Children's Participation Group: February Meeting

Training Practitioners in Children’s Participation: Issues and Challenges

This post has been co-created by four people who are practitioners and trainers in children’s participation. It is the outcome of a meeting on Skype on Wednesday 2nd Feb to (begin to) discuss the topic, ‘training practitioners in children’s participation’. The meeting was interesting, useful and inspiring. It was great to share ideas.

We plan to meet on Skype once a month for just an hour, to keep in touch with each others’ work, to discuss an agreed topic large or small, broad or deep, to share ideas and resources and to be a group that can support each other at times when our own creativity and courage is taking a bit of a dip! Please get in touch if you would like to join the group.

During the one hour meeting we all wrote notes on the communal board. I did the first edit on these notes (this time), Anise checked over the draft (and tidied it up!) and the other two then checked the final draft so the result comes from the four of us. Please feel free to comment and add to the conversation either in the comment box below or privately on the email.  

Thanks!

Clare Hanbury, Sarah Huxley, Barbara Lil Rastern and Anise Waljee

Training in children’s participation:

The training process came under scrutiny both with respect to process and broader issues that we, as trainers, struggle with.  Reflecting on our own experiences as both trainers and participants we found that:

• The most common type of training event is a 5 day workshop. However, it is not realistic to train practitioners or trainers with limited experience in 5 days. It may be enough to transmit ideas but it’s not enough to embed them deeply enough build competencies, to change attitudes and practice and to give the participants the necessary confidence to go out and do similar training. There is a need to practice or to co-train with a more experienced trainer who has enough practice in their background before venturing to train alone.
• It is easier to manage a group when the participants have similar needs but it can also be powerful to train a mixed group that include policymakers, academics and practitioners in different sectors as this helps to bring new dimensions to the training, It builds bridges and creates a supportive structure. Maybe the ideal is to do some work with groups who have similar needs and then mix them. The different needs to be tied to the objectives of the training and the aim of the training event. Each session needs clear objectives. It’s about how we manage the mix. Any thoughts/experiences or lessons learnt that you/others want to share on this?

 A new thought on the training process

• On a process note we also have to be careful how we use ‘activities’ in these workshops, Sometimes and probably because its about participation there is a danger that we go overboard with the jumping around and waving our arms bit.  This can get as boring as lectures! Badly managed group work is awful and when it is overused it is ineffective. Every training method needs to be selected and adapted to suit time constraints, the group and the objectives of the session and aim of the workshop. Some of us have found giving participants individual silent time within the workshop very helpful and powerful too. Luckily for us, achieving this balance and making the subtle adjustments is a highly skilled job! Are there others/ who have/have you tried this or other strategies that could enrich the training?

Managing training is not just about the participants. It is a longer, more inclusive process and so some thoughts on how to think about training include these outlined below:

Who are we really training?

• Experienced trainers in children’s participation such as ourselves need to get clearer to those commissioning the training about the STEPS to becoming an effective practitioner and then they could have a realistic idea of how the training fits. Training would only be one of these steps to creating participatory processes to both programmes and institutions.

• We also need to get clear on the criteria for selecting participants and the conditions needed for training. One of these might be the involvement of children AT the training.

• The experience for practitioners and policymakers becomes MUCH more powerful when we involve children. This has to be managed carefully so the children participating get something too. Very often having adults listen to them is an amazing and empowering experience for them.
  

Training is a formal as well as an informal, continuous process:

• Training is also more powerful when people are journaling and reflecting after the training. The problem is that people go back to overflowing in-boxes after the training. So maybe its about being clear again that a step in the  training is for the participants to be given space by their line managers after the training to do journaling, reflecting and even conduct a mentored case study i.e. practice. Training is on a continuum and does not begin or end with the specific workshop or course.  There is ‘on-site’ work that the institution needs to do after the formal training. This would be part of the training and not framed as a judgment on how well that person had done in the training! So line managers have to set up the process such that there is a period of learning after the training before the application. An outcome of the case study could be the brown bag lunch idea of feedback to colleagues. Is this something we can work with or is it, at this stage, an ‘in the future’ idea? Any comments?

So we train people as well as getting organisations to reflect on themselves

• We need to look at training more broadly and more strategically. An organisation interested in children’s participation needs to map where they are with children’s participation and where they want to go with it and then how training fits in. It is up to us experienced trainers to make suggestions about the other pieces that will strengthen and deepen the experience for all those involved. And make the investment in training worth it for the organisations spending money on it.
• The participants too could have an interactive workbook that they fill in so they could see how the training fits with their work and that the training is just one step. – Not the be all and end all and how their current activity (training) links back to a mandate or strategy which is institutional and emanates from the organisations they work with or for.
•  In this way we trainers are doing institutional capacity building alongside personal and professional capacity building of individuals. We would hope that this would also lead to a more supportive environment for the practitioners to then be able to do their fieldwork. Again, is this too ambitious? Yet what is the point of training practionners if they are sent back to an unchanging organization? Who owns the training process and the ‘products’ it generates in terms of further training and actual participation by children? Again a debate would be welcome.

Who else could be involved?

• The other idea to bring into the steps or the mapping is the phased approach and to give practitioners an idea of where they can start and how to build their skills. Mentoring is a useful way to then bring them on.
• A big question to ponder is how much mentors needs to be trained or if some people just are built to be good mentors. Often a manger is not a good mentor!
• On a broader question - Generally in the field we are not good at communicating the benefits of involving children – we need to get better at this even in small scale projects – doing little tests e.g. trying x strategy here and y strategy that involved children there and then comparing results. We need these types of examples to give participants stretch and courage and insights for themselves. It is linked to the ‘marketing’ of this idea – even internally it’s important and gives status to the idea for those working with it.
• The ‘getting ready for school’ participation project is an example of this. It’s a project where older children are preparing younger ones for school. The most powerful element of the training was to get participants to experience how good the older children (11 year olds) were at working with the younger ones (5/6 years). The 11 year olds surprised the participants who were all teachers and who said ‘They are doing this better than us!’. It was only then that the trainers realized both the baggage that the participants had still carried into the training and the very welcome knowledge that, now, having seen it in action, they actually believed in the 11 year olds and the programme as a whole. This raises the issue of how do we know as trainers that we are preparing those we train to really engage with the work. 

By this time, our hour was up and we had to close. We agreed that before our next meeting we would follow up on one aspect of the conversation that we had found especially interesting (or challenging!) And to come back in the next meeting with 5 minutes on our topic.  But we are equally happy to take up anything that strikes others/you in the conversation so please send in suggestions, thoughts, comments, critiques.