The Purpose
What do you want to achieve?
Do you have a need to constructively engage in change and improve your capacity for learning, creativity, and transformation in a sustainable way?
SELF-ORGANISED LEARNING HAS EVOLVED OVER 30 YEARS through successful Action Research programmes led by Professors Laurie Thomas and Sheila Harri-Augstein, the founders of the highly respected Centre for the Study of Human Learning (CSHL)
Self-Organised Learning empowers individuals teams and organisations to take responsibility for their own learning and to put this learning into successful action
Self-Organised Learning provides ‘scaffolding’ within which learners can construct for themselves, and exchange with others, new meanings and understanding in ways which are not imposed on them and which are, as a result relevant to them and work for them. The resultant learning, change and growth is, therefore, more likely to be sustainable and successful. Once learners become more Self-Organised they can reconstruct or even dismantle the ‘scaffolding’
Self-Organised Learning helps you identify Review and expand your Purposes.
Strategies
How are you going to get there?
Learning conversations help individuals and teams to plan, action and review Personal Learning Contracts which address their learning needs, personal theories, “robotic” behaviours and personal myths. Learning Conversations help learners to constructively engage in change and to develop self-assessment of increasing competence. The support for learners in the Learning Conversations comes from skilled Learning Coaches.
Personal Learning Contracts are more than action plans or the kind of “learning contracts” widely used in training. They are contracts that learners make with themselves and being iterative, they encourage constant review of their subject, purpose, strategy and outcomes, and also learning to learn.
As Professor David A Lane, Founding Director of the Professional Deselopment Foundation, wrote “the SOL model developed at CSHL has influenced, (been outrageously copied), and shaped the agenda of ‘earning conversations”.
Self-Organised Learning helps you identify, Review and expand your Strategies to achieve your Purposes.
Outcomes
SOL is a powerful approach to learning. Your use of SOL will not degrade into the flavour of the month.
It enables individuals, teams, and organisations to continuously reflect upon their learning and performance.
SOL is constantly being developed through an increasing understanding of how we learn. It will impact not only on the way learners work and learn but also on the way they live and interact with others. There are many reported benefits to adopting SOL, some of these are:
- improved contributions to the job
- learning-on-the-job viewed as an ongoing way of life
- more cohesive teams, working with improved understanding and seeking improved performance
- change managed more effectively
- learners committed to positive courses of action.
Through increased awareness and skill in learning, individuals, groups and organisations experience continuous improvement over a widening range of tasks and life issues. A quantum shift in skills, competences and attitude takes place resulting in improved effectiveness and new visions.
Self-Organised Learning helps you identify, Review and expand the desired Outcomes of your Strategies to achieve your Purposes.
Practitioners continuously review the criterial for judging the Purposes, Strategies and Outcomes of Self-Organised Learning.
They aim to learn from their experience, converse, spiral, grow and change.
The College of Self-Organised Learning embodies this philosophy in the way it operates and in supporting others to use SOL.