numbers. Despite this the UK’s skills base remains weak by international standards, holding back productivity,
growth and social justice. The Review has found that even if current targets to improve skills are met, the UK’s skills base
will still lag behind that of many other comparator countries in 2020. The UK has to run to stand still.

The global economy is changing rapidly, with emerging economies such as India and China growing dramatically, altering UK
competitiveness. The population is ageing, technological change and global migration flows are increasing. There is a direct
correlation between skills, productivity and employment. Unless the UK can build on reforms to schools, colleges and universities
and make its skills base one of its strengths, UK business will find it increasingly difficult to compete. As a result of
low skills, the UK risks increasing inequality, deprivation and child poverty, and risks a generation cut off permanently
from labour market opportunity. The best form of welfare is to ensure that people can adapt to change. Skills were once a
key lever for prosperity and fairness. Skills are now increasingly the key lever. A radical step-change is necessary.

(Leitch, 2006, p. 3)

View comment - Activity 40 What are key aspects of policy about learning?

This connection results from the view that the economy of the UK is just a part of a system that includes other parts of the
world. Many of the goods that we buy in the UK come from China, India, Indonesia and many other countries. Currently the UK
imports more goods from abroad than it exports. This is part of a worldwide pattern of international trading which is an important
aspect of what is referred to as globalisation. Much of UK government policy can be seen as an attempt to respond to the issues
caused by globalisation. In order to compete globally, politicians from all political parties have argued that we need to
have a skilled workforce. They suggest that only way to compete with countries like China or India is to have people who have
skills that enable them to provide high quality services or produce high quality goods.

The need to focus on skills means that some groups of the population become the focus of learning policy. Can you think which
groups these might be? The answer is that it is the groups within the population which can make the most use of skills, that
is, people who are able to work. This helps to explain why skills that are relevant to work are seen as being most important,
while learning that is done for pleasure (like salsa dancing) is seen as unimportant. This helps to explain the decline in
the classes which used to be provided by local education authorities and by further education colleges.

You may be wondering where this discussion is taking us. Surely (you may ask) the focus here was to have been on looking at
how theory can help you make better sense of your own learning? You may not see how the previous discussion links to theory
or how it can help you understand your own learning. In fact you have been exploring the wider national and international
context for learning. There is also a theoretical aspect as there are a number of theories which attempt to explain government
policy. Let’s start by looking at theories of globalisation.

4.2.1 Theories of globalisation

There are many different theories relating to globalisation. Some see globalisation as positive or beneficial. These theories
argue that globalisation will encourage ‘good things’ like the growth of online communities that can span the world and might
be able to break free of repressive regimes. Others suggest that there will be negative consequences to globalisation. They
argue that globalisation makes it easier for jobs to be exported to wherever labour is cheapest. In this view there are many
more losers than winners in a globalised world. Both these positive and negative views of globalisation agree that globalisation
is a major force in the world.

There are other theories about globalisation that disagree with this. One theory, known as ‘internationalist’, argues that
there has always been international trade and that the idea of globalisation does not add much to our understanding of the
world. Finally, those who support theories that have been labelled ‘transformationalist’ suggest that it is too soon to be
able to fully grasp the implications of a globalising world. They argue that those who see benefits occurring as a result
of globalisation may yet be proved right; equally the more pessimistic theories about globalisation may prove to be more accurate.

These theories are summarised in Table 4.

Theories of globalisation

Globalists – see globalisation as inevitable and powerful. The impacts of globalisation are felt everywhere in the world.
They cannot be resisted or influenced by people.

Positive globalists Point to the benefits for the quality of life. Bringing people together, promoting sharing and understanding.

Negative globalists See the world as becoming more homogenous and less diverse as major economic and political interests dominate
the world and impose their own agenda.

Internationalists Are sceptical about globalisation. They dispute whether there has been a fundamental change in the way that
the world is organised. The global flows of trade and money are not substantially different to previous historical times.

Transformationalists Also think that globalists have exaggerated their case but believe that it is not easy to dismiss globalisation
or underestimate its impacts and effects.

(Adapted from Cochrane and Pain, 2004, pp. 22–3)

These theories compete with one another as they attempt to explain important aspects of economics, politics and culture. What
is important about globalisation for this discussion is the way that governments, including the UK Government, tend to focus
on the need to deal with the negative aspects of globalisation and, in particular, the negative economic aspects of globalisation.
Consequently, many areas of government policy are said to result from trying to respond to the pressures caused by globalisation.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in government policy about education and training. As Evans et al. (2006, p. 118) have
noted, government has a role because ‘the State has an interest in promoting the competitiveness of the economy as a whole’.
They go on to point out that: ‘Economic competitiveness requires an adequate supply of skills in the economy.’

These concerns underpin a theory known as human capital theory.

4.2.2 Human capital theory

This theory argues that the development of people as a resource (human capital) is as important in creating an internationally
competitive country as the equipment to make things (industrial capital), or the money to set up new enterprises (financial
capital). The need to develop the right sort of human capital can be seen to underpin many social, as well as economic, policies
– education and training are prime examples of policy areas where human capital thinking is used to highlight the importance
of the economy.

Human capital theory can be seen as a theoretical response to the idea that globalisation is important. As we have seen, different
theories attempt to explain the role globalisation plays in the world. Some of these highlight the need to compete on a worldwide
basis. These have, in turn, led to a focus on the need for a skilled workforce. So we can see that there has been a complex
sequence which results in human capital theory. Bear in mind that human capital theory is also subject to criticism. It is
the fate of any theory that attempts to deal with big issues that over time, various gaps and omissions will become clear.
Perhaps, in time, human capital theory will disappear completely, replaced by a new theory that seems to explain things better.

This second section of Section 4 has been looking at some of the wider contexts in which your Learning to change will take
place – after all, it would be difficult to come up with a context that is much bigger than the whole world. The rest of this
section returns to focusing on how you might take forward your own personal change. But this personal change might be helped
by aspects of the wider picture; or it might be hindered by them. For example, if your personal plan involved acquiring work-related
skills then the UK policy context might fit in with your goals very well. If, on the other hand, you wanted to give more time
to a recreational interest, the fit might be less helpful.

Your work on your action plan is an important aspect of this section. Also important is the way that you reflect on your action
plan. The ways that you use the different viewpoints and theories to discuss your action plan is important for Learning to change.

4.3 What we mean by an action plan

An action plan is a list of all the steps that you need to take to reach a particular goal and a timetable for achieving each
step.

How might you go about developing a plan? This can vary. You might want to set yourself a goal that is quite complex. Your
plan will also be different if it is for a long-term goal, rather than a short-term one. For a short-term goal, the steps
might be fairly easy to identify. For a longer-term goal you may need to spend more time and effort at the beginning in order
to find out what the steps might be, what might get in your way, and how you can overcome the obstacles.

Completing this course could be an example of a short-term goal. To work out how you were going to do this, you may have had
to think about organising somewhere to study, finding the time to study and perhaps getting your family members on your side.
You may have had to negotiate new arrangements for the household chores. Before you decided on the goal of doing this particular
course, though, there may have been a much longer period of working out what you wanted to do with your life; what options
were open to you and making decisions about which to pursue. This is clearly a much broader, long term goal.

However, the main action planning process for reaching a goal always involves:

- setting yourself a goal to work towards

- working out what you need to do before you can achieve your goal – breaking the goal down into smaller and smaller chunks
until you get to a point where you think, ‘Yes, that’s manageable. I feel I could tackle that bit.’

- putting the steps in a logical order – some will be dependent on others having been completed first, while some will be more
flexible and can be completed at any time

- starting work on the small and early steps, ticking things off as you go

- reviewing the action plan on a regular basis and adjusting it, as necessary, if your timescales are slipping, or you discover
– through the learning you acquire in completing the early steps – either more interesting and achievable goals or more effective
ways of achieving the goals you initially set.

In this section we help you to develop an action plan which you can then implement, monitor and evaluate during your study
of Section 5. To help you work through the section we are introducing two other people in addition to those in the case studies
you have come across in other sections – Jodi and Shauna:

Case Study: Jodi’s story

Jodi has been working for a long time in a job that he hates. During a well-earned break with a group of friends, in self-catering
accommodation, he ends up cooking all the meals and getting a wealth of compliments, along with queries about why he is not
a chef. These responses really get him thinking about how much he loves cooking. It is something he first learned from his
mother, but he has been developing his own ideas for some time now. Jodi begins to ask himself whether he could be a chef.
It may not mean any more money than his current job, and the hours are not very sociable, but at least he would be happy doing
it; he would not be constantly watching the clock like he does now – waiting for work to end and real life to begin.

Figure 29

Case Study: Shauna’s story

Shauna has recently moved to a new area and spent her first six months getting her two older children settled into school
and afterschool activities. Her youngest has just started nursery and Shauna is keen to have some time just for herself. She
is beginning to realise that devoting time to her children has enabled her to avoid making decisions about her own life. She
recently joined the local history society in her new town, as history was her favourite subject at school, but felt overwhelmed
with shyness at her first meeting. She has decided it is time she did something positive towards developing her self-image
and self-confidence.

Figure 30

4.4 Setting yourself goals

At this point, you may be feeling that you are just not the sort of person who makes plans. You may think that devising plans
sounds a bit mechanical, that your preference is to just go along with whatever life deals out. It can be good to take instant
decisions and be ‘spontaneous’ and we would not want you to stop doing this, especially if you know, from your past experience,
that this can add fun and enjoyment to your life. However, particularly for ‘big’ and important decisions it can be useful
to balance spontaneity with some planning that is more thought through. Bear in mind that your personal plans for change can
be a way to use your imagination and creativity.

We are also making the assumption that you probably do engage in some planning, if only because you have to in order to make
it possible to balance the competing demands that there are on you. So you might have to have a plan in order to cope with
all the things that are happening over the next few days. This plan may not be written down; it is likely to be ‘in your head’.
Once you start thinking about how you go about managing time, you may realise that you do more planning than you may have
thought. In a quiet moment, you might find yourself thinking about what you would like to be doing in ten years’ time. You
probably carry around with you lots of other plans too, such as planning what to do with the children during the next school
holiday or budgeting for some new furniture next year.

You might even make these plans more specific. For example, you might put together a list of all the things you need to do
and work through them, ticking them off day by day, or week by week. But it is less common to develop plans for achieving
longer-term goals. This may be especially true if these goals focus on your needs for change and development. If these are
your goals, you can increase the chances of achieving them if you go through a similar process. However, long-term goals can
be different from many shorter-term goals. These are often about surviving the next few days, weeks or months. The goals we
want you to develop in this section are not just about getting through a period of your life. They are, much more, about changing
your life, giving you the confidence to explore different options. This means a much higher level of time and effort. So having
a vision of where you want to be may help inspire you – but it can also seem so daunting that you never get started. An important
part of action planning is to break down your longer-term goals into manageable tasks that you can tick off on a regular basis.
These small achievements can quickly become a substantial step towards your goal.

We encourage you first, therefore, to think large – and to develop a vision that inspires you – and then to think in smaller
chunks as you develop some more specific goals to aim for.

4.4.1 Developing a vision

Some of you may find talk of visions daunting; others may find it liberating and exciting. Whatever your feelings, a vision
can provide you with the guiding principles for putting your short-term goals into perspective.

It reminds you to ask yourself, on a regular basis: ‘Will what I am doing now help me achieve my ideal life in the future?’
This does not mean you cannot change your mind about where you really want to be in the longer term, but as the old saying
goes: ‘If you don’t know where you are going, how are you ever going to get there?’ (If you feel uncomfortable with the idea
of expecting an ‘ideal life’, it would be worth pausing for a few moments to think about why this may be the case. You could
also use this time to check out whether you think that all human beings – including you – have the right to explore their
talents in order to live as fulfilled a life as possible.)

Activity 41 What do I want my life to be like in ten years’ time?

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

Think about your life as a video and fast forward ten years. If you could have a fairy godmother, to wave her magic wand,
what would your life be like then? What would you be doing, with whom and where? How would you be feeling?

View comment - Activity 41 What do I want my life to be like in ten years’ time?

So, if you were not bold and positive, have another go and tell your internal ‘censor’ to be quiet, while you think freely,
without the usual ‘if only’ and ‘but’ interruptions!

Activity 42 No regrets

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity

By thinking about what you would really like to be doing and feeling in the future, you are less likely to end up, towards
the end of your life, with lots of regrets; thoughts about what might have been if only you had …

How might you finish that sentence? Another perspective on the previous activity is to imagine yourself, towards the end of
your life, reviewing your life and achievements. What do you think you might most regret never having tried? Write down your
fairy godmother wishes – along with your first thoughts about what you might regret never having tried – on a large piece
of paper, which you can then cut up in the following activity.

View comment - Activity 42 No regrets

4.4.2 Case study illustrations

Case Study: Jodi

Jodi’s ten-year vision focused very much on the type of restaurant he would like to work in – will it be big or small; what
sort of cuisine; what sort of clientele; urban or rural; and so on. He has always been an outgoing, sociable type so does
not foresee any need to focus on the other elements; if he has to move away from his current circle of friends he is sure
he will make new ones wherever he goes and the old ones will visit.

Case Study: Shauna

Shauna knows that ultimately she will need to get a job to boost the family finances but she cannot really focus on that now.
Her main vision at this stage is of being a self-confident person, able to hold her own in conversation; to hold opinions
about things that are important to her but not afraid to debate other points of view; to have a wide circle of friends and
acquaintances with whom she feels comfortable to engage in such discussions. A real fairy godmother present would be to have
the nerve to stand up in front of an audience to give a talk. She knows this is important in a lot of jobs these days.

Case Study: Shehnaz

Yeah, my turning point came when my daughter and son started school, especially my daughter because, between having my daughter
and my youngest son, I had a gap. So when she started school I went back to further studies, it kind of turned me around and
made me realise that this was what I wanted to do. I wanted to further my education. I wanted to improve my goals in life,
my prospects for getting a job.

Activity 43 A mind map of your vision

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity

Now use your thinking from the last two activities to produce a mind map for your life in ten years’ time. Write ‘Me in ten
years’ in the central circle on the paper and put your key ideas along the branches coming out of the centre. Build up your
mind map. Remember that you can be as artistic and creative as you wish. Enjoy this opportunity to include some wonderful
ideas about your future.

View comment - Activity 43 A mind map of your vision

4.4.3 Setting specific goals

We mentioned earlier how big visions can be quite daunting, so now we encourage you to break down your vision into shorter-term
goals – and then to write them really clearly.

Activity 44 Choosing some goals

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

Go back to your mind map and the key ingredients of your vision. Give each main area of your mind map a priority rating based
on how interesting/useful/desirable you find it. If you are going to make changes to your life, it helps to start with things
that are really important to you; goals that make you feel excited about getting started and provide you with the motivation
to keep going.

Now write down three key goals that you are keen to start working on:

- one that you think is achievable right now

- one that might stretch you a little bit and take perhaps a few months

- one that may take you a year or two.

Ideally, the short-term goal will be something that contributes to the longer-term goals.

View comment - Activity 44 Choosing some goals

Case illustrations

Jodi has no experience or qualification in the restaurant business, so shorter-term goals include finding out what is involved
– identifying what qualifications are required and how he could acquire them – preferably in his home town so that he has
the support of friends and family while he does it – and working out the finances. Even shorter-term goals include getting
some work experience to help decide whether it would be as fulfilling as he hopes.

Shauna decides she would like to set herself a medium-term challenge – to confront her shyness by preparing and delivering
a presentation to the local history society. Before she had the children she had been researching her family tree so this
might be something she could talk about. Shorter term, she decides she is going to challenge her shyness by speaking to people
she meets in the school playground, while waiting for the children, rather than waiting for others to make the first move.

Having thought about the goals that you are interested in, it is time to be more specific. A popular mnemonic (a pattern of
letters or words intended to help you remember something) for writing goals is SMART – with the letters standing for: Specific,
Measurable, Agreed, Realistic and Time-limited. We now look at each of these in turn.

4.4.4 Specific

You need to be quite clear what you are setting out to do. If you are not clear, your goal may be open to different interpretations
and you may become unsure of what you intended. For example, suppose you chose a goal like ‘to get better at giving people
feedback’. This could be interpreted in at least two ways:

1. To improve your self-confidence about giving feedback, so that you no longer get nervous about having to do it.

2. To improve your success rate in giving feedback so that the people on the receiving end do what you ask of them without getting
angry, resentful or fearful – or you feel able to enter into a rational discussion of alternatives with them if they do not
agree it needs doing.

The important thing here is to be as clear as possible, so you might want to have a couple of goes at writing a goal to check
that it can only be interpreted in one way. So rather than just saying ‘get better at giving feedback’, you might write down
something like ‘provide feedback to two people without feeling nervous while doing it’.

This would mean that you look for different things in monitoring your progress – which leads us into the next element.

4.4.5 Measurable

It is also useful to word your goal in a way that allows you to monitor progress towards your goal. Sometimes this is straightforward
– you can ‘measure’ achievement directly. For example, you may be aiming to get a job and you can easily tell whether or not
you have achieved this.

Sometimes, though, with the ‘real world’ skills we have talked about in earlier sections, it is not so straightforward. How
can you ‘measure’, for example, developments in your communication skills or in your ability to solve problems? Here you need
to write down some of the indicators of progress that you will be looking for. For example, your goal might read: ‘Being able
to …

- … maintain eye contact when speaking with people

- … stop blushing when people take notice of me

- … contribute to any group conversation that I find myself a part of

- … work out what has gone well and not so well in a conversation and work out how to do better next time rather than fretting
over the mistakes

- … get the kids to clear up, without it ending in a fight or tears.’

4.4.6 Agreed

You are more likely to achieve your goal if you have people on your side. If you want to make a change at work, for example,
it makes sense to consult your manager about the wording. If you want to make changes in your personal life, you may need
to discuss this with family and friends.

4.4.7 Realistic

This reminds you to take into account, for example, your current knowledge, skills and qualities; the knowledge skills and
qualities you are aiming for; the help and hindrances you are likely to encounter along the way; and the time you have available.
Setting realistic goals can help to foster a can-do attitude – success helps to breed success, while failure can breed further
failure, as you become more downhearted. So, reach for something that stretches you, but which will not overwhelm you. A little
pressure can be energising, but too much of it leads to stress which is unhealthy, both physically and mentally.

4.4.8 Time-limited

Setting yourself a time frame for achieving your goal helps to concentrate the mind. If you say, for example, ‘By Christmas
I will have …’ or, ‘In three years’ time I will be …’, it may prompt you to set things in motion. Again, be realistic about
how long it will take, so that you do not set yourself up for failure.

Figure 31 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Jodi

View description - Figure 31 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Jodi

Figure 32 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Shauna

View description - Figure 32 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Shauna

Activity 45 Recognising SMART goals

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Below are two goals that are not very SMART. How might you rewrite them more SMARTly?

- I want to get my life in balance.

- I want to be working with people more by the time I am 40.

View comment - Activity 45 Recognising SMART goals

You can see that writing SMART goals helps you clarify your ideas. They also continue the process of breaking down the goals
into smaller steps. The person intending to get their life in balance noted a number of contributory activities that would
allow her/him to get there, as did the person intending to work with people in some capacity. When you get to a stage where
you think, ‘Yes, I can manage that bit right now’, you are ready to get started on moving towards your goal.

Activity 46 Writing your own goals in a SMART way

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Now rewrite the goals that you identified in Activity 44 in a SMART format.

‘By [insert date], I will have done/I will be able to ….’

View comment - Activity 46 Writing your own goals in a SMART way

4.5 What might help and hinder you

Kurt Lewin (1947) developed a theory called Force Field Analysis to think about the way in which changes made at work succeed
or fail. You can also use this concept to think about changes that you are trying to make in your life. Lewin suggests that
whenever we are trying to change things there will be forces in favour of change and forces against. For change to happen,
the forces in favour must be stronger than those against.

Figure 33 Kurt Lewin

View description - Figure 33 Kurt Lewin

It is rather like a tug of war (or more strictly – in this context – a push of war), as indicated by Figure 34 and the case
illustration in Figure 35. If the forces on the left-hand side are stronger than those on the right, then the vertical line
– which represents the current situation – will move; the change can go ahead.

Figure 34 Forces in favour of change, forces against change

View description - Figure 34 Forces in favour of change, forces against change

It might not seem much different from the familiar ‘pros and cons sheet’ but pictures often express ideas more clearly than
words. The diagram lends itself to thinking about how you can weaken the ‘team’ on the right, or bring in heavyweights to
add to the one on the left.

There will almost always be forces in favour and forces against the changes that you are thinking about. For example, your
dream job might be better paid – but also involve more travel to work; you might really enjoy doing the work – but you might
not really trust the childminder to look after your child as well as you do yourself; and so on.

Some forces will be quite significant; others might not have much effect on you at all. It is useful, once you have thought
about what the main factors are, to estimate how much impact they might have on you – in a diagram like the one below, you
can make the arrows representing each factor fatter to indicate this. The thin arrows indicate fairly minor hazards; the fatter
ones indicate potential change stoppers (like hulks on the ‘tug of war’ rope).

Box 2 Case illustration

Jodi came up with the following Force Field Analysis …

Figure 35 Jodi’s Force Field Analysis

View description - Figure 35 Jodi’s Force Field Analysis

Shauna made the following list of helping and hindering factors:

Figure 36 Shauna’s list

View description - Figure 36 Shauna’s list

Activity 47 What might help and hinder you?

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

Now think about one of the goals that you are aiming for and the changes it will make to your life.

Write down all the things that might help you to achieve the goal and all the things that might get in the way. Use the following
headings to help you organise your thoughts:

- Things that could help

- Things that could hinder

View comment - Activity 47 What might help and hinder you?

We now move on to look at each of these categories in turn. Before we do, though, it is worth remembering that Section 3 and
the second section of this section both highlighted the importance of social factors that can affect learning. Social factors
can affect all aspects of our lives as they include racism, sexism, ageism, and other forms of oppression that lead to some
people having more opportunities in life than others. While not wanting to dismiss or minimise these social factors, we are
going to concentrate on things that are in your immediate power.

4.5.1 Thinking about resources

Modern-day life often means we have so many commitments that it is hard to find the time to do all the things that we would
like to do. However, instead of listing ‘not having the time’ as one of your obstacles, an alternative decision might be to
‘make time’ by temporarily dropping another activity that you currently take part in, so that you can make room for the new
one. It is a question of working out where your priorities lie; how motivated you are to achieve one goal rather than another.
As we said earlier, the more exciting your goal, the more committed you are likely to be to finding the time to pursue it.
So if you are still saying that you do not have the time perhaps you need to think again about what your real goal in life
might be. In this way goal setting uses problem-solving and organisational skills.

You may also have listed a lack of money as one of the hindering factors. Again, this can be an obstacle but there are also
ways round it. For example, rather than acquiring knowledge and skills through formal academic courses you might acquire them
through voluntary work, by visiting the library on a regular basis, or by learning from others and trial and error learning
– like Madhur Jaffrey in the early stages of what turned out to be a career in cookery (even though she had not voiced this
as one of her goals at the time).

One of the biggest resources we can have is people on our side. See how Karen values the support she has had.

Case Study: Karen

My husband used to proofread my work because, sometimes, you get too close to things and you can’t see the wood for the trees.
He was very good at that. My son bought me a memory stick. I had never used one before so he showed me how to use it. My work
colleagues were very supportive throughout. If ever I came back to the office when I was on placement they would always be
very supportive, ‘You can do this. Of course you can.’ And the people I was studying with were a lifeline. I knew that I could
ring them up and ask them for help and they would help me. And exactly the same applied to me – they would ring me. We would
email each other. I knew I could contact my lecturer. He would be only too happy to discuss any problems I had. And my practice
teacher during supervision. I can actually reflect on things I had done and, if I wasn’t quite sure about what I had done,
we would talk it through during supervision time and I would actually realise that maybe that wasn’t such a good idea or yes,
that was a really good idea. So yes, I found supervision very supportive as well. I think I pulled from every area really.
You know, I used everyone who I felt could help me. And they helped me through the course.

So it is really useful to have other people who:

- have the knowledge and skills that we need and are willing to spend some time to share them with us

- have the equipment we need – or know somebody else who does – and are prepared to arrange a loan or to make a mutually acceptable
swap of resources

- inspire us and can act as our role models

- cheer us up when we are feeling down

- have the networks and the know-how to open up opportunities to us

- are not afraid to prod us when we need it or give us constructive criticism when they notice that we are not doing things
quite right

- have similar values and interests to keep our own enthusiasm going

- concentrate on what can be done rather than dwelling on the problems, and help us to develop a can-do approach to life

- we feel comfortable with and bolster our sense of self-worth.

Activity 48 Building your sources of support

Allow about 30 minutes for this activity

In Section 3, you thought about how other people can help you by giving feedback. This was just one way that other people
can help out. Here we are interested in who might act as a support for you in the future. Complete the right-hand column of
the table below with the names of the people who might usefully play the roles listed in the first column.

Think about family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, people in organisations that you belong to; and people that you might
be able to find through local information and advice agencies – the library, the job centre, local colleges and so on.

Sources of support

Support roles

Who might be able to do this for you?

Passing on their knowledge and skills

Loaning equipment – or information on where to get it

Inspirational leadership and role model

Cheering us up and cheering us on

Opening up networks and opportunities

Prodding us and keeping us on track

Sharing values and interests

‘Can-do’ people who keep us positive

Providing a ‘comfort blanket’ – reassuring us of our worth

View comment - Activity 48 Building your sources of support

4.5.2 Thinking about knowledge and skills

As you learned in Section 3, there are various routes to acquiring knowledge and skills including formal and informal learning
opportunities, and individual and social routes to learning.

We now encourage you to think first about formal approaches to acquiring the knowledge and skills you might need and then
about informal learning approaches.

4.5.3 Formal routes to learning

Here we are thinking both of educational institutions (schools, colleges and universities) and work-based learning, such as
National Vocational Qualifications (which accredit learning on the job), apprenticeships, and secondments which allow for
rehearsal of old skills in new areas, or the development of new skills to take back to the old setting.

Hand-in-hand with the emphasis on lifelong learning, there has been a growth in flexibility and in the idea of personalised
learning. It is now possible to take advantage of modular courses, credit accumulation and the accreditation of prior learning
to fit study time around other commitments, the resources you have available, the timescale that suits you and the work position
in which you find yourself (Jeffs and Smith, 1999). You can transfer from one institution to another and mix distance learning
with more traditional courses. Flexitime and the growth of part-time work and working for yourself (freelance) also help to
create the space in which to study.

You may not be interested at this stage in careers advice or formal learning, but if you are, then you may find the following
activity useful.

Activity 49 Finding out about formal routes to learning

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity

If you are reasonably confident about using computers, the Internet is a useful source of information. If you don’t have your
own computer you could go to your local library – most have Internet access.

The Open University’s own website has a useful careers section with links to a wealth of other sites. You could use the website to find out about:

- exploring your career options – this section has suggestions for finding out about jobs and further study options

- student stories – here you can read about how some past OU students chose their careers and their learning route.

Even if you are not skilled with computers, a visit to the library would be useful as they will have careers information and
also details of local and national education and training opportunities.

Section 5 uses some of the guidance from these web pages about writing a Curriculum Vitae (CV).

View comment - Activity 49 Finding out about formal routes to learning

4.5.4 Informal approaches to learning

Workplaces are, again, useful informal routes to learning – though in this case it is a question of learning from colleagues.
You share ideas and experiences and find shortcuts to what is expected of you, rather than the more formal work-based learning
and training programmes that teach you what management wants you to know and do.

In Section 3 you learned about different communities of practice, and you could find further opportunities for learning in
this way by:

- expanding the number and variety of groups that you belong to – for example, joining different social groups or community
organisations

- trying out new roles or activities within organisations to which you currently belong – for example, becoming treasurer of
a club you belong to, or offering to stand in for one of the leaders at your local playgroup when they are on holiday.

Either way, you can become acquainted with a wider range of thoughts, feelings and behaviours that you can observe, ‘try on
for size’ or discuss. You can open up your mind to challenging your own stereotypes and opinions – and those of others – and
learn to value the debate and discussion that arises. You can sharpen your communication skills, while also acquiring new
knowledge and information about the topic under discussion.

Neil Thompson (2005) has suggested that you can extend your knowledge and skills through six key routes: reading, asking,
watching, feeling, talking and thinking.

Reading

Both fiction and non-fiction books (including self-help manuals, documentaries and biographies) can help us expand our horizons,
provide new insights and ideas, and help us learn techniques that will save us time, so that we then have more time for further
reading, thinking, asking and so on.

Asking

Sometimes, books (particularly professional literature or academic books) are written in a style we do not understand or appreciate,
so it is a good idea to ask other people what they think about the ideas we are reading about. You can also learn a lot by
asking other people – inside and outside work – how they tackle things and why they do things a certain way; what they have
learned about what works and what does not.

Watching

There are at least two aspects to this: watching other people to learn different approaches to tackling things and watching
carefully what happens when you do something new and then thinking about why it happened that way. Often we work on automatic
pilot – not really thinking about what we are doing. Opening up our attention and taking notice of what happens can be a useful
learning opportunity.

Feeling

Thoughts, feelings, attitudes and behaviours are all linked. We can use our thoughts to make sense of our feelings, and our
intuition to guide our thinking. We will be coming back to this topic shortly.

Talking

Sharing ideas with colleagues, friends, family or members of an organisation you belong to is a good way of learning to understand
a range of perspectives on a situation and to challenge your instinctive responses. Regular conversations can also help sharpen
our communication and problem-solving skills.

Thinking

Sometimes there does not seem to be enough time to really think about our lives and learning, but Thompson points out that
thinking time is an essential, rather than a luxury, for times when you are not busy. If you put some effort into thinking
about, and planning to avoid, crises, you can save time on fire-fighting problems in the future. You can feel more in charge
of what is happening to you rather than feeling at the mercy of unforeseen events.

Using the whole range of these six approaches helps us to build up a more rounded picture of a topic or a skill that you are
trying to acquire or develop. For example, reading an article in a magazine might lead to talking through the ideas with friends;
asking how they might do things differently and why. This in turn might encourage you to think about the way you normally
approach similar situations – and then to try out a different approach. Further reflection on whether or not it works for
you and why (or why not) can be a valuable source of learning.

Activity 50 Informal routes to learning

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

We encourage you now to:

- identify new groups you could join or roles and activities that you could take on as a way of extending your current knowledge
and skills and challenging your ideas and opinions

- take one small aspect of your goal and identify what you might read; who you could ask questions and discuss ideas with; how
you might observe people and make sense of your observations, perhaps, again, in discussion with others.

View comment - Activity 50 Informal routes to learning

The next suggestion about keeping a learning journal for a short period of time should also help you to do this.

4.5.5 Keeping a learning journal

A learning journal does not have to be anything fancy. It can be just a few sheets of paper or a small note book that you
can carry around with you or you can use an electronic one. It can help you look forwards by developing your ideas and plans
for new learning experiences, and backwards by reflecting on your thoughts, feelings and actions about new activities you
have tried. Thinking in terms of Thompson’s six elements, you might write down:

- your thoughts about articles that you have read

- questions you would like to raise with people who might have more information or experience than you

- your observations of other people in action, so that you get new ideas for trying out particular techniques or different responses
to people’s demands of you

- new ideas that you would like to test out in practice or discuss with people whose opinions you value

- reflections on the results of trying out new things – did it work and why? Were there problems and what might be the cause
of them?

- how confident you are feeling about your learning and why

- how you might build on your strengths and address your weaknesses.

Activity 51 Keeping a learning journal for five days

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity over the five days you keep the journal

You might develop a chart in a part of the journal such as the one shown in Figure 37.

Figure 37 Example diary extract

View description - Figure 37 Example diary extract

View comment - Activity 51 Keeping a learning journal for five days

Despite the undoubted value of keeping such a journal, we do recognise that it can be a difficult commitment to maintain.
So, we would really like you to have a go, if only for a few days. We can even appeal on the basis of Entwistle’s approaches
to learning. We think that a learning journal is an excellent way of practising a ‘deep’ approach to your learning.

If you want to, you are very welcome to keep a learning journal for a longer period. This has the advantage of making it possible
to review your entries on a regular basis – perhaps flicking through it once a month. This can help you to recognise:

- your progress, as you see that there are things that you used to find difficult but can now do relatively easily

- recurring themes in your thoughts and actions which indicate potential areas to work on in the future.

While there may be some very real and practical obstacles to learning and development – in the form of resources, knowledge
and skills – there may also be times when our biggest obstacle is our own feelings and mindset, which leads us on to our third
set of helping and hindering factors.

4.5.6 Thinking about personal qualities

Some people are much more open than others to making the changes in their life that lead to (or result from) learning and
personal growth. Sometimes, it may feel easier to stay within our comfort zone, even though we are not satisfied with our
life, than to venture out into new territory. Fiona Harrold suggests that we have to:

… get used to feeling comfortable with a little discomfort and a little uncertainty alongside a great deal of positive expectancy.
Turn anxiety into anticipation, fear into energy and worry into action.

(Harrold, 2001, p. 281)

She explains that excitement and fear produce similar hormones: when the adrenalin surges through you, you can decide whether
what you are feeling is excitement or fear. The more you live within your comfort zone, she adds, the harder it is to distinguish
between the two because you have not had enough practice: ‘To live your best life you have to move out of your comfort zone
and learn to manage your feelings’ (Harrold, 2001, p. 281).

This leads us into the topic of emotional literacy which Susie Orbach (1999) has summarised neatly into a three Rs mnemonic
involving the ability to:

- Register the emotional dimension in any situation – to recognise, for example, that there is an ‘atmosphere’ and use it as
a prompt to work out what is going on.

- Recognise feelings of your own (and their effects on other people) and to ‘read’ other people’s emotions accurately by interpreting
their body language.

- Respond appropriately to your own emotions and to those of other people. Recognising that sometimes it is appropriate to express
your emotions and sometimes it is not; that sometimes it is appropriate to simply sit back and listen when other people lose
their temper, burst into tears or whoop with joy, while at other times it is appropriate to challenge their interpretation
of events. Some people know this intuitively but it is also a skill you can develop.

Whenever you are making decisions there will be rational and emotional elements that you need to take into account. Traditionally,
the emphasis has been on rational, logical thinking for decision making, but emotions can also provide you with useful ‘data’.
Sometimes a decision may appear rational but you are uncomfortable with it. Working out exactly what you are feeling – and
what lies behind those feelings – can be a useful step towards deciding what to do next.

Thoughts, feelings and actions are interrelated – you can ‘learn’ new emotional responses, just as you can learn new knowledge
and skills.

There are various tools and techniques that you can use in developing emotional literacy. You might practise recognising your
own emotions – and what leads to them – by keeping a ‘mood journal’. You could include this as a part of the learning journal
activity. This involves noting how you feel at different times of day, with different people and in different situations,
to see if you can identify any patterns. When are you at your most and least anxious, happiest, annoyed and so on? This sort
of activity can help you to recognise the way in which circumstances influence your emotions and how your feelings can influence
a situation. You can recognise how your feelings can interfere with your thinking and how they can enhance it.

You might practise recognising other people’s emotions by making a conscious effort to interpret their body language and check
it out with them – watching their gestures and saying: ‘You’re looking [insert feeling], today’, with an inquiring tone that
invites them to respond. Even if you are wrong in your interpretation, people are usually glad to be noticed and the following
discussion might add to your knowledge of them and to your interpretation skills.

Build up your emotional vocabulary. Are you a little bit annoyed, cross, angry or absolutely furious? Are you calm, pleased,
happy, delighted or ecstatic?

Having more words to think about how you feel can also help you to work out what to do with those feelings. In addition, Caruso
and Salovey (2004) point out that emotions usually build up gradually, so if you can learn to recognise early warning signals
of negative emotions you might be able to avert a difficult situation. For example, if you can spot someone feeling irritated,
you may be able to find out what the problem is and discuss it before the feeling turns into anger or rage, which may be so
strong they interfere with the ability to think rationally about the solution.

If you can spot your own feelings of apprehension, you can question why you are feeling that way and what you can do about
it before you get to the terrified state in which you cannot think straight. Recognising that you have options is another
element of emotional literacy. We can allow fear to paralyse us so that, for example, we always avoid giving presentations
and ask other people to do them instead. Alternatively, we can note the feeling, but then use our thinking to work out exactly
why we are afraid of doing presentations and to do something about it. We can practise making presentations until we have
no need to be afraid.

By observing other people and noting the ways in which they respond differently to success and to failure, and asking them
how they manage their emotions in situations that you always find difficult, you might be able to find more productive ways
of handling your instinctive responses to events.

Activity 52 Practising emotional literacy

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity

Commit yourself to undertaking at least one of the above suggested routes to emotional literacy over the next week or so.

As another exercise, work on the three Rs. Think back to a recent time when you felt a particularly strong emotion. Now write
as much about the feeling as you can ( Recognising the feeling).

Next, work out how you could Respond appropriately. You might ask yourself the following questions:

1. Why did I feel this way?

2. Was this feeling helpful to me or not?

3. Was this feeling logical? Note the thoughts that accompanied the feelings (for example, ‘I felt so useless’; ‘I will never
be able to do this’; ‘I always do this wrong’).

4. Is there any evidence to support these thoughts or beliefs?

5. Is there any evidence that these thoughts are inaccurate?

6. How can I get a balanced view of this? (You might remind yourself of a time when you handled something really well, or you
might imagine what you could do next time you feel this emotion.)

7. What options are open to me?

View comment - Activity 52 Practising emotional literacy

If you have been completing the activities as you worked through this section you should now be in a position to create your
own action plan and to work out how you could monitor progress towards your goal or goals – the final topic for this section.

4.6 Developing your action plan and thinking about evidence

We explained, earlier in this section, that developing an action plan involves the following steps:

- setting yourself a goal to work towards

- working out what you need to do before you can achieve your goal – breaking the goal down into smaller and smaller chunks
until you get to a point where you think, ‘Yes, that’s manageable. I feel I could tackle that bit.’

- putting the steps in a logical order – some will be dependent on others having been completed first, while some will be more
flexible and can be completed at any time

- putting a timescale next to each step to spur you on to achieving it.

We hope that as you have worked through this section, you will have put together much of the information that you need to
develop an action plan, and we suggest that you do so, in the following activity.

Activity 53 Developing an action plan

Allow about 40 minutes for this activity

1. For one of your short- to medium-term goals, draw up an action plan following the style of Table 7.

2. Write your goal down as the heading for the left-hand column.

3. You may have come up with some initial steps towards your goal as you started writing it in a SMART way (as in Activity 46).
Write these down now on a separate piece of paper.

4. By thinking about the helping and hindering factors, you may have identified some further steps to increase the helping factors
and reduce the hindering factors. Add these to your list.

5. Now put the steps in a logical order – some you will be able to complete any time and some will depend on you having completed
other steps first. For example, Jodi would ideally do his work experience to find out whether being a chef is as attractive
as he thinks it might be before he enrols on any training courses.

6. Write all the steps in the left-hand column of your table in the order in which you intend to tackle them.

7. Now use the right-hand column of the table to set yourself a time by which you would like to complete each of the steps listed.
There are two key things to bear in mind here:

1. Remember to be realistic – do not set yourself up for feelings of having failed by being over-optimistic.

2. Try to make sure that there is something you can achieve every week, if not every day, to keep your momentum going. If you
find long gaps between completion dates, try to break the tasks down into even smaller steps.

Goals

My goal

Date for achieving this

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

View comment - Activity 53 Developing an action plan

As we mentioned earlier, when talking about goals, some of your achievement will be directly measurable and can be ticked
off relatively easily. For example, if you have been to the library and identified an appropriate course; if you have found
yourself a work experience placement; or if you have made three new friends.

Some developments may be harder to tick off since they are not directly measurable; for example, developments in your confidence
or your ability to influence people. This is where the informal ‘tool’ of the learning journal can help.

Looking back at your entries in your learning journal can help you recognise that you are now more confident and/or more competent
in both your academic and ‘real world’ skills. You could use your reflections about the activities in this section and on
what you have written in the journal. You can also develop your problem-solving skills by thinking about what has worked and
what has not when you tried out new things. In addition, you can use your problem-solving skills to help you to decide what
you might do differently the next time in order to increase your chances of success. Doing this will add evidence about your
problem-solving ability, as well as developing your resilience.

4.7 Conclusion

We return to what we said at the beginning of this section by reminding you that the action plan is not something that is
set in stone, but something that you can return to again and again; revising your goals, or the way you might reach them,
in response to the learning you acquire in the process of ticking off the steps you have worked through. As we learn, we change,
and as we change, our priorities may also change.

This does not mean that it is not worthwhile drawing up a plan. Having your goals written down reminds you to ask yourself
on a regular basis: ‘How am I doing?’, ‘Is this really where I want to be right now?’, ‘What other options are open to me?’,
‘What might happen if I did X instead of Y?’ You are then in a position to update your plan on the basis of informed decision
making. This is very different from drifting aimlessly, which might happen without a plan.

You should now be ready to implement a small part of your action plan, which is one focus of the following section. It would
also be a good idea to begin thinking about how the viewpoints and theories that you have explored in this course have helped
you to develop and think about your plan.

Caruso, D.R. and Salovey, P. (2004) The Emotionally Intelligent Manager: How to Use and Develop the Four Key Emotional kills of Leadership, San Francisco, Jossey-Bass.

Cochrane, A. and Pain, P. (2004) ‘A globalizing society?’ in Held, D. (ed.) A Globalizing World? Culture, Economics, Politics, 2nd edition, London, Routledge/The Open University.

Evans, K., Hodkinson, P., Rainbird, H. and Unwin, L. (2006) Improving Workplace Learning, London, Routledge.

Flint, C. (2007) ‘It’s not just the economy, stupid’, Adults Learning, vol. 19, no. 2, pp. 8–11.

Harrold, F. (2001) Be Your Own Life Coach: How to Take Control of Your Life and Achieve Your Wildest Dreams, London, Hodder and Stoughton.

Jeffs, T. and Smith, M.K. (1999) ‘The problem of “youth” for youth work’, Youth and Policy, vol. 62, pp. 45–66. Available in the informal education archives, http://www.infed.org/archives/youth.htm (Accessed 4 July
2008).

Keep, E. and Mayhew, K. (1988) ‘The assessment: education, training and economic performance’ in Esland, G. (ed.) (1990) Education, Training and Employment: Educated Labour – the Changing Basis of Industrial Demand, Volume 1, Wokingham, Addison-Wesley/The Open University.

Leitch, S. (2006) Prosperity For All in The Global Economy – World Class Skills, London, Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.

Lewin, K. (1947) ‘Frontiers in group dynamics: concept, method, and reality in social science, social equilibria, and social
change’, Human Relations, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 5–41.

Orbach, S. (1999) Towards Emotional Literacy, London, Virago.

Prochaska, J. and DiClemente, C.C. (1984) The Trans-theoretical Approach: Crossing Boundaries of Therapy, Homewood, IL, Dow Jones Irvin.

Thompson, N. (2005) Working with Young People, London, Sage Publications.

5 Reflecting backwards, reflecting forwards

5.1 Introduction

You have almost reached the end of Learning to change and we hope that you will continue to use learning to achieve change in your life. This section is an opportunity to reflect
on what you have learned as a result of doing the course. ‘Reflecting backwards’ is an important part of learning because
it helps you to be clear about what you have learned. Looking back also enables you to hold on to what you have learned after
the course finishes. This means that you can ‘reflect forwards’ by thinking about what you might do in future and how this
might be different from what you have done in the past.

Both reflecting backwards and reflecting forwards are important skills in their own right. It can be difficult to make the
time to do either consciously or thoroughly. However, you have had a number of opportunities to practise reflection as you
have worked through Learning to change.

Another way of thinking about this section is to see it as marking the start of the next phase in your learning. So far in
this course you have gone through the following sequence:

1. You have ‘taken stock’ of your own learning.

2. You have considered what other perspectives and viewpoints have to offer.

3. You have used what you have learned to move forward and try something new or different.

This represents a cycle of learning. Now that you are reaching the end of Learning to change you are finishing this particular cycle. But we hope that you will see it as only the first on many such cycles of learning.
This is why, later in this section, we discuss how you might create a CV for yourself. This can give you another starting
point where you begin a new cycle by taking stock. However, before we move on to this we need to complete the cycle of learning
you have been working on.

Figure 38 Sequence of learning in this course so far

View description - Figure 38 Sequence of learning in this course so far

5.2 What have I learned about my knowledge?

It is worth spending some time thinking back over what you have learned from the course materials. The text and video have
presented you with some challenging ideas and a wide range of perspectives. You have been asked to apply this to your own
learning for change. As you look back over these, and at your responses to the activities, you will be reminded of the ground
you have covered.

It may be helpful to think briefly about the perspectives that were the focus of each section:

- Section 1 introduced the course outline and the three main perspectives on Learning to change.

- Section 2 focused on your perspective as the basis for gathering evidence about your knowledge, skills and qualities.

- Section 3 focused on the two remaining perspectives – other people and academic theory – as the basis for your learning.

- Section 4 looked at the wider national and global context of learning. It then focused on how you could move forward by developing
your vision and action plan.

As you think back over what you have learned, you will probably remember some themes and ideas from the course more easily
than others. Perhaps there was an idea or way of thinking about change that you found particularly interesting or challenging.
Perhaps something challenged you to look at yourself, or the world, in a different way. The next activity will help you focus
on what you have learned from the course materials.

Activity 54 Learning to change – knowledge

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Think back over the course. Try and think of three things that you have learned from the course materials. You might include
how your work on the course has made you think differently about yourself. You could say how developing a vision has changed
your own thinking.

One person wrote:

1. I have learned about the importance of other people.

2. The case studies showed me that ordinary people can achieve change in their lives.

3. I was really motivated by having a vision to work towards.

View comment - Activity 54 Learning to change – knowledge

5.3 What have I learned about my skills?

As well as offering different ways of thinking about your experience and about change, the course has also enabled you to
explore your skills. The activities have been an important part of your learning. Some of these activities (especially in
Section 2) focused on gathering evidence about your skills. Many of the other activities have given you opportunities to develop
and practise both your academic skills and your ‘real world’ skills. Do you recall the list of these skills in Section 1?

‘Real world’ skills

- communication skills

- problem-solving skills

- organisational skills.

Academic skills

- reading

- note taking

- writing

- selecting and using evidence

- evaluating ideas (including your own plans) and theories.

- thinking about your own learning (reflection).

There are probably other skills that you have improved as a result of working through the course. Your notes, particularly
those from the activities, are an important resource for reviewing the knowledge, skills and qualities that you have learned.
It would be a good idea to make time to tidy up your notes and put them in order, so that you can use them in the future.

The next activity asks you to think about the skills you have developed.

Activity 55 Skills you have developed

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Think of four skills you have developed or improved as a result of your work on this course. Try and select at least two real
world skills and two academic skills and give an example for each.

You could use the table below or draw one of your own. We have provided an example to get you started.

Skills development table

Skill I have developed

Example

Communication skill

I have got better at expressing myself in writing, not just on my assignments but with a recent reference I wrote for a friend.

Next skill

Example…

View comment - Activity 55 Skills you have developed

5.4 What have I learned about my qualities?

Your qualities include some aspects that you might find difficult to talk about. We hope that your work on this course has
given you a clearer idea about these. They could include qualities like integrity and honesty, and they may link to some of
your values – values that, perhaps, inform your vision and your action plan. How you use your improved awareness of your qualities
is something that you may want to think about. You may be content to know that your qualities and values underpin your plans
for change. On the other hand, you may decide that they have a wider currency and are something that you might want to share
with other people. For example, you might want to make your qualities clear if you are applying for a job.

Activity 56 Qualities I’ve developed

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Spend a few moments thinking back over your learning while you have been working on this course. Note down which qualities
you think help to define what sort of a person you are. Then note down whether you think they have changed over the time you
have been doing the course.

Finally, say how you are going to use these qualities in future.

View comment - Activity 56 Qualities I’ve developed

5.5 Reflecting on what I have done differently — what was the effect?

We hope that the activities in this section have helped you to bring to mind what you have learned. But we also want you to
think about whether you have done anything differently from what you might have tried before starting the course. In other
words, we want you to ask yourself whether the course has given you the confidence, or some ideas that have encouraged you,
to take a bit of a risk, or, as Section 4 puts it, to step outside your comfort zone.

Do not worry if you cannot say that you have yet. We hope that you will feel able to do this in the near future. If you have
tried something new, have a go at the next activity. If you have yet to do this, you should go on to Activity 58 (in Section
5.6).

Activity 57 When I tried something new

Allow about 20 minutes for this activity

Write down what you have done that was new or different. Try to give as much detail as you can, and include how you felt about
this achievement.

Then go on to add (again in as much detail as you can) what happened when you tried something new.

View comment - Activity 57 When I tried something new

You may have noticed that we have not commented on all activities in this section. This is deliberate, as we feel that if
you are completing these activities then you will be demonstrating to yourself that you have, indeed, been able to bring about
change in some way or another. You should look for what has worked and ‘capture’ this so that you will be in a better position
to see what you could try next.

5.6 Reflecting forward – what am I going to do next?

This is the last part of the course but in some ways it is the most important. There will have been little point to your study
if all you do is look back at what you have learned about yourself and your capacity to use Learning to change. It only really becomes significant if you use your learning in future to reach new goals. So we would like you to do two
more activities. As we said at the start of this section, these activities can be seen as the start of a new cycle of personal
learning, discovery and change.

To get your new cycle underway, you could create you own curriculum vitae (CV).

5.6.1 Using a CV to present yourself

A CV is a document that you draw up in order to ‘sell’ yourself to a prospective employer. You might object that your current
plans are unlikely to need a CV. You may not be looking to change your career or your job. However, the work involved in putting
a CV together can be useful to you personally. Creating your CV gives you a clear idea about what you want to say about your
qualities and skills. It can be useful in helping you recognise and appreciate these. It might start you thinking about how
you would like to use your unique combination of talents in the future. On a more practical level it can be very useful to
have an up-to-date CV to hand if you see an opportunity that interests you, whether this is for paid or voluntary work.

The following information was from the Open University’s careers website at the time this course was written:

Take it a step at a time.

1. Identify the key requirements of the job or position you are interested in.

2. Identify your relevant skills, experiences and personal qualities.

3. Choose the most appropriate CV format:

- chronological CV

- skills-based CV.

(Here we are going to look at the skills-based CV. If you are interested in a chronological CV, it might be worth visiting
the website at www.open.ac.uk/careers)

Your CV needs to:

- draw attention to your strengths

- be easy to read

- be faultlessly presented.

Your CV should:

- always be typed or printed on good-quality white or cream paper

- have a clear font (10 or 12 point size)

- use bold type to highlight section headings

- have the most important points on the first page

- use bullet points to break up and vary the text

- look good visually (not too crowded or too sparse)

- be free of errors in spelling or grammar.

5.6.2 Skills-based CVs

A skills-based CV emphasises your personal qualities, rather than your employment history, and is a very popular format with
mature graduates. You should choose this sort of CV to emphasise what you have to offer an employer.

A skills-based CV is ideal if you have gaps in your employment history, because they are not as prominent as they would be
in a chronological CV. However, employers are still likely to ask you about your career progression, so be prepared to explain
any gaps at interview.

If you have varied work experience, this type of CV provides the opportunity to show employers how skills gained in other
types of employment might be relevant for the post.

You should include:

- your contact details (name, address, telephone number, mobile number, and email address if you check it regularly)

- your education and qualifications: degree subject, class (attained or expected), modules studied, A levels (always with dates
and grades), summarised GCSE/O levels or CSEs

- a description of your key or transferable skills (identify the key skills required for the job and use these headings in your
CV)

- a summary of your work experience

- your referees, who can be named or ‘on request’ (if named, ensure you

- ask their permission first).

You do not need to include:

- nationality (unless you will need a UK work permit)

- marital status

- details and ages of children

- your health status

- school and university address

- examining boards

- minor qualifications unrelated to the post applied for.

www.open.ac.uk/careers [accessed 1 July 2008]

Activity 58 Analysing a sample CV

Allow about 25 minutes for this activity

Read this sample CV and comment on what you see as its strengths.

Skills-based CV example

48 Any Road

Edinburgh

XY11 3ZZ

Tel: 01234 123456

email: epage@nothotmail.com

ELIZABETH PAGE

PERSONAL PROFILE

Having recently gained a Psychology degree with The Open University, I am now seeking a challenging and fulfilling post helping
disadvantaged young people. I have considerable experience in working with teenagers and, having studied alongside full-time
work, have a proven willingness to learn and work hard.

I am enthusiastic, energetic and adaptable and am able to relate well to young people. I enjoy helping and motivating others
to achieve and fulfil their potential.

KEY SKILLS

Effective communication skills

In my present job, I am responsible for helping with the children’s physical needs and aim to help them come to terms with
their specific difficulties. I need good verbal communication skills and a sensitive approach to do this. I also endeavour
to ensure that sessions are not only fun but include some learning development.

As a Volunteer Support Worker I have demonstrated my ability to gain the trust of young people and have been able to deal
sensitively but assertively with their demands.

Good time-management skills

I have needed good time-management skills in order to survive while studying for my degree, while working full time and running
a busy home.

Forward planning and ability to prioritise

My Open University assignments had rigorous cut-off dates. This meant that I had to plan ahead to ensure I had the extra time
often required in order to hand in the assignment on time. This involved being able to prioritise other essential tasks. In
addition, I was required to attend three week-long residential schools, requiring careful forward planning for my family’s
needs over these weeks.

Excellent organisational skills

I am responsible for organising outings and activities at the home where I work as a volunteer. This involves negotiating
what is possible, liaising with staff, planning each outing, organising other volunteers to help, ordering the minibus and
leading the group.

EDUCATIONAL QUALIFICATIONS

2001 – 2006

BSc (Hons) PsychologyFirst Class Honours The Open University

courses included:

- Child development (distinct ion)

- Working with young people

- Social psychology

1983 – 1988

Seven ‘O’ Grades including English and Maths High School, Edinburgh

1 Higher Grade English

CAREER HISTORY

1997 – presentCare Assistant The Silken Umbrella Children’s Home

Helping teenagers with additional needs in a residential home

1991 – 1997 Career break bringing up two children.

1989 – 1991 Nursing Auxiliary The Hospital for Sick Children,

Edinburgh

Helping nurses to feed, wash and dress patients, making beds, serving meals.

Voluntary work

2005 – present Volunteer support work New Horizon Project, Edinburgh

Providing information to the 16–25 age range on specialist services (e.g. drugs and housing).

Liaising with local organisations in order to maintain up-to-date information.

1998 – 2000 Volunteer The Prince’s Trust

Acted as a volunteer, organising a sporting event for young people. This was an annual event, lasting a week, run at a holiday
camp. Most of the young people there were either in care or at risk of offending.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

- Computer literate, knowledge of Windows 98 and databases

- In-house training on benefits system and basic drug awareness

- CRB checked

- Extensive knowledge of and interest in sport

- Clean driving licence and minibus certificate

View comment - Activity 58 Analysing a sample CV

This would be a good opportunity to create your own CV.

Activity 59 Your promise to yourself

Allow about 15 minutes for this activity

This last activity asks you to make a promise to yourself. This promise is that you will not lose sight of what you have achieved
and (most importantly) that you will be active in seeking new possibilities to ‘learn to learn’.

Write down what you have decided to do over the next three months. This is the basis for taking forward the vision and plan
that you created in Section 4 into your next phase of learning.

5.7 Conclusion

We hope that you have enjoyed Learning to change. The course has asked you to explore your own learning and how it can be used for personal development and change. We hope
that you have found that you have a combination of knowledge, skills and qualities that you can take forward in ways that
will help you feel fulfilled in whatever you decide to do and will make your life more interesting and enjoyable.

We also hope that you have begun to feel that in addition to being able to manage change in your life you can also successfully
study at the level of higher education. The academic skills you have built up through this course will stand you in good stead
with many other courses and we hope that this means that, although you are finishing Learning to change, this is only just the start for other, perhaps longer, courses of study. We also hope that it marks the start of many exciting
changes in your life.

Good luck and best wishes as you go on learning to change.

Keep on learning

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For reference, full URLs to pages listed above:

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Acknowledgements

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence.

Course image: whologwhy in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources:

Reading: Flint, C. (2007) ‘It’s not just the economy, stupid’, Adult Learning, 19 (2), NIACE.

Figure 7: Reproduced with the kind permission of the University of Surrey;

Figure 12: Reproduced under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License;

Figure 20: Copyright © John Chapple / Rex Features; Page 77 top: Copyright

Figure 22 © Do’Neil. Reproduced under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

Figure 23 Copyright © Hulton-Deutsch / Corbis

Figure 26: Copyright © Barron Claiborne / Corbis

Figure 27: Copyright © Jeff Greenberg / Alamy.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders. If any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be
pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.

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Activity 1 What can Karen, Levene and Shehnaz tell us about learning?

Comment

Karen

Karen seems to have been very unprepared for the work she started when she left school. She had no qualifications and she
also struggled to do her job because she had not learned the alphabet. However, once at work she learned very quickly. She
was able to make use of communication skills she had learned by explaining to her boss what she was doing.

Levene

Levene seems to feel that his qualifications were not very special. On the other hand, he has been able to draw on previous
experience and has been able to use this to explore new learning. Perhaps you got the impression that he would rather be talking
about the successful learning he has done since leaving school.

Shehnaz

Shehnaz also talks about learning in terms of qualifications – both those she was able to do (her GCSEs) and those that she
did not finish (her A levels). Shehnaz tells us that she has looked after her mother-in-law when she was ill, has married,
has had children, and has lived in America. Did you wonder what Shehnaz might have learned as a result of these experiences?
She may well have learned far more from these experiences than from her GCSE courses.

Back

Activity 2 What’s in a word – skills?

Comment

As with many of the activities in this course, we have no way of knowing what your answer might include – that is why keeping
your activity notes together is so important to help you recall your thoughts. You might like to compare the range of ideas
you included with the discussion in the rest of this section.

One aspect of this activity is that it highlights how studying often includes a concern to work out what words mean and how
they are being used.

Back

Activity 3 Thinking about your studying

Comment

People learn in different ways and it is important for you to try different approaches, to find out which methods work best
for you. You might find that you are able to get through some parts quite quickly; at other times you might need to read something
more than once and still have to ask your tutor to explain it.

Back

Activity 4 Looking back

Comment

Figure 4 Mind map for the contents of Section 1 (labelled Chapter 1)

View description - Figure 4 Mind map for the contents of Section 1 (labelled Chapter 1)

Do not worry if your map looks different from this one. It is your personal record of the content of the section and how the
different sections relate to each other. You may find connections that others do not spot. You may find it helpful to create
your own mind map for each section and use it to review your work at a later date.

Back

Activity 5 Planning your study of section 2

Comment

A student made the following comment:

I looked through Section 2 – there are lots of activities. That might slow down my reading. A lot of the activities seem to
be about Karen, Levene and Shehnaz – then there are others which seem to be about me. I think I’ll study this in several chunks.
I’ll have time on Wednesday afternoon to do a couple of hours – might get as far as the part about communication skills.

It is worth considering the times of day and the lengths of sessions in which you work most productively. For example, if
you know you are going to lose concentration after half an hour or so and also that you are just too tired to study in the
evenings, it is probably better to schedule your study time for new topics in half-hour slots in the morning and use the evenings
for something else.

Back

Activity 6 What does Jim bring to his learning?

Comment

It is likely that Jim has already learned a number of things. Some of these seem to affect the way he acts when he tries to
bring about change in his life. He has done a plastering course at the same college where the computer course is running.
We might assume that while he was at the college he learned where certain rooms were – perhaps he became most familiar with
the spaces used for plastering. Perhaps he was also clear where the canteen was.

He has also (at some point in the past) learned how to ask people for information (in this case, directions to a particular
classroom). This might sound like something anyone can do. However, asking for information draws on a complex set of skills.
You have to be able to speak the same language and it might help to use a tone of voice that is more likely to make the receptionist
want to help you. You also have to have good listening skills to follow any directions given.

We thought that Jim did want to achieve personal change. For one thing, Jim wants to change his job. He also wants to know if knowing more about computers
can be part of this change. Jim seems to have decided that to achieve change, he needs to develop new skills, in this case,
computer skills.

Jim will have learned many things about himself – some of which he will be very aware of. These would include the health problems
he has as a result of working with wet plaster. He is probably less aware of other aspects of what he has learned. For example,
he may not fully realise that he has ‘learned’ that he finds it difficult to remember people’s names when he is in a new situation.
He has, though, learned that this can make him feel uncomfortable or anxious. Do you think that he has learned that he feels
far happier once he gets started on something he knows about?

If the situation stays the same, Jim is likely to have reinforced his feeling that he is not very good at learning names.
This might result in him ‘learning’ that he is not very good at communicating with other people. If his course goes well,
this contrast might encourage Jim to label himself as someone who is good at word processing but not with people.

Back

Activity 7 Thinking about Angela’s story

Comment

Angela’s story is about preparing a meal for her daughter. Yet for this one task she draws on a very wide range of knowledge.
Angela knows about what constitutes a healthy diet. For example, she seems to know something about the importance of fruit
and vegetables and that eating too much fat can be bad for us. But it went further than this. Angela has knowledge about Grace’s
likes and dislikes and about what she dislikes at school (sports). She also has wider knowledge about things like the Olympic
Games.

Angela’s story also shows that she has learned how to do certain things. The clearest example in the story is that she seems
to have developed some cooking skills. But did you notice that when Grace returned home, Angela also used other skills to
communicate with her daughter? Angela also showed some of her personal qualities as a concerned parent. She obviously cares
for Grace so it was important for her to make Grace happy. She showed a concern for her daughter by trying to keep up with
her likes and dislikes. Do you think that she has learned how to act in this way?

Back

Activity 8 Reading Jarvis

Comment

learning is a fundamental stimulus to life

Here Jarvis seems to repeat his claim that learning is as important to life as food. He is also implying that learning can
make life more satisfying and interesting. It is what keeps us going forward in our lives, perhaps encouraging us to seek
new experiences.

without learning human beings can never transcend their biology

Here learning seems very different from food. Our bodies need food to keep them going – so we can never transcend (or move
beyond) our body’s need for food. However, learning is very different. If we learn about geography we can, for example, find
out about places that we might never physically visit. If we learn about history, we can gather information about events that
happened long before we were born. Similar points can be made about learning about religion or nuclear physics.

learning enables people to function effectively in society

This suggests that through learning we find how to get on with other people and how to make sense of all the social situations
which we come across on a daily basis. (Because Jim knew something about how the college operated, he knew that he could ask
the receptionist for directions.)

Back

Activity 9 You’re the interviewer

Comment

Rather than comment on all three, this comment just focuses on Karen. In general terms she seemed to be a caring person. She
feels strongly about trying to do a good job as a social worker. She wants to ensure that people are helped to make choices
that are appropriate to them.

Back

Activity 11 Imagine you’re the job applicant

Comment

Did this exercise seem very difficult or very easy? If you found it easy to write down many qualities, is this a result of
thinking you have already done? If you found it difficult, then you may have been too self-critical and found it difficult
to believe that you have many qualities. If you think this is the case, you could go back to the activity and see if you can
add a few more. Have another look at the list that you created earlier. There may be some qualities there that really apply
to you.

Back

Activity 12 Qualities of a learner

Comment

Shehnaz talks about learning in relation to her work with schools. It seems clear that she has used learning to develop her
career but she also finds that she has to go on learning while she is at work. She seems to see learning as very important
in the changes she has made, and plans to make, in her life. Shehnaz seems to have increased in confidence and suggests that
she relates her academic learning to other aspects of her life. She seems to demonstrate great persistence and a reluctance
to give up. Did you think that it was hard to identify any less-than-positive qualities?

Back

Activity 13 How do you learn?

Comment

This activity should help reinforce the ideas that you have already been introduced to earlier in this section. It has already
been suggested that learning is a fundamental aspect of being a human being. In brief, being human requires almost constant
learning. If this is the case, then we should all be very skilled learners because of the amount of practice we get! Thinking
about the way you have successfully learned in the past should help you remind yourself that you are not just a good learner
but someone with valuable personal qualities and knowledge.

However, much of our learning can be described as ‘everyday’ learning. This should not be seen as playing down this learning.
Indeed, it can be argued that this sort of learning is the most important as it helps us to negotiate our way through all
the real life situations that we encounter on a day-to-day basis. Yet strangely there is a strong tendency to see other sorts
of learning as having a higher status. In particular, learning that is associated with an institution like a school, a college
or a university is often held in higher esteem than ‘everyday’ learning. Such learning is often marked by being part of a
‘formal’ course which is taught by people with professional qualifications and is taken by people with a view to passing exams
or gaining qualifications. The high status accorded to this small proportion of learning can make us think that the other
learning we do has little significance. We hope that Learning to change will help you to challenge this way of thinking.

Back

Activity 14 The importance of communication skills

Comment

Often individual examples of communication have only a limited importance or effects by themselves. They may be part of a
relationship or process that continues over time. Sometimes they can help things keep going over time – communication can
help to ‘oil the wheels’. Communication also has the power to bring relationships to an end. The phrase ‘a breakdown in communication’
is often linked to problems in a wide variety of situations.

Back

Activity 15 Reflecting on Karen’s verbal communication skills

Comment

Neil Thompson (1996) has pointed out that these verbal aspects of communication can all give important clues about how people
are feeling. So it is not just what people say that counts, it is how people say it too. If someone seems to talk rather quickly,
this may be because they are angry or worried. In contrast, if someone speaks slowly this may be because they are tired. Or
it may indicate a lack of confidence in what they have to say. It is also possible to interpret why people may use a particular
tone of voice. As Thompson (1996, p. 83) points out, tone of voice is ‘an important indicator of emotional state. It gives
important messages about how the person is feeling. It indicates a whole range of feelings: anger, sadness, joy …’.

Similar comments may be made about pitch. Thompson suggests that:

flat, unmodulated pitch can reflect a depressed mood, while high or fluctuating pitch can signal … anger, fear or excitement.

Thompson (1996, pp. 83–84)

Thompson (1996, p. 84) suggests that quiet speech can indicate a lack of confidence, fear or anxiety whereas loud speech can
suggest aggression or a lack of sensitivity. Loud speech may also be used by someone who is fearful or anxious.

Back

Activity 16 Reflecting on Shehnaz’s non-verbal communication skills

Comment

Facial expressions, according to Thompson (1996, p. 95), ‘are very powerful in conveying information’. In particular smiling
“can be a highly significant form of communication”. As far as eye contact is concerned, it is important not to have too much
eye contact as this can be seen as challenging or threatening. On the other hand, too little eye contact can be interpreted
as indicating that someone is not trustworthy. It is important to note that these interpretations can vary from one culture
to another. Some cultures see it as being polite to avoid eye contact as far as possible.

Back

Activity 17 Communication skills – their overall impact

Comment

Assessing someone’s communication skills is always going to be difficult as different interpretations are always possible.
It is not always easy to decide which interpretation is ‘true’. The point is to become as aware as possible about the messages
that other people are sending out so that you can improve the likelihood of reasonably successful communication. Let’s see
what Karen has to say about her communication skills:

I think I have learned how to read body language when I am speaking to people – more observant. People don’t always say how
they are feeling, so if you can read their body language it’s easier to pick up on things. I am probably more confident with
my questioning. I am listening and taking in the messages I am receiving from people and also giving them a lot more opportunity
to make their own choices.

Back

Activity 19 Using a case study – problem solving

Comment

We hope that you found the Drill Down technique an interesting way of thinking about the problems that your chosen person
had faced. Remember that the main point of applying this technique is to get a feel of what it is like to break problems down
into smaller chunks, so that you feel more confident in applying the technique. For this activity it was more important to
imagine that you were ‘in the shoes’ of your chosen person. This use of your imagination can help you think about possibilities
that may not occur to you otherwise.

Back

Activity 20 Using Drill Down to solve a problem

Comment

The key point about problem solving is that you need to be in control of the problem as much as you can. This can seem almost
impossible when the problem is a large one. You are much more likely to feel in control (and be able to take action) if you
can break down the problem into small chunks. If you think back to the example of Shehnaz, you will probably remember how
she faced her problem of not having a teaching qualification by breaking the problem down into smaller steps, such as getting
on an Open University course. To begin with none of the three case study subjects felt in control of their lives. They all
had to break things down into smaller chunks, such as finding out about training opportunities. By doing this, it becomes
much more possible to solve a problem.

Back

Activity 21 Decision making using PMI

Comment

Thinking back over what you have done or past events is often thought to be all that is required to ‘reflect’. It is worth
pointing out that reflection is now viewed as important in many different contexts, and it is seen as an important academic
skill in this course. It is also an important aspect of professional practice in careers such as social work and medicine.
However, backward-looking reflection can only have very limited benefits. It could make you less likely to embark on a process
of change if it reminds you only of a time in the past when something did not work out well for you. So, reflection is most
worthwhile when it is used as the basis for trying something new in the future. Trying something new and seeing how it works
out is the focus of later sections in Learning to change.

Back

Activity 22 Future problem solving or decision making

Comment

Problem solving and decision making are important aspects of using learning to achieve personal change. In this section you
are gathering evidence about what you have already learned. You will probably have developed preferred ways of dealing with
problems as well as skills that underpin these preferences. It is very useful to take stock of these and extend them. This
serves to remind you what you are good at. It also reminds you of examples of when you have used the skills you already have.
The value of having examples of what you have already done ‘at your fingertips’ is stressed in Learning to change. They have a clear value in situations like a job interview, where you are being called on to show what you have done that
is relevant. But they also have a broader usefulness. If you are as clear as possible about what you have done, and what you
can do, then you are in a far better position to begin thinking and planning for a whole range of personal change.

Back

Activity 23 Your ‘daily time expenditure’

Comment

Usually, doing this activity does make you stop and think. It may highlight how many competing demands you have on your time.
Studying Learning to change is likely to be only one of many demands for some students doing this course. You might be surprised at what you do achieve
in a very short period of time. If this applies to you, then you can be pleased with how you already manage your time and
yourself. This is a valuable skill. Its value is clear if you think about time management in a work context. At work we are
paid in order to use substantial chunks of time for our employer’s benefit. So it is important to be able to show that we
use work time well.

Back

Activity 24 What qualities are revealed in my use of time?

Comment

This activity suggests that important aspects of your qualities are likely to be bound up in how you use time, or how you
would like to use time. It is important to recognise that our qualities, knowledge and skills all, together, form part of
who we are – our identity. Your qualities are likely to influence the knowledge you seek out and the skills you acquire. For
example, if you place a great value on caring for family members, you may want to know how to cook meals they will enjoy.
In this case, you would also develop the skills needed to cook these meals.

Back

Activity 25 What do you already know about managing time?

Comment

It is possible to use the information from this activity in two ways. First, it shows you what you know about ways of trying
to exert some control over how you organise yourself and your time. Second, it might help to show you which of these methods
you are using successfully and which do not seem to suit you (at least for the time being).

Back

Activity 26 Mind mapping

Comment

This is almost the last activity in this section. It is intended to enable you to ‘capture’ your qualities, knowledge and
skills as well as introducing an idea (and a skill) which will be of value to you. The result of this activity should help
you as you think back over what you have covered in this section. It should mean that you have been able to show, on a single
piece of paper, what you have brought to the course and what the course has added for you.

Back

Activity 27 The academic skills used in Section 2

Comment

You have used many skills that count as academic skills to study this section. You could include any of these:

- gathering evidence from a range of sources (your ideas, what other people say and course materials – including the course
video material)

- reflecting on (thinking about) this evidence to try and make sense of it

- grouping evidence in different categories (qualities, knowledge and skills)

- using reading to gather evidence

- using note taking and mind maps to summarise evidence

- using diagrams to make sense of evidence.

One way to view Learning to change is as a small-scale research project which focuses on how you might go about personal change. Every academic research project
goes through a similar early stage of accumulating evidence. This project has been about you and has involved gathering evidence
from a variety of sources. You have used your own thoughts, feelings and experience as a source of evidence. You have also
used the written and video materials that make up the course. In addition you have been encouraged to gather evidence by seeking
feedback from another person.

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Activity 28 What is in Karen’s open area?

Comment

Did you think that Karen’s open area was reasonably extensive? You might have noticed that she spoke quite freely about both
her personal and her educational background. She also told us quite a bit about her current role as a social worker. Karen
also seemed to be quite open with regard to some of the skills and qualities she uses in this role.

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Activity 29 The effect of feedback on Karen

Comment

Of course, it is only possible to guess what feedback Karen (and indeed the other case study subjects) might have had and
the effects it has had. It is clear that Karen must have had feedback from her Open University tutors, as well as her colleagues
and managers at work. Perhaps some of this aspect has given her the confidence to do what she has done, and maybe some of
the feedback means that Karen still feels: ‘I am not an academic person…’.

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Activity 30 Feedback you have had

Comment

Sometimes feedback can be useful and helpful. At other times it can be negative or even undermine confidence in our own abilities.
However, it is also clear that we need such feedback in order to build a picture of what we are good at and what we could
improve on. There is only one solution to this problem – we have to choose people that we can trust and who have no ‘axe to
grind’.

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Activity 31 Can you change your Johari window?

Comment

If you cannot increase the size of your open area, this might be because you already have a very clear idea of yourself. Alternatively,
it may be because you find it difficult to justify taking the time to focus on yourself. (If the latter applies to you, you
might want to consider why this might be the case.)

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Activity 32 The value of learning theories

Comment

It would be interesting to think about which task you found easier. Did you find it easier to extract the main points of the
content or did it seem straightforward to work out whether it was useful or not?

Having read about some of the learning theories that have been developed within psychology, we would like you to think about
two things. The first is to think about how you approached the task itself. The second is the issue of what information seems
to be there. Let’s take each of these in turn.

First, it would be worth asking yourself what you felt and thought about being asked to read ‘An overview of learning theories’.
Did you think that the title suggested that it might be rather demanding? You might have thought that it was important to
try and remember details in case you need to use them for an assignment. On the other hand, you might have thought, ‘This
might be interesting; I wonder how it links up with the rest of Learning to change ? ’. This leads on to thinking about how you went about reading and making notes on this overview. Did you feel that you had
to read in great detail and so made notes about more or less everything? If your notes on the overview are almost as long
as the overview itself, it is possible that you have taken this approach. If you were able to highlight just two or three
key points, and were able to connect these to other learning, then your approach to reading the overview may have been different.
One good way to arrive at this sort of understanding is by using techniques of ‘scanning’ and ‘skimming’ as you read. You
may remember that you were asked to read the overview twice. Your first reading could have used scanning where you let your
eyes run quickly over the text to see what points seem likely to be important. The second read through could use skimming.
To do this, you return to some of the points you identified in your scan read and make sure you are clear about them and how
they relate to each other.

You will be interested to know that the way that students approach tasks like the one you have just done has been of ongoing
interest to academics trying to develop ideas about how people learn. We will explore this in more detail when we come to
look at the theory developed by Noel Entwistle later in this section.

So far this comment has focused on how you approached this activity. Reflecting on this should help you create a clearer idea
about your approach to learning. But we also need to think about the content of the overview too. The overview broadly suggests
that there are a number of learning theories that agree that the environment ‘makes’ the individual learn. However, there
are some important differences about the way that the theories saw individuals. Some (like Pavlov) did not seem to give much
of a role to the individual ‘organism’. In contrast, Köhler suggests that an ‘organism’ like a chimpanzee might have the capacity
to solve problems. It is true that these problems were in the ‘environment’ – but the chimps’ responses were not determined
just by the environment.

It is harder to guess what you might think about the relevance of these ideas. Perhaps the notion that learning comes about
because of the way we interact with our environment is a good place to start. There are important consequences in taking this
view. It side-steps the debate about whether only ‘intelligent’ people can learn. Instead it seems to say that we all have
to interact with our environment, so we will all learn. It also seems to imply that these interactions are all different,
even unique. This would suggest that our learning is unique to us. That makes it hard to say that some people are ‘better’
learners than others. You might also accept that if our environment is an important (perhaps central) aspect of our learning,
then it is important to create environments in which good learning can occur. If someone’s environment makes them feel ‘stupid’,
then some very unhelpful learning has happened.

So, these theories may be very useful when it comes to how our beliefs about ourselves as learners are shaped. These beliefs
are clearly important – if we believe that we are incapable of doing something it is less likely that we will succeed in doing
it. This ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ can also work to our advantage, if we can have confidence in our qualities, knowledge
and skills.

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Activity 33 Who’s been involved in your learning and where did it happen?

Comment

This activity is similar to what you were asked to do in Section 2 as part of your evidence gathering. At this point in the
course, the focus is different. We are asking you to think back over who has been involved with your learning and where this
learning took place. The example of learning to drive a car was included above because it can have many implications for how
people live their lives and even what jobs they can have. But there are different people who may teach us how to do this.
We may have lessons from a qualified driving instructor; we might ask a friend or relative to show us how to do it. Either
way, other people have to be involved – if only because we cannot drive a car alone before passing the driving test. The driving
test itself is quite a formal situation. In the UK it is necessary to pass a theory test, as well as showing that you know
how to drive a car.

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Activity 34 Your learning – informal or formal?

Comment

All types of learning have advantages and disadvantages.

Formal learning may have the advantage of offering a structure which can be reassuring to learners. For some people there
is nothing worse than being unsure what comes next. Other people find this structure rather stifling and relish the opportunity
to explore aspects of a topic in their own way and at their own pace.

It is good to have to have learning opportunities that suit our needs. We may want to get a qualification that a course of
formal learning might bring. At the same point in our lives we may enjoy developing a hobby through informal learning. It
is often quite surprising how what we learn informally can help us appreciate aspects of formal learning. The opposite can
happen too.

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Activity 35 Theory – describing and reflecting

Comment

The first part of this activity is about your note taking. Note taking is an important aspect of study in general. Equally,
writing things down in note form is an important way of gathering evidence. In this course you have already used a variety
of note-taking approaches to gather evidence about your own learning. You might even have used mind mapping for this activity.
There are two important aspects about notes. First, they need to be concise. There is little point in just copying most of
the material you are basing your notes on. The second aspect is that your notes have to be useful. They have to do what you
want them to do. So if you are writing notes in order to write an essay, they are only useful if they help you with your essay.
For this activity your notes are the basis for your reflection on the possible usefulness of the theories.

The second part of the activity is more about evaluating whether the ideas you have come across seem relevant to you. Again,
there are two aspects to this. The first is whether any of the theories so far help to explain what has happened to you already.
This means that it might help when you reflect back over your experience. The second aspect you might like to think about
is whether any of the ideas you have read about might help you in future. For example, you might want to think about whether
they could help you structure any plans for change.

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Activity 36 Your groups – are they communities of practice?

Comment

This activity might have made you realise (or, possibly, realise again) that friends and family can have a big impact on you.
They may already have had an impact on how you see yourself as a learner. This can have an ongoing effect on any subsequent
study and on any plans for future change. It might even effect how you view this course. This is fine if you do feel supported
by the groups you belong to. But what if you feel that none of these groups are on your side? Well, we hope that you find
Learning to change acts as a support which helps build your confidence and belief in yourself. There is likely to be a range of community groups
and associations if you want to develop a particular interest.

Figure 25 Communities of practice, or not

View description - Figure 25 Communities of practice, or not

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Activity 37 Deep, surface and strategic approaches to learning

Comment

We hope that this activity has given you a real ‘feel’ for the ideas that Entwistle puts forward. You may even have some criticisms
of this approach. For example, you might find it difficult to differentiate between deep and strategic approaches. If this
is the case then you should see this as being very appropriate – taking a critical approach is seen as being a ‘good thing’
in academic study.

It is perhaps also difficult to escape from the idea that the deep and strategic approaches are always the most valued. As
we have said, we hope that you will adopt a combination of these two approaches, both as you study this course and as you
begin to think about your own development.

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Activity 38 Reflecting on how you have used academic skills

Comment

We hope that doing this activity will help reinforce the idea that so-called academic skills can be useful in other situations
too. Developing these skills is not very different from the situation faced by anyone who takes up a new interest. Thinking
back to the dance club example, if you had learned how to dance salsa and then took up the tango, then you would have to learn
in what ways the tango is different from salsa and in what ways the same. So do not be afraid about getting it slightly wrong
to start with. After all, ‘trial and error’ can be a good way to learn, as long as you can see some value in making the errors
and have the chance to move on from them. It is also better when it is accompanied (as it is in this course) by some support.

Back

Activity 39 Reflecting on how you have used the three ‘real world’ skills

Comment

We hope that doing this activity will help reinforce the idea that these three skills are transferable – that they can be
used in a wide variety of different situations. These skills act as an important foundation for many aspects of our lives.
They can even help with learning. They are also the skills that you will be encouraged to use in the next section.

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Activity 40 What are key aspects of policy about learning?

Comment

You may have noticed that both these extracts refer to the importance of skills, although both suggest that acquiring skills
may help achieve a variety of important social goals, such as reducing deprivation or inequality. Colin Flint uses the terms
lifelong learning and post-compulsory education as well. The phrase lifelong learning would seem to suggest that learning
happens across our lifetimes, from when we are very young to the very last stages of our lives. Post-compulsory education
refers to all the education that is available after 16 years of age. Flint suggests that the opportunities for lifelong learning
and post-compulsory education are disappearing unless they are linked to skills. What seems to be going on is that the government
is more interested in certain aspects of learning. The extract from the Leitch Review supports this. Leitch suggests that
there are all sorts of ‘risks’ if the skills base is not improved. This extract also highlights how education (or learning)
policy is tied up with economic policy.

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Activity 41 What do I want my life to be like in ten years’ time?

Comment

Did you immediately start to think about all the things that might limit your vision? That’s a common reaction – there is
a natural tendency to limit our visions for the future by thinking about, for example:

- where we are now and what we ‘deserve’

- what other people might think of us – and what we would rather they thought of us

- how uncomfortable it is moving into new territory

- our lack of resources – time or money or access to support of various kinds.

There may well be obstacles ahead and that is something you are going to think about (and then plan for, and keep chipping
away at) later in the section. We are asking you to think in terms of wishes from a fairy godmother because we would like
you to be bold and really ‘go for it’; to think about what you really want to do, what would excite you. The pull of exciting
goals can help to spur you on through the difficult times.

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Activity 42 No regrets

Comment

While we have no idea what your actual ambitions might be, your thoughts from these activities probably fell into some of
the following categories:

- what you might be doing – at home/at work/in the community/online

- who you are with – including family, friends, colleagues and fellow enthusiasts (for example, fellow cooks, anglers, crossword
addicts or singers)

- where you are – for example, where you would like to work, to live, to exercise, to go on holiday

- how you are feeling – for example, more confident in yourself; delighted with your dream job; settled with your old friends
and excited about meeting new ones; proud of having achieved some qualifications; relieved at paying off the mortgage.

Back

Activity 43 A mind map of your vision

Comment

Did creating this mind map help you to come up with new ideas about where you want to be, doing what and with whom? We hope
this reinforced some of your earlier learning about the usefulness of mind mapping. Having a structure in mind is also useful
in other aspects of learning. It has been suggested that mind maps do encourage creativity and show that planning is best
when it can build on new and interesting ideas.

Back

Activity 44 Choosing some goals

Comment

This part of the course asks you to do a demanding sequence of activities. We hope that you will find all the activities in
this course helpful, but these are particularly important as they take you through the process of putting together your personal
plan for change. This plan is an important outcome of your study on this course. We also hope that you will find that your
plan is something that you can go on using after you have finished Learning to change. The more thought that you put into your plan at this point, the more useful it will be in future.

Back

Activity 45 Recognising SMART goals

Comment

Your own answers will have depended on how you interpreted the question, but see how they compare with our suggestions that
follow.

The person wanting more balance in their life might have written:

‘By the end of the summer holiday I will have …

- mapped how much time I am spending each week on work, family, friends, physical activity and my photography

- encouraged my partner to do the same

- discussed what we have each found out

- agreed what, if anything, we would like to change

- drawn up a plan of how we can help each other out.’

The person wanting a career with people might have written:

‘By Christmas I will have talked to a youth worker and a social worker to find out …

- whether or not either of those would be the right job for me (and/or get some other ideas)

- what qualifications and experience I would need to do them

- what sources of funding might be available for training.’

Back

Activity 46 Writing your own goals in a SMART way

Comment

We cannot give you direct feedback on your own outcomes, but you could discuss them with friends, family or other students
on the course whom you are in touch with.

Back

Activity 47 What might help and hinder you?

Comment

We do not know what your actual helps and hindrances are but they probably fall into three main categories:

1. The resources you have available – for example, having (or not having) people on your side, money, time, equipment and so
on. (Having these would lead you to list them in the left-hand column, while not having them would lead to them being put
in the right-hand column.)

2. Your current level of knowledge and skills in areas you would like to pursue.

3. Your personal qualities/attributes – for example, having (or lacking) confidence and self-belief; being brave (or nervous)
about facing new challenges; being extrovert (or introvert); being healthy (mentally and physically); having (or not having)
the resilience to cope when things are turning out harder than expected.

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Activity 48 Building your sources of support

Comment

We expect that some of you will have found this last activity quite straightforward, while some of you will have found it
difficult or even impossible. If you found it relatively easy, this suggests that you can identify a number of people and
that you can see these people giving you useful support. If you found the activity harder it may because you do not know many
people (you may have moved to a new area). Or the activity may have been difficult because you would not feel that the people
you do know are in a position to give you support. You might see the outcome of this activity as being to set a goal to increase
the number of people that you can turn to for support.

Back

Activity 49 Finding out about formal routes to learning

Comment

Doing this activity suggests that you are thinking about what possibilities lie in front of you in terms of work or education.
These possibilities might form part of your personal plan as you get near the end of this course. Doing this activity might
also have helped you to realise that you have developed useful skills. These might be using the computer at your local library
or they might be how you ask for help and advice. Your confidence in using these skills may also have been increased if you
had a go at this activity.

Back

Activity 50 Informal routes to learning

Comment

We hope you found this activity both interesting and challenging. It would be a good idea to make sure that you keep your
notes for this activity where you can find them easily, as they may help as you move towards drawing up your action plan.

Back

Activity 51 Keeping a learning journal for five days

Comment

The act of writing down your thoughts and feelings about your learning is valuable in itself – helping you to get things off
your chest; to remind yourself to look for solutions to any problems; and to celebrate successes. Sometimes just the act of
writing things down can clarify your ideas about what you would like to do about something. For example, making separate lists
of the pros and the cons of a particular action can help you make a decision whether or not to go ahead.

Back

Activity 52 Practising emotional literacy

Comment

We hope that you have found it useful to stand back and think more closely about the link between thoughts, feelings and behaviours,
and recognise that you can use your thinking to help you manage your feelings – but also use your feelings to prompt you into
thinking about what you might usefully do next. If you identified that your automatic thoughts and feelings were not justified,
it might be useful to write down your true qualities on a post-it note and put it somewhere you can look at it whenever you
want. If you found that there was some justification for your thoughts and feelings, you might work out how to address any
weaknesses in the knowledge and skills that led to the feelings so that you can avoid them in the future.

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Activity 53 Developing an action plan

Comment

Now, as you tick off the different steps of the plan, you are engaging in the process of collecting evidence of your achievements
which can:

- be a real boost to your confidence and your motivation

- help you to develop your CV when you are applying for paid or voluntary work – showing that you can take an organised approach
to your learning and development, as well as demonstrating the knowledge, skills and attributes that you have acquired in
the process.

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Activity 54 Learning to change – knowledge

Comment

Making clear what you have learned at this point in time makes it much easier to use in the future as the basis for your ‘reflecting
forwards’. By reminding you of which aspects of the course you found most interesting, you will have a better idea of what
you want to build on and take further.

Back

Activity 55 Skills you have developed

Comment

Being aware of the skills you have developed will boost your confidence as you think about the future. It will also help you
think about the skills that you want to develop further, whether through study, training or work.

Back

Activity 56 Qualities I’ve developed

Comment

You may still find it quite difficult to claim that you possess particular qualities. You might still feel that it sounds
boastful even to write them down. We hope that you feel that you are now more able to have an accurate and constructive picture
of yourself. Not only does this mean that you can feel positive about yourself, it also means that you can share these feelings
with other people when you need to.

Back

Activity 57 When I tried something new

Comment

If you are doing this activity, we hope that you are able to recognise what changes you have made in order to try doing something
that you might have found difficult before you started Learning to change.

This is a real achievement, and real achievements are always worth recording and celebrating. This activity asks you to do
just that.

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Activity 58 Analysing a sample CV

Comment

This CV provides evidence of working with children in varied situations: at a hospital, in a children’s home and with the
New Horizon Project. It demonstrates a commitment to children over a period of time.

Now that the applicant has successfully completed her degree she is ready to take on a more responsible post, and is using
the skills she gained while studying to emphasise her suitability for the job. By using a skills-based CV she is able to put
more emphasis on her full range of skills.

By identifying her skills, and their relevance to her application, she has improved her chances of being offered an interview.

Back

Figure 1 Karen

Description
Figure 1 Karen

Back

Figure 2 Levene

Description
Figure 2 Levene

Back

Figure 3 Shehnaz

Description
Figure 3 Shehnaz

Back

Figure 4 Mind map for the contents of Section 1 (labelled Chapter 1)

Description
Figure 2 Mind map for the contents of Chapter 1

Back

Figure 7 Peter Jarvis

Description
Peter Jarvis

Back

Figure 8 The audience waits to be impressed by how many facts the contestants know

Description
Figure 4 The audience waits to be impressed by how many facts the contestants know

Back

Figure 10 Communication

Description
Figure 6 Communication

Back

Figure 11 PMI for Jim going back to college

Description
Figure 7 PMI for Jim going back to college

Back

Figure 12 Arnold Bennett

Description
Figure 8 Arnold Bennett

Back

Figure 13 24th January

Description
24th January

Back

Figure 14 Managing time

Description
Figure 10 Managing time

Back

Figure 15 Basic 4-pane Johari window

Description
Figure 11 Basic 4-pane Johari window

Back

Figure 16 You need to be careful who you trust to give you good advice

Description
Figure 12 You need to be careful who you trust to give you good advice

Back

Figure 17 Personal Johari window

Description
Figure 13 Personal Johari window

Back

Figure 18 Dance club flyer offering lessons

Description
Figure 14 Dance club flyer offering lessons

Back

Figure 19 Chart showing who has been involved in my learning

Description
Figure 15 Chart showing who has been involved in my learning

Back

Figure 20 Madhur Jaffrey

Description
Figure 16 Madhur Jaffrey

Back

Figure 21 Types of learning

Description
Figure 17 Types of learning

Back

Figure 22 Lev Vygotsky

Description
Figure 18 Lev Vygotsky

Back

Figure 23 Catching birds and eggs for food was a dangerous but important occupation

Description
Figure 19 Catching birds and eggs for food was a dangerous but important occupation

Back

Figure 24 Etienne Wenger and Jonathan Hughes

Description
Figure 20 Etienne Wenger and Jonathan Hughes

Back

Figure 25 Communities of practice, or not

Description
Figure 25 Communities of practice, or not

Back

Figure 26 bell hooks

Description
Figure 22 Bell Hooks

Back

Figure 27 A shared interest: Salsa dancing

Description
Figure 23 A shared interest: Salsa dancing

Back

Figure 28 Learning approaches chart

Description
Figure 24 Learning approaches chart

Back

Figure 31 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Jodi

Description
Figure 25 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Jodi

Back

Figure 32 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Shauna

Description
Figure 26 Case illustration – possible SMART goals for Shauna

Back

Figure 33 Kurt Lewin

Description
Figure 27 Kurt Lewin

Back

Figure 34 Forces in favour of change, forces against change

Description
Figure 28 Forces in favour of change, forces against change

Back

Figure 35 Jodi’s Force Field Analysis

Description
Figure 29 Jodi’s Force Field Analysis

Back

Figure 36 Shauna’s list

Description
Figure 30 Shauna’s list

Back

Figure 37 Example diary extract

Description
Figure 31 Example diary extract

Back

Figure 38 Sequence of learning in this course so far

Description
Figure 32 Sequence of learning on Y165 so far

Back

Karen

Transcript

Karen

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications, basically, were nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A-Levels. I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings
a week was my wage then. My first job was filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so
I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was
getting a little bit confused. And he said, “Well, carry on. That’s a good idea”. Oh – I would rather have the files in the
correct order rather than have them wrong!

Back

Levene

Transcript

Levene

I was made redundant in 2002. I was part of the management of a community organisation and I was asked to manage, or care-take,
this particular project for a number of months, which meant I had to come off the management board to do that because of conflict
of interest, obviously. So, after a period of months, the management decided that since I had been doing... they say I had
been doing a good job – why not take it and run with it? So, I did that for twelve months and in that period of time I was
interfacing with social... Social Services and people from that particular discipline and I found it... that I was... there
was some difficulty in terms of me understanding certain things that they talked about and I didn’t understand because I’m
coming from the private sector, an engineering contracting background, so it was important for me to grasp and talk the talk,
if you will, and walk the walk in terms of social work. So I made a decision to embark on a course of study.

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

I was studying A-Levels, which I weren't up to because I got married. I was supposed to carry on with my studying, but I didn’t
because my mother-in-law was ill and so I ended up looking after her. And then we moved away and we moved to America for two
years. We lived there so that is why I had to have a break in my studies. And in between that I had my children. And because
I was so young I didn’t want to leave them and go back to university. So while they were younger I used to child-mind at home
with them.

Back

Levene

Transcript

Levene

In my previous life as… as a project manager in electrical industry my work really involves communicating with a range of
individuals – contractors, main contractors, sub-contractors internally and so forth. An example would be – of a difficult
situation – would be a supplier failing to deliver on time. Now my work would involve me arranging and negotiating with various
bodies to commence work on a particular site. So, a supplier failing to deliver on time creates a lot of problems for me,
embarrassment for my organisation, as well as difficulty with the main contractor on site. So, it would involve me perhaps
renegotiating one with the main contractor a new start date or possibly with the supplier a new delivery date, but, in any
event, it creates an environment where I am having to use a certain amount of skills to get the organisation out of a difficult
situation because, quite often in circumstances like that, we would be hit liquidated damages – that is paying for doing the
job. So, my task would be to minimise those eventualities.

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

In the beginning I think it was going back to the structured learning of writing the essays because, informally, I wasn't
doing that when I was doing the other courses for the school, so it's more academic based. It's doing essays and learning
how to re-write everything. But I would say I’m a better essay writer now than I was when I first started the course.

Back

Karen

Transcript

Karen

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications, basically, were nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A-Levels. I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings
a week was my wage then. My first job was filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so
I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was
getting a little bit confused. And he said, “Well, carry on. That’s a good idea”. Oh – I would rather have the files in the
correct order rather than have them wrong!

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

Obviously, as my family grew I had to start to think about how many people were involved in our house and how much I was cooking
for (like budgeting how much ingredients I would need to get) – things like that. And still having money left over to go and
enjoy ourselves as well at the end of the month. It had to be in a routine in order to get... sure... to make sure that the
food was ready on time. Now that routine is the same kind of thing that you need to have when you are studying, because you
need to set yourself a timetable in order to finish your assignments and get them in on time. Before I went back into studying,
I thought that my life skills and academic skills were completely different but, when I did go to learning, I found that what
I had learnt through life I could apply to my academic learning to help me succeed in what I was doing.

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

When I was studying I was... I did it with a group of friends so we helped each other in my first Openings course, so we were
able to help each other through the course. I think it was very important in the beginning because we were all in the same…
we were all doing it as a first course and having each other to reflect on it helped us a lot.

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

When I first started I did two thirty-point courses which was, in effect, like nine months study compacted twice over, but
because I was only part time, I was able to jig that and do the work while the kids were at school and then I got my job,
and I was working for about twenty hours, and now I am full time and I am studying as well at the same time. It still is very
easy because I have got into a routine of how to study and where it all fits in.

Back

Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz Part 4

In the beginning I think it was going back to the structured learning of writing the essays because, informally, I wasn't
doing that when I was doing the other courses for the school, so it's more academic based. It's doing essays and learning
how to re-write everything. But I would say I’m a better essay writer now than I was when I first started the course.

Back

Karen

Transcript

Karen

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications, basically, were nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A-Levels. I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings
a week was my wage then. My first job was filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so
I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was
getting a little bit confused. And he said, “Well, carry on. That’s a good idea”. Oh – I would rather have the files in the
correct order rather than have them wrong!

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Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

In the beginning I think it was going back to the structured learning of writing the essays because, informally, I wasn't
doing that when I was doing the other courses for the school, so it's more academic based. It's doing essays and learning
how to re-write everything. But I would say I’m a better essay writer now than I was when I first started the course.

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Karen

Transcript

Karen

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications, basically, were nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A-Levels. I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings
a week was my wage then. My first job was filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so
I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was
getting a little bit confused. And he said, “Well, carry on. That’s a good idea”. Oh – I would rather have the files in the
correct order rather than have them wrong!

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Shehnaz

Transcript

Shehnaz

I was studying A-Levels, which I weren't up to because I got married. I was supposed to carry on with my studying, but I didn’t
because my mother-in-law was ill and so I ended up looking after her. And then we moved away and we moved to America for two
years. We lived there so that is why I had to have a break in my studies. And in between that I had my children. And because
I was so young I didn’t want to leave them and go back to university. So while they were younger I used to child-mind at home
with them.

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Levene

Transcript

Levene

I was made redundant in 2002. I was part of the management of a community organisation and I was asked to manage, or care-take,
this particular project for a number of months, which meant I had to come off the management board to do that because of conflict
of interest, obviously. So, after a period of months, the management decided that since I had been doing... they say I had
been doing a good job – why not take it and run with it? So, I did that for twelve months and in that period of time I was
interfacing with social... Social Services and people from that particular discipline and I found it... that I was... there
was some difficulty in terms of me understanding certain things that they talked about and I didn’t understand because I’m
coming from the private sector, an engineering contracting background, so it was important for me to grasp and talk the talk,
if you will, and walk the walk in terms of social work. So I made a decision to embark on a course of study.

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Video 1

Transcript

Narrator

The Johari window provides a framework for organising your notes about yourself. This makes the notes much more useful as
the picture this provides can be the basis for helping to decide what you want to do next.

There are two factors at work in a Johari window. The first factor is what you know about yourself. The second factor is what
other people know about you.

Anything that you know about yourself is part of your open area if you are happy that others know about it too, as in: “I
have a positive attitude about change”.

Any aspect that you do not know about is in your blind area if other people have become aware of it without telling you, such
as: “They are nervous about speaking in front of large groups”.

There are also things that you know about yourself that you do not want other people to find out about – these are in your
hidden area, for example: “I am scared of making decisions in case I get it wrong”.

This leaves just one area. This is the area that is unknown to you or to anyone else: your unknown area.

You can change the balance between these areas. You might decide to tell someone about some aspect of your life that you had
previously kept hidden from them, for example: “I am embarrassed about being a slow reader”. This would increase your open
area and decrease your hidden area.

It is also possible to increase your open area by asking for feedback from people. This can reduce the size of your blind
area. For example, they might tell you how well you communicate with them. It is also possible to work with another person
to discover things that neither of you had appreciated before. For example, your contact with your tutor might help you both
to have a clearer understanding of the effect that your experiences at school have had on your learning. This would reduce
the size of your unknown area.

So, the place to get started is your open area – by being as clear as possible what you know about yourself already. The next
step is about involving other people – asking them for feedback to reduce the size of your blind area.

Now that you have watched this part of the DVD you should return to complete the activities that involve Johari windows.

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Karen

Transcript

Karen

My name is Karen Edwards. I live locally. I’ve lived... I have been married for thirty-five years. I have twin sons. I work
for Stourbridge Social Services and I have done for almost twenty-five years in different roles and currently I am working
as a social worker for the District team.

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Karen

Transcript

Karen

I left school when I was fifteen and I started work the day after. My qualifications, basically, were nil. I had no GCSEs.
No A-Levels. I immediately got myself a job in an office as an office assistant when I left school. Three pounds ten shillings
a week was my wage then. My first job was filing clerk and I actually realised that I didn’t know my alphabet properly, so
I actually found a file and I stuck it on the wall. My manager asked me what I was doing at that time and I admitted I was
getting a little bit confused. And he said, “Well, carry on. That’s a good idea”. Oh – I would rather have the files in the
correct order rather than have them wrong!

Back

Karen

Transcript

Karen

I think I have developed the life-skills through being a carer, through being a home-help and to also learn the skills; to
actually work within a team and to value other people’s opinions and also to work in the wider area; to work with District
Nurses and Physiotherapists and GPs and to understand, and listen to, what they are saying about the person in the centre
of it all. And whatever I learn and remember, or think about later - that was a good thing I did - I try to apply that again.
I reflect on what I have done; reflect on my past life and then reflect on how I have dealt with other people.

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Karen

Transcript

Karen

I knew there was training opportunities; they were coming up then, but I honestly felt that my drawback would be my age. But
I spoke to my supervisor then and she was very interesting and she was very positive and I enrolled for the first year. And
I supported myself within that year because I was thoroughly enjoying the course. The realisation came when I became office-based
and I was Assistant Care Co-ordinator that I needed to expand on my knowledge base.

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Karen

Transcript

Karen

My husband used to proof read because sometimes you get too close to things and you can't see the wood for the trees. He was
very good at that. My son bought me a memory stick. I had never used it before and he showed me how to use that. My work colleagues
were very supportive throughout. If ever I came back to the office when I was on placement they would always be very supportive:
“You can do this” and “…Of course you can.” And my... the people I was studying with – they were a lifeline. I knew that I
could ring them up and ask them for help and they would help me. And exactly the same applied to me. I knew I could contact
my lecturer. He would be only too happy to discuss any problems I have.

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