Barry Smith - Learning about Learning

I’ve spent another fruitful and hectic day working towards the SQH comparative study today.  Firstly I interviewed a number of staff at John Muir House about their impressions of the ‘climate for creativity’ within their working environment.  I was delighted that as we chatted a number of themes appeared to be emerging, in relation to the perceived culture of the working environment.  People were using similar language to describe processes and feelings about their working environment. I won’t pre-empt the report by going into any detail here, but I’ll be interested to back through the interviews and pull out these themes. 

I then went up to Moray House for a SQH Unit 3 seminar.  Our tutors were checking that things were going OK and no-one was falling to pieces under the strain!  I thought I’d had a fairly hard time managing to secure a suitable host organisation after being turned down by a couple of companies, but by all accounts I got off lightly.  There were a couple of horror stories of people being let down by businesses at the 11th hour after all the preparation work had been done.  They have had to go back to the drawing board, so I’m now counting my blessings about how relatively smoothly things have gone for me. 

It’s back to school tomorrow to catch up as best as is possible after being out two days in the last three, that’s the pay back for having access to such great experiences elsewhere I suppose.

I’ve a busy week of planning for our ALPs meeting on Friday.  I’d like to present everyone with a finalised programme and selected students as well as having an idea of what we’d like to achieve at our induction day on 16th February.  Having started to read ‘The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook’ by Peter Senge, it has further developed my thinking already in relation to why, what and how we are going to achieve our goals for ALPs. I think I’ll be blogging much more about this book in the future.