Youth Development Insight

By Mark Haugen How do you make your leadership decisions? There are almost as many decision-making methods as there are leadership styles. Some organizations expect or allow decisions to be made exclusively by an individual or small group of leaders. Some leaders do a group SWOT analysis, where insights are gained by reviewing the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats related to a needed decision.

By Jessica Pierson Russo Earlier this year, Extension Youth Development professionals from Minnesota and 11 other North Central states began to explore how to better invite and retain “first-generation 4-Hers.” This is especially important in light of racially-motivated violent events such as those that occurred within the past week in North Minneapolis. They are symptoms of a racial pathology that will continue to plague our country, as well as our youth programs, if we don’t do anything about it, and if we don’t talk about it.

By Nicole Pokorney Recently, while teaching a room full of youth workers, I was taken aback by a few early-career professionals who were struggling with why they were actually doing youth work. On the same day, I also met an older gentleman who was full of energy for working with youth after doing it for more than 30 years. What was the difference between them?  I believe it was passion and innovation. Through my work with Youth Engagement Matters , a curriculum developed by the University of Minnesota, I teach participants about the Rings of Engagement, which are participation, passion, youth voice and collective action. The course shows adults how to use the Rings of Engagement in their youth work practice.  The curriculum defines passion in this way: “Becoming engrossed in or passionate about something, and based on experiencing the activity itself as rewarding, regardless of outcome or external rewards.  Passion is marked by high levels of attention, concentration, enthusiasm a

By Sara Langworthy A few weeks ago, I attended the Children, Youth and Family Consortium’s Lessons from the Field event on coparenting and divorce. Researchers James McHale Ph.D. and Kathryn Edin Ph.D. talked about their work with divorcing and never married families and ways to promote high quality parenting that benefits children and youth. Their talks raised questions for me about what we’re doing in our Extension programming to support youth and their families, especially when parents are parenting apart.

By Kate Walker Our public symposium series is an opportunity to invite national experts to share the latest developments and discuss cutting-edge issues in the field of youth development. But there is plenty to learn from our own local scholars and practitioners as well.  At our upcoming symposium on Nov. 24, researchers will share data on how Minnesota youth are doing on a set of social and emotional learning (SEL) indicators and a panel of practitioners will share some promising programs and strategies from right here at home.

By Joshua Kukowski The White Earth Science and Math Academy day camp has been going on since 1999 and has had measurable success in both outcomes and in process. This year’s camp had a lack of centralized funding, creating a need for multiple groups to work together to put it on. This stimulated each partner to really identify their strengths and contribute what they could.

By Kathryn Sharpe What do these situations have in common: a youth worker addressing challenging behavior, a judge deciding on ribbons at the state fair and a hiring committee interviewing candidates? Answer: In each of these situations, people are making decisions based on both conscious and unconscious factors.  Neurosocial research is revealing that human beings are influenced constantly by both positive and negative subconscious associations about others, based on characteristics such as race, gender, age, weight, accents and many other aspects of our identity. This phenomenon is known as implicit bias and has significant implications in our behavior and judgments.

By Carrie Ann Olson Bombarded by advertisements of what to buy, media messages of how to look and peer pressure of what to do, responsible decision making can be tough stuff. Every day, youth are tasked with promoting their own health, avoiding risky behaviors and dealing honestly and fairly with others. That’s decision making – a social and emotional skill. Decision making can be defined as the process of making choices among possible alternatives . How can you help youth to have the skills for mastering this skill? There are many guides for you to use – including a new online course. The ability to make decisions and solve problems on the basis of accurately defining decisions to be made, generating alternative solutions, anticipating the consequences of each and evaluating and learning from one’s decision are skills that are considered important to effective decision making. Our youth programs should be learning labs of safe opportunities for youth to learn decision-making ski

By Amber Shanahan You may cringe when you think about negotiating, but I’m here to tell you that negotiation does not have to inherently apply to conflict or uncomfortable conversations. Negotiation is a powerful tool that can be used to ensure you’re utilizing all of your constituent’s assets to their full potential to best support the youth you serve. As a youth worker, you are one player on a field consisting of families, funders, policy makers, research experts and of course, youth. The goal of this team is to provide the most effective and appropriate services to your youth members, and each player provides differing levels of expertise and expectations. To navigate this sea of stakeholder expectations, youth work requires planning and negotiation. Negotiation is an interpersonal decision-making process necessary whenever we cannot achieve our objectives single handedly. Negotiation must happen in board meetings, with committees, with youth groups and with colleagues. So

By  Betsy Olson  and  Mark Haugen Each fall, leaders of youth organizations reflect on their successes, celebrate with award ceremonies and begin planning for next year. Injecting youth voice into your annual program planning and goal-setting process is critical as it increases the relevance of those goals or plans. Providing space and time for youth voice also works to engage young people. Once engaged, they are more successful at accomplishing goals and following through on plans.

By Molly Frendo As youth development professionals, we work hard to engage adult volunteers in meaningful long-term relationships with young people.  Research, particularly from the field of youth mentoring, indicates that youth whose relationship with an adult mentor lasts at least a year have more positive outcomes than those lasting less than a year. Anecdotally, we hear youth in the 4-H program share how their 4-H club leader has been an ongoing source of support for several years as they developed life skills and grew into adulthood. We know that strong youth-adult partnerships are essential to positive youth development and that those partnerships take time to nurture and grow. At the same time, in the field of volunteer systems management, the trends are showing that individuals are still volunteering at similar rates; however, they are looking to make shorter commitments and work within flexible schedules. According to experts like Tom McKee and Susan Ellis , cultural

Are you trying to reach new communities with your youth programs? Early in my career, I came to understand that what draws young people to programs is adults that take a genuine interest in them. Building a genuine, positive relationship with a young person takes time and patience. One of the most effective ways to make it happen is through youth-adult partnerships.

By Darcy Cole If you have worked in youth development for long, you probably have encountered at least one youth who seems “unique”. You might not know exactly why he or she is different, but you know for some reason she is. That something may be called autism.

By Rebecca Meyer Isis Wenger, creator of the #ILookLikeAnEngineer  campaign How do we engage women in productive science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers when stereotypes run so deep?  A recent ad campaign by a company recruiting engineers ignited a social media dialogue about sexism in the tech industry and what people believe engineers should look like.  One of the ads featured a female engineer, which elicited sexist comments in social media.

By Joanna Tzenis Many young people aspire to go to college, but there’s a gap between aspirations for higher education and actually enrolling. This is an important gap to address because lower levels of educational attainment are associated with higher levels of poverty. Here are the numbers: In the U.S. in 2011, a higher percentage of young adults without a high school diploma (31 percent) were living in poverty than those who had completed high school (24 percent) and those who had earned a bachelor’s or higher degree (14 percent) (U.S. Department of Education, 2011).

By Sara Langworthy Online video is ubiquitous for watching and sharing content – especially for young people. In fact, many youth are watching more free online video content (11.3 hours per week) than traditional TV (8.3 hours per week). A recent survey by Defy Media suggests that younger viewers find YouTube content more entertaining than traditional TV shows and they are more likely to view YouTube creators as role models than TV stars.

By Carrie Ann Olson The summer schedule for young people can be full of adventure, curiosity and exploration. On the other hand, the lack of structure can cause boredom and lack of motivation. Youth practitioners may find it hard to come up with appealing activities non-formal learning environments that foster education and career success, healthy relationships and engaged citizenship. Recently my colleague Kate Walker blogged about research that shows how integrating specific strategies and practices into existing curriculum can support Social and Emotional Learning (SEL). One of the key strategies is to design impactful learning experiences.  Programs that focus on specific skill development using sequenced and active learning strategies, as well as focused and explicit skill content, consistently succeed in promoting social emotional learning.   A new report by the Wallace Foundation  called Foundations for Youth Adult Success: A Developmental Framework, stresses that “Expe

By Trudy Dunham My colleague Jennifer Skuza's new profile photo. Did you add a rainbow to your Facebook profile photo last week?   Did you think twice before making your decision? Was it a risky choice for you? Did you think of it as a meaningful action? Following the  Supreme Court decision on June 26  that same-sex marriage is a constitutional right, more than a million Facebook users changed their profile images in celebration. We don’t know how many viewed that action as risky . Likely fewer than those who changed their profiles in March 2013 to the red "equals" sign, the logo of the Human Rights Campaign, which was an early demonstration of widespread support for same-sex marriage. Using social media as a forum for one’s civic activism has been denigrated as clickactivism and slacker-activism -- an easy, no-cost, low-effort, almost meaningless action. One click and you’re done. I agree it is easier – especially for those with busy lives, or who live in co

By Pamela Larson Nippolt Today, youth workers are expected to be social innovators. Francis Westley teaches us about the place for  bricolage in designing innovative programs that address critical issues facing youth. Bricolage is the “DIY” of program design or, as defined by Merriam-Webster dictionary, “construction (as of a sculpture or a structure of ideas) achieved by using whatever comes to hand; also something constructed in this way.”

By Trish Olson , Extension Center for Family Development This post first appeared in Family Matters , the newsletter of the Extension Center for Family Development . Hot Buttons from Cultures Connecting. Have you ever attended a conference where, when someone asks you afterward “What did you learn?” you drew a blank? Such was not the case with the Children, Youth, and Families at Risk (CYFAR) conference I attended in Washington, D.C. last week.

By Jessica Pierson Russo I’ve been thinking about curiosity and how to spark it. My colleague Anne Stevenson recently asked why the innate skill of asking questions tends to drop off as we move through school and into careers. This prompted me to look a bit more deeply into how we can more intentionally develop curiosity as a skill in our youth programs.

By Jennifer Skuza There is something so rewarding about seeing your name in print as an author. You may think about youth continuously, do the work every day, hone your practice and even conduct applied research but even so, when you publish, you receive validation from peers that shows your work contributes to the field of youth development.

By Nancy Hegland “What do you want to study after high school?” “What career do you want to pursue?” As a junior high student, I clearly remember being asked to write a paper on these questions and researching the details of being a dental hygienist, which seemed very interesting at the time. That idea eventually faded, and in the years that followed, many mentors guided me, even though I wasn’t sure where I was headed and whether I could make it in college.

By Kathryn Sharpe “I have a group of Muslim youth who won trips to the state fair—what kind of religious accommodations will they need?”  This is a question that I asked myself last summer. It’s an example of the kind of question all youth workers must ask themselves if they want to make their programs more welcoming to non-traditional audiences.

By Amber Shanahan A passion for youth work is often what drives us to join this profession. We love young people and feel enriched by the rewards of helping them to become the best person they can be. But our passions can get derailed by politics. It might be a power struggle between passionate volunteers, or the meddling of an influentially connected parent, or the fickleness of a funder attracted to another cause. Politics can kill your passion for youth work, making it feel more exhausting than empowering. How can we turn these situations around to create forward momentum? It can be done. In fact, you can use power struggles to demonstrate effective leadership with youth. High-quality youth development programs have democratic features embedded into their frameworks: active engagement, encouragement, and collaboration, to name a few. We often limit our thinking around program quality to how these attributes will effect youth, but what if we applied it to the political cl

By Kate Walker How exactly does learning unfold in youth programs? They are a particularly rich context for young people to learn and practice social and emotional learning skills. It is critical that we understand how learning happens there, and how we as adults can support that process. Youth in our programs often engage in real-world activities and projects, work in teams, take on meaningful roles, face challenges and experience the accompanying up and downs.

By Hui-Hui Wang When you think about engineering, do you first think of machines and buildings? People rarely associate engineering with the natural world. You may think it’s hard to design a youth program that combines engineering design and environmental or nature components. It is a challenge but it’s worth doing because of the thinking skills that youth can get from these activities. I am leading a science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) youth program that focuses on native pollinators. Recently we asked a group of middle school youth to examine different flowers and write down their observations, such as the shape, smell, size and color of the flowers. Then, we introduced the concept of pollinators and different type of pollinators -- bees, bats, mice, flies, butterflies, birds and so on.  We asked them to design a flower that attracts the most pollinators. Next, they designed a pollinator that is attracted to that flower. We asked them to consider why the pollinators

By Betsy Olson Searching through childhood pictures of a clowning workshop I attended as an eight-year-old, I have strong, happy memories of our tumbling presentation, with my parents laughing in the audience. These memories resonate with me as I prepare for an upcoming youth leadership presentation, and have me thinking about how to evaluate brief programs. Measuring impressions from them can be tricky. However, keeping a few considerations in mind can simplify the process of evaluating brief programs – defined as those lasting fewer than eight hours.

By Judith Conway Collaboration should be the way we do business for young people. We know that no one youth program can support every child’s needs and engage youth from every background. But by working in collaboration with other programs, we can bring our commitment to enriching the lives of young people to even more of them.

By Cynthia Matthias Who do young people confide in? Do they ever talk about setting goals, managing emotions, or understanding other people’s perspectives? Young people will be most impacted by the policies concerning the teaching and assessment of SEL skills in schools and in out-of-school-time programs, yet their thoughts on the topic have not been heard. The YouthVoice project research team, an intergenerational group convened in collaboration with Youthprise,  is working to remedy this situation.

By Joshua Kukowski I had my first “pay it forward” experience at a coffee shop recently and I was confronted with a choice: should I continue the trend?   I had no scientific evidence that paying it forward to the next coffee drinker would be a good thing to do. I just knew.  I bought the next person a cup of coffee. Mentoring is like that. There are now 15 years' worth of research proving that mentoring helps young people succeed.  But mentors do it because they just know.

By Anne Stevenson “What’s the most powerful question you know?” Children ask hundreds of questions a day as soon as they can speak. But in grade school, questioning “drops off a cliff,” according to data from the  2009 U.S. Nations Report Card. Why does this innate skill fall away as we move through school and into careers? If curiosity and the ability to ask good questions are essential to innovation and problem solving, why aren't we putting more emphasis on fostering and utilizing this essential, innate ability? How would you answer this question? This week is Question Week 2015 , a week ( and a great site! ) dedicated to inspiring more of us to become good question-askers! Various thought leaders in business, media, and psychology respond to this question on a fascinating website I recently viewed. Journalist and author Warren Berger has zeroed in on the power of questioning in our lives. He has interviewed and studied hundreds of the world's leading innovators

By Margo Herman The simplistic answer to the question is that a high-quality youth program provides an environment conducive to developing social and emotional skills. Yet simplistic does not reflect the depth of the question. Researchers are immersed in defining the compatibility and the distinction in these two key areas of youth work practice. And practitioners naturally want to know more about how we will measure these outcomes and if measures for both SEL and program quality will be compatible.

By Joshua Rice “When am I ever going to use this in real life?” If you're an educator working with youth, you've probably heard this question, usually when they're faced with a complex equation, a problem-solving scenario, or are asked to read, remember, and recall information. Agriculture educators have an advantage answering this question. They can simply reply, "Every day."

By Darcy Cole Schools work hard to serve special needs students, but can youth programs say that they do the same? In the public school system, formal individualized education plans (IEPs) outline the supports that will ensure the success of special students. But youth programs don’t have IEPs.

To make sense of the emerging field of social and emotional learning (SEL), we developed a model we call Ways of Being. It paints a picture of the whole social and emotional learner, describing the attitudes, skills, and behaviors that exist within a person who is socially and emotionally competent. The model describes dynamic, interactive ways of being that exist in three layers -- identity, awareness, and navigation and three dimensions -- ways of feeling, ways of relating to others, and ways of doing.

If you are working with youth, you are probably working youth whose families have sought refuge in the U.S. They may not tell you their stories, but you can learn more about the refugee experience -- and you should -- to create more effective learning spaces for them and for all young people in your program. More than 50 million citizens across the globe were forcibly displaced from their homes in 2014, the highest number of refugees and internally displaced people since 1994. More than half of them were under the age of 18.

A leader needs to be trusted. Trust is an important element of the work I do with members of the community. But why should they trust me and the organization I represent? I wish that everyone saw me as I see myself; someone who is worthy of their complete trust. Sadly, I'm not a perfect leader, and like all leaders, have been in situations where people don't trust me fully. Not one of us is perfect. The truth is that in educational, non-profit and community settings there are people who don't know us or our programs, well enough for them to trust. As full time, part time, paid or volunteer leaders of programs we need to invest our time in developing and maintaining the trust of others.

A New York Times opinion piece published this week is titled, "Can we teach personality?" This is the wrong question in so many ways. First, it's not about teaching personality but helping to equip youth with the skills they need in life - academic, social and emotional. These skills can be learned and should be -- not as a one size fits all or by forcing everyone into one mold. Rather, they should be taught as tools that can be used in navigating learning and life. They also are, and need to be, taught by parents and expanded community learning opportunities. Like all skills important in life, we cannot and should not leave it to schools alone to help equip our young people.

What does it mean to be ready? According to the dictionary readiness means "the state of being fully prepared for something". As we approach each day or stage in our development are we in a state of readiness? Are we or the youth we work with ever "fully prepared" for what is going to happen? OK, maybe not fully prepared but at least prepared to take on the challenges ahead and make the most of the opportunities for learning in front of us. Prepared to try, fail, and try again. We talk often these days about helping our children be ready for kindergarten or maybe ready for college. The Forum for Youth Investment talks about Ready by 21 - ready for work, college and life. But what does it really mean to be ready? And when we say ready do we mean ready in all the ways that matter - ready cognitively but also socially and emotionally?