Professional Learning Sessions 2021

Professional Learning Sessions 2021

The Library of Professional Learning Sessions is ready to use. That being said, with all of the transition in the past year, we at the Lab want to remind you of the concepts behind the Professional Learning Sessions so that they can be used most successfully.

For starters, read the PLS How To that can be found on the website. This will give you guidance for the ideas behind the Professional Learning Sessions. Secondly, if you have staff that are new to the PLS, then schedule a Train the Trainer orientation with the Lab. It will be no more than two hours.

At Outward Bound there is a tension between creativity and consistency. OB tends strongly towards the creative. The Lab is trying to nudge Outward Bound more towards consistency. Here are some resources that already exist, saving you time, and do not need to be modified for your use. You can use them over and over again with different groups of people, and because the audience is different, the session will be slightly different.

Strategies

Professional Learning Sessions are meant to elevate the student experience by being a consistent resource. They help you to have prepared content to deliver, introduce new ideas and deliver old ones. Sessions can help you with old ideas, but they may also at first complicate things. When using them, you have three suggested options:

1. Replace old content. That old information wasn’t that necessary after all. This is a better option. Move on. You’ll find out if you actually miss it. Example: historically you used to run a session on how to develop leadership in your students. Now you offer Arenas of Challenge and Support. They’re not the same, but the latter might have more consistent positive results.

2. Substitute what you’re already doing. Strengthen it and making it more consistent from year to year. Example: Facilitating Belonging can be done instead of spending two hours talking about how to build connection with students.

3. Supplement what you’re doing. A PLS can help you with something, and then you need deliberately figure out how to add earlier ideas into another aspect of training. Example: you want to do the Structure PLS. Use the PLS to introduce concepts of structure, and then use travel training for teaching staff about how to develop specific chore rotations.

Tracking PLS Use and Giving Feedback

While there are many options for sessions, the one thing that was never intended with the Professional Learning Sessions was for ideas to be picked here and there from them and then plopped into another training. That goes against the Lab’s desire to put learners first, to push Outward Bound towards more intention around staff development and more consistency and systems over time.

We highly encourage using entire sessions and/or designing some of your own with the guidelines in the PLS How To. That being said, the PLS are yours to use as you see fit. They are, in function, a resource. With any use of any part of a PLS, we need you to track it.

Tracking is done via a tracking spreadsheet. The fourth tab of the Lab Tracking 2021 document is for PLS (the green page). In it we ask for the following:

• Date

• The session

• The number of participants,

• If a whole or part of a session was used

• If part, how was it used?

The last two are critical for increasing Outward Bound’s understanding of its own needs.

The following table outlines the process for both tracking and feedback. Access to all surveys is located here:

https://outwardboundlab.wixsite.com/survey/pls-development-process

2021 Session Specifics:

Ready for Field Testing. They are NOT in the development process at this time. Content is as it is for the foreseeable future. Most testing is because they are shorter in length and thus have content changes from the original:

• Better Questions

• Purposeful Questions

• Sequence and Tactics

• Discussion Routines (technically done once virtually)

• Difficult Discussions

• Challenge Concepts

• Physical Challenge

• Emotional Challenge

• Social Challenge

• Cognitive Challenge

• Spiritual Challenge

• The Learning Cycle

• Experiential Learning Cycle

• Extrinsic Motivation

• Intrinsic Motivation

• Maintaining Motivation

• Trust

• Perspective and Purpose

• Choice, Competence and Confidence

• Alliance, Accountability and Amends

To Conclude:

The Professional Learning Sessions challenge both training systems and ways of thinking about learning. They are a staff development resource unlike anything Outward Bound has had. We encourage you to use them. Through that use we will learn more about Outward Bound together.

Training should be a focused endeavor. If you are going to take the time and effort to introduce or strengthen something with a PLS, then we hope you will do it in the context of a system and supports that encourage the performance that you and your staff are striving for. Help them learn from each other and enable them to best use their knowledge and skills on the job.

If you have questions about the sessions or about surveys or tracking, please contact the Lab.