Professional Learning at Work

Abstract

As this book is based on research into real-life experiences, it opens with the voices of professionals describing situations where they have learnt. The first description was given by a young therapist, Nerida who works full time at a residential setting for adults with intellectual disability. Nerida commented that she often learns as a professional in seemingly incidental situations, with such incidents building upon each other. From the “gum” incident, she described not only learning more about her client but also learning more about communicating with adults with intellectual disability.

Okay you might laugh at this one but I’ll tell you anyway. I didn’t used to know how to chew gum, and I’ve just learnt. On my lunch break one day, I was sitting at my desk and I had some gum in my mouth. One of my clients who lives here happened to be wandering around and I said, “Hey come in and sit down,” and he sat down by my desk. He uses one or two words, so you can have a conversation with him. So I’m reading and talking to him and was also trying to chew gum at the time. I went to blow a bubble, and it fell out of my mouth. I just glanced up at him because I was really embarrassed, and he burst out laughing and laughed so much that tears started pouring down his face. This is a client who laughs a lot when other people are laughing but you can tell it’s just a “Heh heh I’m laughing ‘cause everyone’s laughing, I don’t know what’s funny”. Whereas this was a genuine “that was really funny” and it was a real, shared experience. I saw him and his abilities in a different way after that (Nerida).

I went to a course and they mentioned about the advantages of a technique, and I thought who would I try it on in therapy? My supervisor wanted me to present my results at a seminar, but when the time came I didn’t have any real results. I had tried it on a nine year old who was very unco-operative. It was terribly difficult and frustrating as I had no response at all. I could only talk about what not to do rather than what to do, and I felt I couldn’t present that. So I changed my attack. I decided that as I couldn’t give a presentation on my results I would do a literature review instead. I find that’s a good way to learn, when you’ve actually got to present it, because you’ve got to be very clear and logical. You have to really know it. Doing the literature review helped me change my direction. Since then I’ve had some good results with other clients, because I’d studied the information in a bit more detail and had to present it in a logical way. When I next went back to the same boy I could put all of this together, so I had a different approach which worked (Sally).