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The Professional Identity and Values Organisation Tool (PIVOT) is designed to facilitate and enhance processes of critical reflection and self-directed learning. Our intention is to help students in professional practice become more aware of a developing sense of identity through exploration of their values and creation of their own learning aims. This project piloted the use of PIVOT with social work students, for evaluation and development. What is PIVOT all about? The tools have been developed from Personal Construct Psychology and wider constructivist perspectives of teaching and learning. Through a series of activities within structured interviews, learners are enabled to: - draw out their own personal observations and interpretations within their practice - progressively refine and develop these constructs to reflect and highlight their own core values - systematically score these values as learning aims - use these learning aims as a basis for an action plan to develop their own professional practice.
The tool has been developed from Personal Construct Psychology and wider constructivist perspectives of teaching and learning. Through a series of activities within structured interviews, learners are enabled to: - draw out their own personal observations and interpretations within their practice - progressively refine and develop these constructs to reflect and highlight their own core values - systematically score these values as learning aims use these learning aims as a basis for an action plan to develop their own professional practice.
Capturing and organising self-generated personal constructs Charting awareness of professional values and identity Encouraging learner centred enquiry into practice and learning aims
An example of how the learning aims scale can be completed - for use in PIVOT Stage 3 activity
This activity enables you to generate your own learning aims to work with in your practice setting. These aims will be based on the constructs that you previously identified in the earlier stages of PIVOT. Therefore they will be unique and (most) meaningful only to you. The intention of this activity is to make the constructs more concrete in terms of your own development. You will be prioritising and scaling up to three constructs to develop personal goals and learning objectives and you will be identifying significant steps in reaching these.
For use in PIVOT Stage 1 activity
This activity encourages deeper reflection upon your professional and personal values in your practice. It encourages you to capture what is really important to you now, and to think about aspects of practice to which you aspire. It may bring out ideas and values that you weren’t aware of holding dear to you – a sort of ‘I didn’t know I knew it’ experience.
Welcome to PIVOT. Within SwapBox you will find a suite of activities that have been designed specifically to help professional learners with the most important aspect of their studies – themselves and the people they work with. These reflexive techniques are derived from the pioneering work in Personal Construct Psychology (Kelly 1991; Fransella 2005). Finding the time to use them will help students to critically reflect upon, identify and explore their developing sense of professional identity through their individual values and personal learning aims. The self-contained activities have full explanatory instructions and there are also accompanying video clips of two people demonstrating their use. The exploratory dialogue between a student and their facilitator (tutor, mentor or assessor) is a key part of the enhanced reflection experience. The tools are designed to build upon each other and so will work best if used in order for the first time.
This activity helps you to examine the ways in which you see yourself and others with whom you have worked, particularly in relation to being a social worker. It is the first stage of thinking about professional identity and values (and the first stage of PIVOT).
Personalisation: Interpersonal Skills for Practitioners As the ‘personalisation agenda’ in social work gathers pace at the level of policy and service provision, there is an increasing need for individual practitioners to re-acquaint themselves with the skills and values of working with diversity and understanding the perspectives of other people and other lives across all service user groups. This workshop will introduce participants to a range of reflexive enquiry methods that draw upon the seminal ideas from Personal Construct Psychology (PCP). The main aim of PCP methodologies is to enable the practitioner to ‘stand in the shoes’ of their client - to see the world in the same way their client does, using the client’s language and the client’s ‘personal constructs’. Everyone has their own system of personal constructs and these are the ‘goggles’ through which they construe the world in which they live and which govern their behaviour. The value of a PCP perspective for social work is that it helps the practitioner to focus upon ways in which, in order to help people to change their behaviour, we have to help them to become aware of how they see themselves and key aspects of their social worlds. This workshop will offer opportunities for participants to examine their own personal constructs and try out 3 basic techniques that will demonstrate: • how personal constructs are used to differentiate between people, situations and things • how someone’s personal constructs can be explored to understand their personal and professional core values • how personal constructs inform behavioural choices - why, at some level of awareness, a person chooses to behave in the ways that they do, rather than in ways that we might consider to be better for them The workshop will be of practical use to students, practitioners and anyone interested in practice learning. Presenters: Dr Barry Cooper, The Open University, UK Nick Reed, University of Hertfordshire, UK
