Step 2: How Using a Simple Learning Plan Can Help You Collect Data
Personal learning plans are developed by learners — typically in collaboration with CALP providers — as a way to help them achieve short-term and long-term learning goals. As a CALP practitioner, your role is to support them by encouraging them, prompting with thoughtful questions and helping them think about learning paths they may not have yet considered.
Tips:
- Help them think about and describe their personal life aspirations, particularly their learning and career goals.
- Be a cheerleader! Help them identify some of the skills they already have but might not recognize as skills. For example, technology skills (using a smart phone), basic math skills (banking or shopping), etc. This will help them to understand that they are not without skills.
- Ask them to think about their individual learning strengths and weaknesses, or reflect on what they have excelled at, or struggled with in the past.
- Help them identify specific skills and knowledge they would like to acquire or improve on.
- Learners may not always want to disclose the barriers to learning that they may face, but you can watch for phrases in conversation that refer to their finances, childcare, transportation, etc., that you can explore further in a respectful way when they are ready.
By working collaboratively with a learner to identify their learning goal(s), you are contributing to Outcome 1.1 in the CALP Logic Model: Adult learners demonstrate commitment to learning.
A learning plan will also set the stage to help a learner reflect on their own progress towards their learning goals.
"Learner Progress" - learners who report that they are making progress towards, or meeting, their learning goals - is one of the measures we collect in the CALP Logic Model and Evaluation Framework.
Resources:
Download the Customizable Template