The SOLO LEARNER in a ‘Covid World’

You will be under no illusion that ‘learning’ has become the new mantra. Every day, it seems, new challenges emerge, and each of us has to learn to live with a new order of things. 

Some of you will have come out of furlough pretty much unscathed, others will suddenly find themselves in a less than receptive job market. Add to that the fears of parenthood, concerns for the elderly and vulnerable and a host of other global environmental and humanitarian issues from which nine of us appear to be immune.

During lockdown, we put our heads together to see what we might do to help those facing an uncertain future …

We had a number of ZOOM meetings with our expert panel of employers, and they suggested that … ‘we could do worse than to establish the present state of an individual’s Learning Power.  That would bring a definitive point of difference to a letter of application and a CV. And, when deciding who would be on the list of redundancies, a Learning Power profile could make all the difference’.

ELLI, (the Effective Lifelong Learning Inventory) is the most effective way of determining which learning habits have taken the most battering and, importantly, how responsive we are as learners ’.  Why is that important? Because learning capacity drives propensity for change or our ability to cope productively and positively with the unexpected.

Ellie has been research-validated, both accademically and operationally, among more than 100,000 people globally drawn from all walks of life. The
research teams, working in Bristol in the UK and Penn State University in the USA, found, beyond any reasonable doubt, that there are just 7 basic
dimensions, the raw building blocks, that hold the key to our capacity for learning.

Why is ELLI Unique?

• It plots the learner’s strength and weaknesses.
• It doesn’t ‘trait cast’ by tracking change.
• It monitors the ‘learning journey.’
• It upstages most psychometric tests.
• It creates a ‘growth mindset.’

Input:

Participants answer an on-line questionnaire and become excited to be doing something with an immediate result. They don’t have to think too much and are given only 4 possible, repeated answers, to every question ∙ very like me ∙ quite like me ∙ a little like me ∙ not like me.

Output:

An immediate, but simple, spidergraphic with a user-friendly single page explanation. Participants can have fun comparing notes with one another, which also furthers their understanding of how they learn.

Further Explanation

Interpretation and suggested Interventions: Available in more detail with Learning to Learn with ELLI. Download £9.95

Peter had been furloughed by his company and had been fearful of redundancy throughout lockdown. However, he did go back to work until the local lockdown came about through the rise in COVID cases in Leicester. He is now redundant.

Not to be outdone Peter has now managed to find a number of temporary jobs, most of them in agriculture. He is determined to make a living by whatever means, and with only himself to provide for, he is living in a caravan on-site with a number of East European workers. He picks and packs vegetables and from time to time drives a delivery van. Peter knows that this isn’t his future but is just glad to be doing something physical and worthwhile.

He has made a number of new friends and is teaching them to improve their English.

Sam believes that she has been dealt a major injustice and is extremely reluctant to abide by the rules of lockdown. She is licking her wounds rather than accepting the situation and making the best of it.

Sam agreed to provide her ELLI profile equally reluctantly but is now considering how she might use her strength in creativity to take her natural resilience in a different direction. She is beginning to accept that she had not allowed herself to ‘think outside the box’ and use her skills and knowledge productively.

When last we spoke, Sam had returned to her culinary expertise and, with her sister’s help, was in the process of creating a video blog in which she ‘made something out of nothing’!