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We begin with the context for our project and what we wanted to happen. Then we outline some of the philosophy underpinning our approach and introduce key features including the notion of autogenic metaphors for learning, clean (metaphor-free) questions, clean set-up and clean feedback. We continue with how we went about engaging staff and students, some challenges, learning and the impact so far, and then end with a summary of how we will do things differently this year, knowing what we know now.

Professional Development Planning (PDP) has been an area of interest within the Sport Development (SD) programme at Liverpool John Moores University since the course started in 1999. There is an annual Level 1 intake of 90 students and average student retention of 96%. The university requirements are for just two PDP tutorials per year, but SD views PDP as central to student development and far exceeds this recommendation.

At Level 1, Sport Development PDP is part of a year-long module. The teaching is structured around whole group lectures one week, and then small group sessions with personal tutors in  the alternate weeks. Each member of staff has around 9 tutees and we believe that by sharing their goals, setbacks and successes students learn more and can become more supportive of each other. They complete an assessed reflective essay on their personal goals, their learning styles and their aspirations, plus four 5-minute verbal presentations during the year on different areas of their development.

Through working with external facilitators we have formed, challenged and re-formed our thinking and our process, borrowing tools and techniques from Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Symbolic and Systemic Modelling. The wider university is presently taking an employability approach to its curriculum design encouraging students to develop themselves as employable graduates. The PDP process we have developed strongly supports these aims.

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