Youth Development Insight

It takes a team

2013-05-29T17:17:44Z

In sports, we know that it takes a variety of skills to win, and a variety of players to make a team. So why do we measure the success of every student by comparing their scores on the same few tests, all of them cognitive?

We know intuitively that success, whether in school or life, depends on many factors -- intelligence, academic skills, personality, and relationships. Paul Tough calls this oversimplification of skills the cognitive hypothesis. It can cause us to ignore anything but math and reading scores in our push to close the achievement gap or create a work force for the 21st century.

]]> Research increasingly shows factors such as grit, self-control, the ability to work with others, and sense of self-efficacy are critical for success of many types (see for example the National Research Council's report Education for Work and Life. Yet we continue to seek to oversimplify what it takes to succeed.

Team sports are all around us. Even people who do not like sports hear about it. We need a frame that intuitively fits and is easily understand by many different people.

I think the metaphor of team sports is useful for framing the many ways that young people can learn and succeed:

It takes a team of skills -- Both winning and learning require a number of characteristics that work together. The balance of these strengths can vary from one player to another. Some have are good at reading, others can work very hard. A young person's overall success depends on the team of skills and attitudes they bring to life and learning.
It takes a team of players -- The parents, teachers, neighbors, and youth workers who help them practice success, expect it of them, and support them over the long haul act as a young learner's support team.
It takes a season -- In sports, one good game does not make a wining season. For youth, it is not about success on one test that matters most, but success in a variety of activities and challenges.
It takes a league -- a set of fans, rules and sponsors who help things come together so the games can go on. It is not left just to owners (school districts) or to the players unions (youth). Rather it is important enough that we work together to create mutually reinforcing efforts to make it happen -- much like cradle to career collective impact efforts try to do in communities.

If we thought more about success as a team sport we would make more progress. A team sport where we develop strong individual players who bring a team of their own skills and attitudes to the game, A team sport where we help players work together to achieve success. A team sport that has measures of success that are not dominated by only one perspective but add up across the season. A team sport that has the necessary coordination and integration to keep the enterprise of learning thriving in our communities.

In a few weeks I will have the great pleasure of becoming the Howland Endowed Chair for Youth Development Leadership here at the University of Minnesota. As I begin this year as endowed chair, I believe we will find ways to improve the chance for success for individuals and for the team.

What works or does not work for you about this analogy? Do you use a different metaphor for what it takes to support young people's success?

Dale Blyth, Extension professor, School of Social Work, College of Education and Human Development *

Who are the branches on your learning tree?

2012-09-05T13:07:31Z

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.

]]> These three events have me thinking about the many summers I spent growing up swimming, playing board games and baseball in my neighborhood in Illinois. Who were the people who made those learning opportunities possible? Who invested in making sure we had a pool and park with an open baseball field? I will probably never know.

Like a family tree, a learning tree would illustrate all the people who supported our learning throughout our lives. Who are the teachers -- formal, informal, family and non-family -- who have helped me to learn and develop as I have? Who opened up a whole new branch of learning to me? Whose excitement for learning was contagious? Whose challenge did I rise to meet?

Who are the people doing this in today's society and are we investing in them and their work? The evidence for supporting nonformal learning has been growing for years. Or are we perhaps pruning the learning trees of our children back too much?

Too often we take for granted the people on our learning tree. As a culture we even tend to make school this time of year less about the start of the learning season, and more about the loss of summer freedom and the buying of school supplies. But my daughter is a school principal and I can see her excitement for a new year and her effort to prepare the teachers, the building and the climate. It makes me thankful for people like her in many professions.

So as I begin this fall I hope you will join me in thanking the people in our lives and the lives of our children, grandchildren and the neighborhood children -- the people who help them learn whether in school or out of school, in math or in sports or in life. Let us recognize both the importance they played in our lives and the importance they are playing in the lives of all our children and youth. And as we switch seasons to new teachers and new youth workers and new opportunities this fall, let us thank those from the past as well as those taking on the role anew. Our biological family tree would not help us to be who we are without the many people who are branches in our learning tree.

Who are the members of your learning tree? What role are you playing as a branch in the learning tree of young people today? How well do you think we know and support our children's learning throughout their lives?

Dale Blyth, Extension professor, School of Social Work, College of Education and Human Development *

Hopes and fears for the use of evidence

2012-04-04T19:15:17Z

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.

]]> At a forum discussing program accreditation last week the group explored the ways we use evidence - whether from Consumer Reports or Trip Advisor on line reviews - before we invest. The more authoritative, simple and aligned with our values and questions the evidence is, the more useful. Questions here were about whether accreditation provides useful evidence and how the evidence would be gathered if there were an accreditation process. Also, what is the evidence that accreditation of programs improve quality or increase outcomes? What is the evidence that accreditation systems generate investments in a field and improve quality?

I put this question into historical perspective in a recent issue of the Journal of Youth Development (jump to page 167). This week I am in a work group of academic researchers examining how prevention science and developmental science can create a better evaluation model for youth programs and how we increase investments in the creation and use of such evidence.This summer, I will be in Ireland reviewing the evidence they have gathered to inform their new youth development and youth services national policy. What evidence will make the cut as strong enough? What will the evidence say or be unable to say? What impact will it have in their current political, economic, and practice contexts? All these opportunities to examine the role of evidence give me pause.

What do you worry about when it comes to the use of evidence in our field?

What do you hope evidence can do for our field?

-- Dale Blyth, director, Youth Work Insitute

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Intentionality means more than just paying attention to youth

2012-02-22T18:01:00Z

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.

]]> Intentionality, on the other hand, is purposeful. It has an end in mind. It is much more than simply paying attention to what is happening (though that is a critical foundation). Intentionality is about knowing what we want for young people and working to support their learning and development in purposeful ways.

Intentionality around and with youth means designing the contexts they experience. It means being deliberate about the way we interact with them. It means having expectations of them as well as expectations of what we do to encourage and enable them.

Intentionality requires not only focusing our attention but knowing where we are trying to go. And therein lies the dilemma - we do not have a shared sense of where we want to go with young people as a country. We need to create a clearer, shared vision of what it means to be Ready by 21 for work, college, and life.

Intentionality in youth development is not engineering. It cannot be directed like a construction project, where the look of the finished building is largely known before we start. It must be a much more dynamic intentionality, in which what we do at any moment as a parent or a youth worker builds upon and responds to where the young person is and what they are trying to accomplish. It is emergent. It is about supporting the development and intentionality of a young person in their own life as it evolves. It is about the supports and opportunities that increase the odds that young people will succeed.

I know of some excellent organizations that bring intentionality into focus: the Sprockets and Youthprise efforts here in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, Ready by 21 efforts nationally and Strive-like efforts underway in many cities. These organizations talk about what success for young people looks like, giving us a vision and goals, and ways to measure whether we are succeeding. They provide ways to get the collective impact that is so badly needed.

How can we shift from trying to get more attention paid to youth to becoming more intentional in providing opportunities and supports for young people and their development?

-- Dale Blyth, director, Youth Work Insitute

Remembering Peter Benson: May 2, 1946-Oct 2, 2011

2011-10-07T14:00:24Z

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.

]]> In the next decade Peter grew Search from 13 to 75 people and the assets from 30 to 40. More importantly, he laid the critical empirical foundation for a strength-based approach to youth, which he continued to champion with new ideas until his death last Sunday. From assets to sparks, Peter was a man of ideas and words -- words that moved you to do the right thing. He spoke from the heart and the head in ways I came to greatly admire. Peter perhaps did more than anyone else to bring positive youth development to communities, families, schools, and everyday people than anyone else. His most popular book, "All kids are our kids: What communities must do to raise responsible children and adolescents", sold hundreds of thousands of copies. Peter's passing is being noted in journals and the news media.

I will miss Peter's smile,charm and friendship but most importantly we will all miss his voice for young people -- and what we can each do to support the development of young people. Fortunately for the field and for the world, he leaves behind him ideas that have and will continue to inspired individuals, families, youth workers, foundations, communities, cities, states and even nations to do well by youth.

Thank you Peter for all you taught me and all you have given the world.

I invite you to share your stories of Peter's influence on your life and our field.

-- Dale Blyth, associate dean and director

Let's measure everything that matters

2011-09-21T17:00:33Z

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?

]]> I believe we do need to be accountable for our collective impact, not just our program and organizational impact. I also believe that we need a set of valued and visible measures for youth -- measures that:

are valued for what they do capture about youths' experiences while they are in those expanded learning opportunities
are visible to the public and remind people of how important and needed community learning opportunities are for our youth
include academic measures, but go beyond them
don't just talk about the size of the problems that youth have but the levels of engagement in their own learning and in our communities as well as the size of their contributions

One barrier is that these positives are considered hard to measure. For example, a colleague identified to me recently the importance that African American males place on feeling respected and that someone in their schools actually cares about their learning. This value is so great to them that when it is achieved, it is still hard to see or expect achievement as it is traditionally measured. The problem is that the gains these youth have toward feeling engaged and respected are regarded as "qualitative" and "anecdotal" - not measurable. But they are not anecdotal. They are measurable and meaningful in young people's lives. They are the types of measures we need to put into policy and change efforts.

Too often we are our own enemies in this regard. By talking about what we do as deeper and richer than something measures can capture we too often devalue the very things that do matter. Many of these elements are measurable. Many of them, if measured and held up as valuable for policy makers and citizens alike, could be changed if we work together.

I long for the day when we measure the success of our youth along their journey with measures that are rich and wonderful at capturing engagement in learning, contributions by youth, the level of socio-emotional growth as well as reading and math competency. I hope for the day that we find energy for action from knowing our young people miss the very strengths we want them to have, not just from fear of the drugs they use or their sexual activity or the lack of progress in test scores. I am all for accountability but let's at least be accountable for all of the things that really matter.

As a field we need to support measurement that matters, and not let our youth or schools or communities be defined as failing because of their math and reading numbers alone. If we do not want youth to become numbers only, perhaps ironically we need to know more about them as a whole. Are they engaged in their learning in life, not just in school? Do they know the sparks that drive them? Do the people in their life support and respect them?

What do you think are the measures that should get the same attention as reading and math scores or GDP in our state and national debates?

-- Dale Blyth, associate dean and director

The importance of measuring non-academic outcomes is the subject of a public symposium we will present on October 6. Learn more and register.

What does it mean to be driven by data?

2011-06-29T17:13:08Z

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.

]]> But the data driving these decisions, like many others, are a real mix -- some conscious and quantitative and some unconscious; some rational and some emotional. We drive differently when we are angry than when we are happy.

If youth work is to become a data-driven field, we had better make sure we know what that means and take a strong role in shaping the data available and how they are used.

In driving the field of youth work there are decisions at many levels. Decisions at the policy level about what we fund and support, how and for whom. Decisions on the system level about what quality looks like and who is qualified to practice. Decisions at the program level about what we offer and how it's designed. Decisions at the offering or activity level as a youth worker plans and executes part of a program. And then there are the decisions by each youth, which shapes the experience for themselves and for others.

As several new books point out, from David Brooks's The Social Animal to Incognito: The secrets of the Brain by David Eagleman -- we are learning that more and more of the data driving our decisions are collected and processed unconsciously -- not in some simple rational, conscious and largely cognitive ways.

Over the last few weeks I have had the pleasure of thinking about how we collect and use data on young people's learning, especially but not solely about non-formal learning in out-of-school-time opportunities. Data that can help us to drive decisions on what we do and how we do it with respect to the learning and development of young people.

Learning is about both the journey (the levels of quality in a program, a young person's engagement, and opportunities for youth to contribute) as well as how the journey helps youth get to critical destinations or outcomes.

What mix of data do you think should drive our field and the practice of youth work?

Dale Blyth, associate dean and director

Are we building a workforce, a profession, or a field?

2011-04-20T17:00:00Z

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.

]]> Do we want to be a workforce with multiple job categories and a checklist of the skills each should possess? Something that systems can support but also control, as Joyce discussed last week? Is that enough?

Do we want to be a profession with a defined body of knowledge and a set of values and ethics driven by both practice wisdom and research wisdom on what works and how? If so, are we professional front-line youth workers? Or are we professionals at many levels from part-time to full-time, from doers to managers and from program designers to system intermediaries?

Or do we really want to be a field -- a field with a set of workers of many different types in allied professions with various levels of competence and expertise, and who work together for the learning and development of our nation's children and youth?

Perhaps the real answer is D) all of the above. I believe that what we are really talking about is the breadth, depth, and differentiation of who we really are:

Breadth: We must include everyone in the community workforce who supports the development of our children and youth. Our field is broad and varied and we should claim that breadth.
Depth: What are the core competencies that bring us together and which we can begin to assess authentically, not as items to be checked off but as knowledge to be understood and a frame of mind about the very heart and nature of this work. A profession whose values and ethics unite us even as some of our skills and expertise varies in the content and context in which they are practiced.
Differentiation: We must recognize that we are a set of differentiated professions that share a common set of core competencies, values and ethics that drive our work and differing perspectives and skills. Perhaps we are a field of researchers, evaluators, educational designers, content translators, bridgers of research, practice and policy, organizational leaders, recreation workers, child and youth care workers, and afterschool professionals who enrich the developmental diet of young people in our communities and our nation, and work to ensure they have choices in how they exercise their learning muscles growing up.

Perhaps we are already a broad workforce with deep professional competence and expertise in an allied set of professions who make up a field that needs to understand itself -- to build an identity that is as broad, deep and differentiated as our reality.

What vision do you have for our field? What types of debates, decision, tools, and other actions will help us build our identity?

Dale Blyth, associate dean and director