Results tagged “Dale Blyth”

As fall starts, three unrelated events have caused me to wonder about how well we know and support our children's learning throughout their lives.

Event 1: Last night I was playing around on ancestry.com and saw my family tree filling in before me. I learned things about my family tree that I hadn't known before.

Event 2: My oldest granddaughter starts school this fall and her parents decided to home school her for kindergarten. Where are my son and his wife going to find 30 hours a week to devote to her learning and development, I wondered? Thinking about this made me realize just how much work it takes to be a teacher and how much time and support they give our children. Upon reflection, I am excited by the new opportunities that role can provide and my roles as a grandparent in helping her find joy in learning and develop the skills so essential in life.

Event 3: The Minnesota State Fair ended last weekend and with it all the 4-H projects and ribbons, summer camps and myriad other summer learning opportunities young people have. As always, 4-H learning was very much in evidence at the fair.

In March and April my schedule has me in multiple conversations about evidence. What is the evidence for the impact of out of school time programs? How do we generate better evidence? How does one organize evidence to make it useful? How do we invest in creating, gathering, and using evidence? How should evidence guide further investments in our field? To what extent does money flow to where evidence is strong or stop when evidence is weak?

At the recent Mayoral Summit here in Minnesota, mayors and others learned about the evidence that youth opportunities work, to what extent young people are participating, and the nature of the opportunity gap as a supply problem, not a demand problem. Many attendees wanted more evidence about opportunities in their communities, evidence that what mayors can do will matter, and evidence that if we build it, youth will come.

For years I have talked about becoming more intentional about how we think about and work with youth. Too much of our efforts often go to trying to get attention for youth and the issues that impact their lives, and not enough goes into being intentional about our work on their behalf.

Paying attention means selectively narrowing or focusing consciousness to sort out what is important. Paying more attention to youth may help us spend more time thinking about them but it does not help us act more effectively without a clearer purpose or goal in mind. Paying attention to our children is helpful, it is not enough.

Youth development lost a champion this week. I first met Peter Benson in the early 1980s in Arizona at one of the first adolescent research meetings. I remember his bright boyish charms even then. He had just conducted a seminal study of early adolescents and was humble and eager to learn. We next met in Chicago in 1990 when he was presenting publicly for the first time on the developmental assets. Here was a man saying what youth needed positively in their lives -- not just trying to understand their development or count their problems.

I was quite taken by him and by his work and soon joined him at Search Institute as the director of research and evaluation. I remember my family having dinner with his family as we moved to Minneapolis and feeling I had found a soul mate. We joked and told stories with our families. I never felt more instantly at home than I did that night.

What outcomes do we want for our children and youth? What outcomes can we expect from expanded learning opportunities during the non-school hours?

What we measure and hold up now is pretty limited -- test scores, drug use, cheating on tests. Sometimes we get stuck in the mode of just using the data we have, even when they are not the measures we need. How many times are we forced to consider how well our youth are doing by just looking at deficits or test scores rather than strengths?

From evidence-based practice to data-driven decision making, the role of data in driving everything forward is becoming omnipresent. As a recovering quantitative sociologist this excites me. As a person devoted to building the field and making a difference in the lives of youth it raises both opportunities and concerns.

Like driving a car, youth work is a navigational sport filled with hundreds of decisions on a moment-by-moment basis. Whether it is the development of the field of youth work or the development of a young person, we process thousands of bits of data to make decisions.

What is our vision of ourselves? What do we in the youth development, out-of-school-time, non-formal learning field want to become?

During discussions at the National Afterschool Association Annual Convention in Orlando, Fla., a weekend of great sessions and discussions about the future of the youth worker workforce sponsored by the Next Generation Youth Work Coalition, part of a series of critical conversations that started back last fall at the History of Youth and Community Work Conference I was struck by these most basic questions.