Activity Based Training for Young People - Making it Worthwhile

November 5th, 2007 by mas | Filed under Courses & Events.

When we first started designing training programmes for young people one of our biggest concerns was to make the courses practical - we didn’t want to hear comments about our courses being “too much like school!” (funny that this is actually used as a criticism!)

What we didn’t want to do though was end up running activity breaks. PGL and Outward Bound are brilliant experiences but this isn’t what we were aiming to be. Our main objective was to support young people to organise community activities and projects and so a degree of planning was inevitable and so therefore was a some paperwork.

So our challenge was to provide ‘real training’ including some paperwork, but to keep an overall practical feel to the experience.

I’d been on, and seen lots of ‘youth training’ (or training for young people) and largely the tactic used seemed to be to balance traditional types of training with some ice breaker type games. The problem with this approach is that sometimes the ‘games’ become a distraction or they end up taking up too much time (and time is precious on residential courses).

Initially we attempted things in a similar method although we tried to keep the ‘games’ within the theme of the training - for example on environmental courses we would do activities that allowed participants to ‘appreciate the environment’ like abseiling and raft building. The problem with activities like these is that while they’re brilliant fun they don’t actually provide people with anything they can take home and use (unless they plan to abseil instead of using the stairs or travel to school by raft!). I know some will argue that they provide ‘confidence’ and ‘leadership’ skills but personally I think this is a bit loose - claiming that throwing someone off a cliff a couple of times will change their personality is a bit far fetched (and it used to be my job to throw people down abseiling walls!)

Qualities like ‘confidence’ and ‘leadership’ are very important though and we did want to include these as core aims within our training activities. At the same time we wanted to make sure everything we did on courses was replicable - they should be activities that participants could actually do themselves and therefore needed to be affordable, low or no risk and not require specialist skills to lead.

So that was challenge number 1! Challenge number 2 was incorporating the paperwork. We tried lots of ways of ‘hiding’ the paperwork in between practical activities but found this caused frustrations because people would lose their concentration or become distracted with the breaks and practical activities. The next thing we tried involved a pink talking teddy bear which whilst amusing was a technical nightmare and failed the ‘replicable & affordable’ test. Along the way though what we did end up doing was designing some good ‘tools’ that made the paperwork flow better and allowed large groups to interact well throughout and I’ve since published some of these as training resources. What we really learned from the teddy bear, is that what mattered was that if the young people were genuinely interested in the project they were planning, and that the person supporting them was enthusiastic about it.

Well it took quite a few years to get to the point where we felt our training was practical, was purposeful and was replicable. But we did achieve it and heres a few things we learned along the way:

Teambuilding doesn’t have to mean adventurous activities - low and no risk activities can be just as effective at developing confidence, group work, leadership, cooperation and communication skills
Low and no risk activities can also be exciting and fun - it’s all to do with how they’re presented & facilitated
You don’t need to hide or shy away from paperwork - you do need to make sure paperwork is relevant and that its well facilitated
It is possible to design practical courses where all the activities are relevant - it just takes a lot of planning and practice, but this is well worthwhile as it makes every experience a useful one

We also learned one more very crucial thing thats been critical to the development of YoMo. When we set about working out how to make training activities “affordable, low or no risk and not require specialist skills to lead” - we also realised we could train up young people to lead these activities!