[MUSIC] Hi and welcome to the lesson on how to evaluate the actions that you've chosen to close the gap. If you've been following along, you should now have a list of possible actions that you can do in order to close the gap between your current state and your desired state. Now, you're going to need to call your actions down so you only have about five to eight different ones. How you choose your actions is totally up to you, but I'll give you one piece of advice. Choose the actions that you find the most interesting. They don't have to be the biggest ideas or the most world changing so long as they're relevant to your goal and will help you achieve it. If you have a couple of actions that are quite similar you can merge them into the same action. Once you have between five and eight different actions then you need to go through and evaluate them. You will assess them for risk, benefits, beneficiaries, feasibility, impact and potential barriers. For the rest of this lesson I will be going through and detailing what each of these means before giving a quick model from our example project. This is a fairly lengthy process. Don't worry. You can do it in whatever order you like. You don't have to follow ours. Okay, so lets start by looking at risk. When we asses for risk, we're really trying to think of all the factors associated with that action that could make completing our goal difficult. We can ask questions like, will people understand what this action is supposed to do? Will people do what we want them to do? Will they want to do it? Why may they not want to, or who else might pose resistance to the action or goal? Let's take this action as an example. Now by asking some of our questions we can see that maybe having someone observe you when you're already stressed could add more stress. Moreover mentors might not really know how to give concrete and actionable feedback to their mentees, which could cause a problem. But we're not done yet. So now let's look at the benefits of the action. When looking at this, you need to think about the positive outcomes or effects of the actions. In other words, why do it? We'll use the same example action. We know from our research that mentees benefit as they have their teaching practice validated, and they gain useful guidance on how to improve it. Mentalists can also benefit as they're exposed to news ways of teaching and new resources. Now as you do this you can add in references of your ideas, or you can do this later. Make sure to record where you got your information from. Next we can look at the beneficiaries, for this we look at particularly at who the action benefits. Sometimes it can be useful to explain why it benefits that person or group as well. Of course, whatever you write for this one will rely heavily on what you wrote for the benefit section. For example, here we see that mentors gain self-awareness, and mentees gain confidence in their practice, as well as support and guidance. Additionally, in some areas, mentoring can count as professional development, which adds to a CV. Another thing to note here is that you do not have to write in full sentences. You can use dot points. Now, only three more to go, feasibility, impact, and potential barriers. So let's look at feasibility. When we assess for feasibility we are looking at whether or not the action is realistic for you to achieve. It can be useful here to use the risks to help with this section. Here, for example, we know that one of the risks could be that there might be resistance from schools. If the graduate teacher, the mentee, is not employed at the same school as the experienced mentor. Then we would need to get permission from the principal. And the experienced teacher would need to be given the time to observe the mentee, which could be very difficult. Another thing we need to consider though is the impact. When we look at impact we need to consider how important the action is. And how that helps us to achieve the goal. For example, this particular action has a really high impact factor for both the mentee and the mentor. We know this because there's been a lot of research into such relationships, especially for graduate or. This research suggests that it really does help reduce teacher stress and burn out. And lastly, we need to look at the potential barriers. In order to really consider the potential barriers it's useful to go back and consult what you've written for the risks and feasibility sections. Think about what challenges stand in the way? What would make the project fail? Here we've identified that if mentees are not employed or only employed sporadically or for short terms, it makes it difficult for them to be observed. Equally if the experienced teachers are too busy with their own work, they'll not be able to observe the graduate teachers. Another barrier occurs if the mentor and mentee are at different schools. As you can see, by going through one by one, we get a better picture of this action. Not only why it's important, but also the difficulties or constraints we might face. Later on you'll take what you've written here and figure out the different ways you can get around the different risks and potential barriers. This might involve adding in more actions or even adapting the action or project in order to achieve the goals that you developed earlier. Good luck. [MUSIC]
