Name of the tool:
LEARNING QUESTIONS
What the result will look like:
A set of questions that guide the learning process.
Description of the tool:
A set of Learning Questions is like a roadmap for guiding learning in a project that aims at designing a specific type of intervention (e.g. in a healthcare clowning project addressing a new audience or testing a new artistic approach).
It involves crafting a set of thoughtful questions to guide your learning journey.
Start by talking to your project team and stakeholders, understanding their expectations and what they hope to discover.
Collect these insights, identify common themes, and organize an ideation session to collaboratively decide on the key learning questions. The questions should be open-ended, encouraging deep reflection and exploration.
Importantly, they should address knowledge gaps and inspire progress in your project.
When it can be used:
Start developing learning questions at the project’s outset.
Adapt them as the project evolves to stay aligned with your goals. Regularly review and refine the questions throughout the project to maintain their relevance.
This tool helps you set a clear direction for your healthcare clowning project.
By answering these questions, you aim to fill knowledge gaps, enhance understanding, and continuously improve your interventions.
It fosters a collaborative learning environment, ensuring that everyone involved is aligned in their goals and expectations.
Who it’s useful for:
This technique is valuable for project leaders, healthcare clown performers, partners, and stakeholders involved in the project. It ensures a shared understanding of project goals and facilitates collective learning.
Length of process:
The process is ongoing, starting at the project’s beginning and evolving as needed throughout its duration. Crafting the questions and seeking feedback may take a few collaborative sessions, but the continuous review and refinement are integral to the learning journey.
Main features - advantages:
Alignment: It aligns everyone involved in the project, fostering a shared vision.
Depth of Exploration: Open-ended questions encourage thoughtful reflection and exploration, leading to a deeper understanding.
Adaptability: Questions can be adapted as the project progresses, ensuring continued relevance.
Collaboration: Involving project partners in question development ensures relevance and shared ownership.
Main features - disadvantages:
Time Investment: Crafting and refining questions may take time, requiring commitment from the project team.
Subjectivity: The interpretation of open-ended questions can be subjective, requiring careful consideration during analysis.
Guidelines for implementation:
Early Involvement: Start early and involve all project stakeholders in the development of learning questions.
Open-ended and Probing: Craft questions that are open-ended, using probing words to encourage thoughtful responses.
Avoid Bias: Ensure questions are neutral and unbiased to promote objective exploration.
Feedback Loop: Seek regular feedback from participants and stakeholders to refine questions.
Continuous Review: Regularly review and adapt questions to stay aligned with the evolving needs of the project.
Tool in practice:
A set of learning questions accompanied us during our project. Take a look to gain an insight into the questions that inspired our processes and which we consistently asked ourselves at regular intervals.
The questions were drafted in the frame of our Baseline Evaluation and based on consultations with the project participants and partners. During the project, we slightly adapted them to ensure that they remained relevant to our learning needs.
The ClowNexus team regularly came back to the learning questions to ask themselves whether their activities were still providing answers. Furthermore, the team used the learning questions to structure the findings of the project. Within ClowNexus, we used the learning questions as an informal framework to guide us in the background.
Attachments / Images:
Origin of the tool:
This is a common tool for monitoring, evaluation and learning. The learning questions showcased above were specifically developed during Clownexus.
