Occupational Safety and Health Training and Development

Occupational Safety
Name
Institution
Employees have the responsibility of ensuring that they safely perform the assigned tasks while complying with the company’s existing health and safety regulations. They need to identify, as well as familiarize themselves with their working areas’ safety standards and emergency plan. One way of making sure employees know how to handle equipment is through active learning. Generally, active learning is defined as any method that is instructional in a way that it engages learners in the process. This method necessitates the learner to do “meaningful learning activities” and think about what they are undertaking. While the basic definition may include conventional activities such as in practice and homework, “active learning” refers to elements of activities that get introduced into the learning process. The core aspects of “active learning” include the learners’ engagement and activity in the process. This type of learning is often compared to the conventional lecture where learners receive information passively from the instructor.
Group and individual active learning activities may be incorporated and utilized into “safety training course on machine guarding.” The activities in this kind of learning encourage the learners to participate actively and in the enhancement of learning experience through allowing the learners to be actively engaged in the entire process. Participants are also provided with an opportunity to apply learned information, asking questions and for the instructor to check and confirm participants’ learning objective and understanding of the material.

Use of active learning activities comes with benefits such as increased motivation besides increased retention and transfer of newly learned information.
Being that some jobs are dangerous and others are safe, it is, therefore, important to provide health and safety training in a workplace. It is imperative to provide health and safeties training in the workplace since not all jobs are safe, some are dangerous. Health and Safety training is essential since some people work in dangerous places and others work in safe places.
According to Boud, peer learning basically refers to “students learning with and from each other as fellow learners without any implied authority to any individual, based on the tenet that Students learn a great deal by explaining their ideas to others and by participating in activities in which they can learn from their peers” (Boud, 2001). Information technology today has provided learners with admirable opportunities to gain knowledge without the need of an instructor to transmit information. This hence necessitates a paradigm shift from the traditional instructor-centered to a student-centered education where learners are expected to take greater conscientiousness and initiative in managing more of their own education and learning development. In peer learning, “students will construct their own meaning and understanding of what they need to learn. Essentially, students will be involved in searching for, collecting, analyzing, and evaluating, integrating and applying information to complete an assignment or solve problems. Thus, students will engage themselves intellectually, emotionally and socially in constructive conversation and learn by talking and questioning each other’s views and reaching consensus or dissent” (Boud, 2001).
Besides the acquisition of content knowledge, peer learning, particularly in classroom training fosters and nurtures the development of teamwork, interpersonal and communication skills, problem-solving and critical thinking skills, learning through critical reflection, peer and self-assessment. Besides the above, peer learning can be used to enhance self-directed learning skills which in turn lay a foundation for continuing self-education.
References
Boud, D. (2001). Making the move to peer learning. Peer learning in higher education: Learning
from and with each other, 1-21.