Are you committed to your own learning and development? Do you want to take some action to enhance your learning? Let's assume you are. Where do you start? Here are some pointers towards a few books you may find relevant and interesting. The first is Make it Happen, published by the Campaign for Learning at £3. This is a short book with just 23 pages. It's designed to help you make a personal learning plan. Some of the questions the book will help you to answer are: What have you already learned? What's your wish list? What kind of learning will help you get what you want? Who can help? The questions are well thought out, and anyone who answers them will have a very clear idea of their own learning and development needs. The book is a bargain. At this price every arts organisation should issue free copies to its staff and volunteers. In a similar vein is Peter Honey's Learning Log. At first sight it is an unexciting 35 pages. The cover illustration is, well, a rather poor drawing of a log (as in firewood). It has all the design flare of 'Towards a National Arts and Media Strategy' (Remember that?). Most of the pages inside consist of blank space to record your learning experiences. So not a glowing endorsement so far. But if you bought a copy, and kept a learning log even just for one week, you would more than recoup your £3.50 investment in this pamphlet. Honey's book neatly complements the Make it Happen book; one is about setting learning goals, the other is about fulfilling them. The Learning Log's author, Peter Honey, is one half of the Honey and Mumford learning duo. Honey and Mumford are the Gilbert and George of the learning world - it seems like they've always been around, and if they've never really hit the big time, their work is always worth a look. If you've done any training at all in the last ten years, it's quite likely that you've been exposed to H&M's Learning Styles Questionnaire. If you've ever come across the terms reflector, theorist, pragmatist and activist, you've probably done the quiz. But do you remember what it all meant? Take a look at Using Your Learning Styles, by Peter Honey and Alan Mumford. Not only will the book tell you what those terms mean, but it provides a thoughtful insight into the implications of different ways of learning. If you want to know how you learn best, and how to become a great learner, this is the book for you. This book really gets you thinking about your own learning. At 10p a page for 35 pages of well argued text, it's great value for money. If you've managed to avoid the learning style questionnaire all these years, now's the time to find out how you really learn. Get the book and the questionnaire. Forgive me if so far I've given you the impression that learning is a rather solitary, nay clandestine affair. It doesn't have to be. If you want to infect your organisation with the learning bug, and you can't afford those extraordinary fees consultants charge to run a course, splash out an outrageous £7.99 on Mike Pedler's Action Learning for Managers. What is action learning? Learning from experience in order to take action. Something we already do in the Arts, but not as much as we should. This well written book tells you why your organisation needs action learning, and it tells you how to do it. What more could you want?
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