Co-shadowing and mutual learning

Lots of people use shadowing, when someone is taking on a new role and wants to learn from someone who has more experience.  It happens in jobs, volunteering, for trustees on charity boards.  There is lots of informal shadowing in day-to-day life too.

We want to develop a guide for shadowing in pairs, where each person learns from the other.

This came out of conversations with people in community groups, voluntary organisations, social enterprises and people working in health and social care in the public sector.  The Community Solutions events and reports looked at how community responses had helped during Covid, and how this could be part of social care in the future.  A frequent reflection was that often people working in the public sector and community sector don’t really understand each other’s circumstances – what they can contribute, the challenges they face, what scope there is to do things differently.  We came up with Shadowing as a way to help here.

Then we realised that would also be good for 2 community groups understanding more about each other, and for people in different public sector teams.  And it is useful in other situations, such as equalities groups, groups working around climate change, and for finding out about what life is like for people in other places.

Next steps to develop co-shadowing

We’re planning to develop this over the next 6 months or so, as a partnership between Outside the Box, SENScot, and the Improvement Hub at Healthcare Improvement Scotland.

• We’re looking for people to do shadowing pairs as a pilot
• We’ll have a guide in September, to get you started
• We’ll give some backup to people who are part of this pilot/development stage if that is useful
• Around December or January we’ll look at how it all went
• We’ll update the guide in early 2022, with examples and suggestions from the people who were part of the pilot
• We’ll share the updated version – aiming for March 2022.

Get in touch if you are interested or want to find out more.

We know it has been done before and works.  If you have experience of mutual shadowing, please get in touch and share your story and advice.

Take a look at these Examples of co-shadowing, for ideas on how it could work in different contexts.

Contacts

Anne Connor, Outside the Box  anne@otbds.org

Mary Sinclair, Senscot  mary@senscot.net