Reference no: EM132725249

Assessment Task - Physical environment project

Task summary
You are required to participate in a meeting with their colleagues that will explore and then decide on changes to the College's physical environment that will support innovation. You will then carry out the changes and then evaluate their effectiveness.

Complete the following activities:

1. Prepare for a meeting with your colleagues.
In the next activity, you will meet with your colleagues, looking at ways that you can alter the learning environment in your RTO to better support innovation.

Prepare for this by taking a good look at your learning environment. Think about the aspects of the RTO that encourage innovation and those that don't.

The meeting will be held in an innovative style: there will be no chairperson, and no-one will lead the meeting. All decisions will be reached by consensus decision-making, not a "yes or no" vote. Do some research on consensus decision-making so you can participate fully in the meeting.

Your Assessor will observe all participants during the meeting.

2. Conduct a brainstorming and idea evaluation session.
The meeting will last for a maximum of 30 minutes.

There will be no chairperson for this meeting Your group of students is required to meet and reach the meeting's objectives together without any one person leading the meeting.
It is very important that each member of your group is given the chance to give their input on every idea that is proposed at the meeting, and that each idea or suggestion is acknowledged by all students.

There are two main objectives for the meeting. The first part of the meeting involves generating innovative ideas for changes to your RTO's physical environment to better support innovation
In a second step, the ideas will be evaluated among the group, and the most effective idea(s) will be selected and carried out. Each member of the group should be allocated at least one activity to carry out.

Begin by letting each person give their evaluation of the impact of the RTO's current physical environment in relation to innovation. Then, as a group, discuss the aspects of the present RTO environment that encourage innovation and those that don't.

The next part of the meeting requires your group to conduct a brainstorm to generate ideas that would encourage creative mindsets, collaborative working and the development of positive workplace relationships.
These may involve your working station, the rooms of your RTO, or the ways that you work together with your colleagues.

Use the whiteboard to record all the ideas that are generated during the brainstorming session.

After 10 minutes of brainstorming, stop the process and look at all of the suggestions that have been generated.

Your group should then have a discussion that evaluates each idea. Participants should evaluate each idea in terms of:
• Practicality
• Cost-effectiveness
• Potential for supporting innovation
• Physical resources and equipment required
• Risks involved

Keep in mind that, in the next activity, you will have to actually make the change(s) to your work environment decided on during the meeting. And following that, your intervention(s) are then going to be evaluated by yourself and your colleagues.

There is, therefore, a certain amount of risk involved with carrying out the tasks that the group decides on. There is a risk, for example, that your intervention will be evaluated negatively by other students or staff who work at the RTO, which may generate social stigma. There is also a risk that your intervention could be seen as offensive by others who may be from a different cultural background to you. You should therefore consider the potential risks involved in carrying out the change(s) to your work environment before you agree to undertake them.

Highlight any potential risks when an idea is being discussed.

Ensure that you acknowledge suggestions, improvements and innovations from all colleagues

During the meeting, you are also required to demonstrate effective communication skills including:
• Speaking clearly and concisely
• Using non-verbal communication to assist with understanding
• Asking questions to identify required information
• Responding to questions as required
• Using active listening techniques to confirm understanding

3. Write a Workplace Innovation Report.
In this report you will evaluate the changes that you and your colleagues intend to make to the RTO environment.

Your report will need to:
• Describe and evaluate your RTO's facilities and how their appearance and function encourage or restrict individual and collective innovative thinking and creativity.
• Describe the actions that were decided on to promote innovation to students and staff at your RTO
• Identify and assess the resources that will be needed for the innovation actions to occur. These should be readily available in the RTO.
• Analyse potential barriers and risks to the innovation actions and devise strategies to respond to these.
• Determine the most appropriate means to promote the transfer of knowledge about innovation to students and staff at your RTO.
• Include an action plan that will document the actions to be carried out

Use the Workplace Innovation Report Template to guide your work. 

4. Apply strategies to encourage innovation in the workplace.
Make the changes to your workspace that were decided on at the meeting you conducted in the previous activity.

5. Write an innovation evaluation report.
In this report you will evaluate the changes that you and your colleagues have made to the environment.
Your report should:
• Describe the feedback that you have received about the actions and your opinion of them.
• Suggest how the actions could be improved on in the future.
• Reflect on your own performance during this assessment task and suggest at least two ways that it could be improved
Use the Workplace Innovation Evaluation Report Template to guide your work.

6. Send an email to your assessor.
The text of the email should be in grammatically correct English, written in an appropriate (polite, business-like) style.