During the last 5 years, over 30,000 young people from around the world have been trained and supported to take part in the International Citizen Service (ICS) programme. As well as attending preparation training before their volunteering placement, the programme provides regular opportunities for ongoing learning and reflection as well as a comprehensive debrief at the end of the placement.
I'm still often asked by friends and family, "but what do you actually DO?!" Well... as the Learning and Development Manager at VSO, I work with the consortium of ICS agencies to oversee the quality of volunteer training and learning. This includes training observations, resource development, training design, and innovations such as audio-visual materials and social media platforms for learning.
As we move towards a pause in programming at the end of the second ICS contract next year, there is a great opportunity to reflect on our training provision to date, refresh the existing curriculum and develop new content. It's also an opportunity to consider different target groups for training such as those on alternative youth volunteering programmes, and design a curriculum that is flexible enough to be adapted for these different groups.
In order to take a collaborative approach to developing the curriculum, I planned and led a 'writeshop' in Nairobi - a workshop dedicated to writing. Championed by the Barefoot Guide Alliance as a "creative and collective method for reflection, learning and writing" it was a natural choice to ensure a participatory approach to our curriculum development process.
So this post is a kind of 'Write-shop 101' - what we did leading up to the write-shop itself, what happened during the 6 days of actual writing, and plans for the future....
1. Preparing for the write-shop - Developing Learning Outcomes
Any Learning and Development professional will be familiar with the expectation that you should be an expert in anything and everything related to training and learning. But while our role is often to provide the 'learning lens' to a particular subject matter, it's virtually impossible to work in isolation from those colleagues and stakeholders who are the 'experts' in their respective fields.
So, for the ten units (or modules) of volunteer training and learning that we identified as essential to the ICS programme, our first step was to identify the key people to oversee the content for each unit. So in practice, this meant working with our Safety and Security Director on 'Safety and Security', our Programmes team on 'Understanding Development' and 'Project Context and Skills', and our Inclusion Specialist on 'Diversity and Inclusion', and so on.
When designing any kind of curriculum, it's important to start with the desired outcomes for learning - so at the end of each stage of the volunteer journey, what do we actually want volunteers to know/understand/be able to do? Think of it like knowing your destination before deciding on your mode of transport...
With ten different units in the curriculum, my colleague Irene (Organisational Development Manager, based in Nairobi) and I divided up the units and worked with the different content leads to support them in shaping clear volunteer learning outcomes for their units across the five stages of the volunteer journey. While not a quick process, investing in this stage of the curriculum gave us a really strong foundation (destination) from which to design actual training content using a range of different methodologies (mode of transport).
Then me, being me, the ten units were colour-coded, laminated and stuck onto a flip-chart!
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| Volunteer learning outcomes mapped across units and stages |
2. Write-shop! Designing content to meet the learning outcomes
Our write-shop team consisted of Irene and myself, joined by our Inclusion Specialist Lyndsey, and a locally engaged training consultant called Charles. For 6 days, we took over one of the meeting rooms in our Nairobi office and only came out of our 'write-shop bubble' for food, bathroom breaks and to invite other staff in for feedback. By the end of the 6 days, the walls were covered in our coloured papers, mind maps and sketches. It was actually kind of sad to take it all down!
On Day 1, we really invested time in 'putting ourselves in the shoes of the volunteer'. All too often, training is designed around the trainers themselves, without considering those who the training is for. It's important to consider the types of trainers and their varying experience, but we all agreed the importance of starting with the volunteers' perspective. As a fan of guided meditations myself, I led an activity for the rest of the team to close their eyes and imagine they were a youth volunteer. I then talked them through the whole ICS journey, pausing at each stage to reflect on their thoughts and feelings (in the shoes of the volunteer).
Before the write-shop I'd been nervous about spending too much time on the set up of the writing process, and risking lack of progress with actual writing, but this activity was so helpful in reminding us why we were there that we repeated it in some way (whether drawing, writing or meditating) at the start of each day.
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| Irene re-capping on our thoughts and feelings from the volunteer perspective |
Next we identified and experimented with different training and learning methodologies, including 'free-writing' (when you just write continuously on a subject to see what comes out). It's amazing what you end up writing about - leading to ideas you never knew you had!
We also agreed a set of minimum standards for training, related to facilitation, content, process and environment. It was particularly helpful to have Lyndsey, our Inclusion Specialist, lead this session to help us explore and identify what makes training accessible to the wide range of young people we work with.
Finally on Day 1, we revisited the learning outcomes across the 10 units and 5 stages of the volunteer journey, in order to check the logic and flow.
At the start of Day 2 we stepped back into the shoes of the volunteers with some more free-writing exercises. We then focused specifically on the first stage of the volunteer journey (pre-placement training) and mapped 'storyboards' for each of our units - a rough sketch of session plans that would enable volunteers to meet the associated learning outcomes. Between each unit we paused writing to make space for peer feedback on our rough outlines. This was a really useful process so we could benefit from the different ideas and styles in the team before progressing to more detailed writing up of sessions at our laptops.
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Day 3 followed a similar format to Day 2, but focusing on the in-country orientation stage of the journey. It was clear to see the benefits of developing the content with the whole volunteer journey in mind, with the in-country orientation content intentionally building on the pre-placement training content. It was also great to identify the linkages between the different units and ensure that there was a logical flow between them all, as well as avoiding duplication of content across units and stages of the journey.
Now in full flow, Day 4 focused on the final 3 stages of the volunteer journey (mid-placement review, in-country debrief and post-placement debrief), which you can see from the flip-chart are 'lighter' in terms of the number of learning outcomes.
After the weekend break, we returned to our creative cocoon with fresh eyes, ready to look at the curriculum as a whole in order to firm up the scheduling and timing of sessions. Stage by stage we experimented with the ordering of sessions on each day before estimating the total time needed to deliver the sessions. It was really exciting to see it all come together on the wall, before typing it up and re-mapping against the original learning outcomes.
In the afternoon on Day 5 and 6 we also invited other staff into our write-shop bubble to get their input and reflections on the process and content - this kind of ongoing feedback was invaluable and very timely.
3. Planning next steps
On Day 6, we mapped out the next stages of the curriculum development process, from the end of the write-shop itself to being 'first draft ready' by Christmas, allowing a month for further review and input from content leads, staff, trainers and young people before reaching a final draft by the end of February.
We are also in early discussions with our training and learning steering committee about potential piloting or phased in roll-out of the new curriculum, so watch this space!
