Preparation for Learning
This clip is particularly relevant to:
- Level 7 ‘Responsibility for Developing Quality Learning in a Social Services Practice Context’
- Level 9 ‘Facilitate Learning in a Social Services Practice Context’
- Level 10 ‘Support Practice in a Social Services Practice Context’
Shortly you will hear Yuni Li talking about how she prepared herself to provide a reminiscence group for the residents of a care home for older people.
Before you listen to her please spent a minute or two jotting down how you think a learner new to your setting will need to prepare before they join your team. What kind of knowledge, skills and attributes will they need? Then play the audio and compare your ideas to what this learner actually did.
Read/Download the transcript for this audio clip
I went into visit the care home and spoke to the manager and spent some time in the dementia unit…because I’ve never worked before with people with dementia. I’ve read books but it's difficult isn’t it to actually go out and see what this client group are like. When you actually go it’s a totally different experience. I also needed to find out how many people will be coming for each group because I decided if I had to run the group by myself I wouldn’t be able to manage more than six.
A really important thing for the group work was to find out what material to use and I’d got a really good book on reminiscence group work. I used the framework in the book which has themes for each session. The Museum of Childhood has got artefacts that you can go in and borrow which was quite good. I had a theme for each week so say, for example, the first week if I had a theme…say ‘childhood’ you know the Museum of Childhood has stuff like baby clothes…shawl and all the rest, it was quite good, and also what I found was you know for your client group to have objects that can trigger memories.
I also researched the local area and read books getting to know more about the history. When you work with older people if you don’t know where they’re coming from it might be very difficult to work with them ‘cos you need things to chat about and also I’m not from here so I don’t know a lot about where my service user group are coming from.
I decided that it was an open group so by open group, you know, I try and go in and then ask the residents if they’d like to go, come along to the group…because I don’t want to force anyone to come to the group, it should be their choice and in fact I had a few clients who came quite regularly and they seemed to really enjoy it (laughs)…
This transcript is available as a PDF download.