Understand principles and practice of learning and development in groups Outcome 4
a. Explain purpose of group learning and development
Identifying group learning needs
Learning will be most effective when people have an opportunity to learn things that relate to their lives and their needs.
People want to improve their lives and the lives of their families. So their interests will be dominated by their own and their family needs.
Sometimes people do not always see the linkage between learning and their needs. Our role is to help learners make this connection. This will be easier if we relate learning to prior experience and current relevance
Examination of learning needs helps us to facilitate purposeful and useful learning. It also helps us to identify the level of our learners, thus allowing us to adapt curriculum, select relevant learning materials and to plan appropriate learning activities. Once we know the problems and needs of the learners, we can address them.
To measure learning we need to know first what our learners already know. Unless we do this, we cannot easily identify each learner’s progress. We should keep detailed records for each learner. These will allow us, with the help of the learner, to check learning and see what progress is being made.
Identification of learning needs also helps us in our future planning.
Techniques to identify prior learning:
Interview - A face-to-face dialogue where the facilitator asks questions in order to obtain the learnerûs views about certain issues.
Meta-cards-The learners write down what they want to learn on cards or slips of paper. Afterward, learners discuss the responses.
Questionnaire- Each learner answers questions from a prepared list in order to provide information about his or her learning needs.
Individual learning plan - Each learner identifies individual learning goals and a plan for attaining them. The plan can include reasons for learning, times she or he...