Life Skills Handbooks

Welcome

Welcome to Lifeskills Handbooks. This site is to help you to find and download the life skills handbook and to link you to the very best life skills resources we know about. It is also here to discuss issues and share ideas about teaching life skills sessions with children and young people. Join the community and the debates on this blog.

The Life Skills Handbook provides advice and active learning activities for teaching life skills to young people. It supports and guides all people who plan, manage, teach or work on formal and non-formal education programmes. It can be adapted and used in different cultural contexts worldwide.

More information about the Handbook here.

Newsletter from the Clare Hanbury Site

Hi All - I hope you'll forgive this posting of a newsletter from the Clare Hanbury site. Clare is the author of the Lifeskills Handbook and of this blog. Some of the content is relevant to those of you interested in promoting life skills work with children and young people. If you want to go and see more about her other work click here www.clarehanbury.com If you visit this site please click on the toolbox button on the left where you will find a LOT of free resources for practitioners and links to other free resources too.

Newsletter from the desk of Clare Hanbury

Issue 7: January 2012

Summary

In this e-newsletter I describe some of the work I’ve been involved with between October  2011 and January 2012. You can also access it by clicking on the Newsletter 7 link on the left hand side.

1. The 100

The 100  are 100 x 140 character length messages on child health and child action. With the help of a small team of advisers who know aboout 'mobile health', I am developing a resource hub for those

Apologies for Multiple Posts

Apologies for multiple posts. There is a glitch in  my contacts mechanism which is being sorted out. I think you will have recently received a backlog of posts that I had thought were being delivered to you as I posted. Its not a virus. Once again - apologies.

Happy New year!

Clare

The Most Important Life Skill: To Be Able To Say 'I Can'

Inspiring video to start 2012. I'm excited about the year and hope you are too. Let me know what you are up to and if you would like any support with your work. Take a look at our sister blog www.clarehanbury.com. There are some great articles going up on this blog over this month.

Special Offer Fully Booked.

The special offer is now fully booked. Thanks for the many for contacting me. Before the end of the month I will be making a similar offer from my site www.clarehanbury.com so if you missed this one look out for the new offer. Sign up to the site so you dont miss the alert. Thank-you!

Clare

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 15/15: TOOLS TO STIMULATE DISCUSSION

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is the last of my series of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy.  As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!

In the 'tools' download you will find lost of explanations and discussions about the different types of evaluation tools like structured and semi-structured interviews, role plays, surveys and types of survey questions. Also set out are some more qualitative methods like draw and write. In addition, there are twelve activities to engage children and young people and to stimulate discussion and information. Young people can feel uncomfortable in a formal interview or even a focus group discussion. A creative activity can helps to get their attention and focus and stimulate opinions. The informal chatting that happens during a creative activity acts as 'warm up' and often results in deep and interesting reflections at the end of the activity. To give you a sense of the contents here is the list of activities:
1.    CD Covers
2.    Collage
3.    Shields
4.    Masks
5.    The Most Significant Story
6.    Speech bubbles
7.    Picture This
8.    Builder
9.    Draw and write
10.    Moving Circles
11.    Image Theatre
12.    Fill in the blanks

For step by step explanations on how to conduct each activity and for examples how some of  the partners of the Jacobs Foundation have used these download the full version of the toolkit here.

Happy New Year Readers and a New Year Offer!

I would like to wish all of you a very happy 2012. My thoughts are especially with my readers from Syria and I am hoping that the troubles in their country will resolve soon. Our Syrian colleagues are working to build the life skills of the youngsters in their country. I cannot think of a more positive and better part to play in the development of their nation.If any of you have specific messages for them that I can post on this blog, please send them in.

This year and as well as the many things I wish to share with you, I would like to feature YOUR work so if there are any of you who are running lifekskills programmes and who have something you would like to share with my community then PLEASE get in touch. Your guest post can be one paragraph or three pages. It doesn't matter! If you have ideas or suggestions or links that you think will interest me then please send these in too.

Over the holiday period I received several messages from readers enquiring about training and mentoring services. I am planning to conduct a 3-month on-line supported training course starting on the 18th April. The course will include two modules on monitoring and evaluating life skills programmes. Please contact me for more information and to register your interest. You will need a phone line and a broadband connection to access the 12 modules.

For some April might be too far away or a 3-month course not meet their needs and in this case do contact me to enquire about mentoring services.

SPECIAL OFFER!!!!!

I am giving away THREE -  FORTY-FIVE minute mentoring sessions on the phone to the first three people who contact me. If you would like one of these please send your name, email address and three reasons why you wish to speak to me, to clare.hanbury@zen.co.uk. The last time I offered this the free places were taken within an hour so hurry if you are interested!

 

 

 

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 14/15: COMMUNICATING THE RESULTS OF YOUR EVALUATION

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is 14 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy.  As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!

The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement  backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved.  Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step.  Here is more  on the last step, Step 12.

Step Twelve: COMMUNICATE

The final step is COMMUNICATE THE RESULTS of your evaluation. This may be in a report or a presentation or both. Evaluation is hard work involving the effort of many people. Time needs to be set aside to communicate and deal with the results internally and externally. Positive aspects of evaluation need to be recognised and rewarded, more challenging aspects built into new planning or training activities.  It’s important to ensure there are enough resources to communicate the results and make best use of the results as the project goes forward.

The most important people to report to are the young people who took part in their evaluation and explaining what will be the outcome of the results irrespective of whether the results are positive or not. This demonstrates your respect for the young people, gives them an opportunity to comment on the results and maximizes the chances of their cooperation for future evaluation. Failing to feedback properly can lead to their reluctance to participate in future evaluation activities.  Depending on the style of your report, you can develop a version specifically for young people that you can give to them.

Although this is the last step in the planning process, there is one more post to give you an overview of M&E tools and 12 tools to stimulate discussions wiht children and young people.

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 13/15: WRITE UP THE RESULTS OF YOUR EVALUATION

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is number 13 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy.  As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!

The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement  backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved.  Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step.  Here is more on Step 11. As there is a holiday for Christmas the final two installments in this series will be posted on January 3rd and January 10th.

Step 11
Developing and presenting a written evaluation report gives an opportunity for others such as funding agencies, officials, researchers and other staff to learn from the evaluation. Before you decide to write a report, think about how you communicate in your organisations. Match  your reporting style with this you may not need a written report!

Here is an outline for the type of information that is usually included in a written evaluation report. This may be too long a document for your purpose. Adapt it to match our needs.

A Sample Outline of an Evaluation Report

1. Title page

• Name of report;
• Name and address of the project;
• Time period covered by the project evaluation;
• The date the report was completed; and
• The name of the authors of the report.

 

2. Summary
This is really important as many people will only red the summary! It is easier to write the summary AFTER the rest of the report has been finished. It usually contains

• The purpose of the evaluation;
• A very brief description of the project (3-4 sentences); 
• Who carried out the evaluation and how it was done;
• Important results;
• Important conclusions; and
• All the recommendations.

3. Table of contents
4. Description of the project (history, aims, objectives, target group)
5. Description of the evaluation process and methods
6. Results
7. Conclusions and recommendations

8. Appendices:

• A list of people involved in the evaluation e.g. officials and young people (if this is appropriate to identify them);
• Examples of the tools and recording methods/charts you used;
• Examples of tables and diagrams; and
• Lists of other documents and references used.

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 12/15: DATA ANALYSIS

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is number 12 of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy.  As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!

The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement  backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved.  Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step.  Here is more on step 10. This is a long section in the toolkit and this extract is just the outline of what you can find in the full version.

Step TEN: ANALYSE

Now that the information has been assembled, cleaned and organized, it is now DATA. The penultimate step in planning your evaluation is to consider how you will ANALYSE the data. You need to remind yourselves of the purpose of the evaluation. There is nearly always more data generated in the monitoring and evaluation activities than you need. So be clear on what you do need and stick to this!  If possible, give yourself the scope to look for the unexpected too.

The same data can be analysed in many different ways and at different levels of complexity. How you do it is linked to the time you have available and the purpose of the evaluation. Remember if you have good data which is well organised you can go back to it and analyse it more deeply and for different purposes later when you have more time!

Here are some simple steps to use to undertake data analysis. There are many ways to do it and so this is not THE way but it is A way to bring together and understand and explain data. If your project or organisation already has set out a way to do this then use the methods that are familiar.

Remind yourself of the aims of the evaluation and the objectives of the specific activity that generated the data you will analyse

• Get familiar with the data to begin the process of abstraction and conceptualisation.
• Create some kind of chart (sometimes called a thematic framework) that sets out the issues arising from the themes you have noted and the sub themes. 
• Using the themes and sub themes to guide you, look again at the details of the data. Undertake data analysis activities. Select the activities that are relevant to the type of data you have. Start with what feels simple and build from there.  For example: Make a note of the frequency of the data (how often a piece of information occurs or is said). You can colour code the notes or make a coloured dot beside each piece of data to show where the data came from (if you have different sources). This part of the process is sometimes called indexing. 
• The next step and the one which is the most difficult to describe is where you interpret the data. This process is about looking for patterns, connections, links and explanations. You search for a structure to explain what you have found. It is not mechanical step it requires your intuition and imagination. You will be illuminating young people’s attitudes, experiences and behaviour. You seek to address the questions that began the evaluation process. 
• The final step to analysis is to formulate what you have found out as conclusions and set out specific strategies for change, improvements or simply a scaling up of something that you find is working well!  These strategies will often be expressed in an evaluation report as, ‘recommendations’.  Also, there may be one-off pieces of information or quotes that are powerful but that do not fit into a pattern. Include these in a summary but resist making a general point from this type of information.

For much more on this section and for a worked through example download the full version of the toolkit.

Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills 11/15: IMPLEMENT & TURN INFO INTO DATA

For those of you conducting life skills activities or life skills training with young people or adult facilitators. Here is number 11 out of a series of 15 weekly posts on Monitoring and Evaluating Life Skills. Each of them are extracted from the Toolkit I developed for the Jacobs Foundation with the help of many of their field partners and which you can download for FREE by clicking here. Please find the Lifeskills Toolkit half way down the page under the heading, Intervention and Application. If you wish to have a hard (printed) copy please contact me with a short description of your work and why you would like the hard copy.  As always please comment on these posts and let's get a conversation going!

The toolkit sets out 12 steps for planning and implementing your project evaluation. In practice, the steps may not always flow from one to another. There will be some movement  backwards and forwards and there may be a need to add to, take away from or change the order of steps. Each evaluation works differently as each evaluation and each project has its own unique purpose. The crucial thing is to plan evaluations which are useful, enjoyable and realistic given the amount of time and resources for the project and the expertise of those involved.  Where it is helpful, an example is set out in shaded boxes below the general points for each step.  Here is more on steps 8 and 9 .

STEP Eight: Conduct monitoring and evaluation activities

This step is to implement the monitoring and evaluation activities planned using the tools and recording the information you have designed.

Step NINE: ASSEMBLE, CLEAN AND ORGANISE information gathered

This step is about turning  information that has been gathered during monitoring and evaluation into DATA in preparation for DATA ANALYSIS. The information will need to be ASSEMBLED, CLEANED and then ORGANISED.

ASSEMBLING is about putting all the information from the variety of sources together, from evaluation and monitoring, reading it, looking at it, listening to it  and getting an overview of what you have.  It is useful to do this with someone else so you can discuss it.

CLEANING  information is about removing information or sets of information. For example – maybe a question was not translated correctly or maybe one group being evaluated were asked to do the activity differently to the majority of the groups and the results from this group look ‘wrong’.

ORGANISING information is about reformatting information and/or putting information sets together ready to be compared or counted. The information gathered may test more than one indicator or more than one aspect of this indicator. The information may be recorded in different ways and in different places. There may be:
•    Notes on or filled tick boxes on an observation schedule;
•    Notes or an audio recording of/notes from a focus group discussion; 
•    Photos or videos;
•    Information from different sections of a questionnaire;
•    Information from different questionnaires; or
•    Notes taken in an interview.

It may be useful (depending again on your purpose) to organize all the information about one indicator or groups of indicators together in one place. This might be a simple matter of cutting and pasting information, or dividing parts of a questionnaire into two or more places.

If the evaluation is taking place at the beginning or half way through a project and will be repeated, consider if you need to clearly identify data back to particular individuals or groups so that when it is done again, the changes can be noted and verified.

If you need to identify the different bits of information, do this as you organise it. You might use a name or a CODE. CODES are useful if anonymity is useful or important for confidentiality. If you are separating different bits of information, remember to identify them all later so the information can be reassembled and used again.

Do not forget to include relevant information generated by those monitoring the project.

For examples of how to do this download the full version of the toolkit here.