Graduate Development goes back to school

Last week I ran a module with a group of retail graduates where we looked at how they can manage themselves and others in difficult situations.  We applied Transactional Analysis and other theory that we had introduced during their previous modules on their graduate development programme to help them explore and learn from the challenging situations we put them in.

The one that got us all a little worried was preparing and running a session for students at the Merchants’ Academy School in Bristol.  The graduates were given a short period of time to prepare an interactive, high quality session that would inspire and engage the students in a particular business related subject.

Engaging 14 year olds is not something they had too much experience of, so each group had to do some careful planning and thoughtful preparation.  Children of any age can be brutally honest, so the graduates where really worried about the pupil’s views of their sessions.

During the sessions the graduates worked really hard to relate to the pupils and had to think on the spot on more than one occasion! The reward was some really useful feedback, and after some personal reflection each graduate worked on how the learning from the programme could be applied to make them more effective at work. A lovely example of engaging experiential learning.