Tims stuck a few thoughts down over on the NYA blogs about ‘Youth Work 2.0‘ and Hilary mentions in her blog that they are looking into ideas for a ‘Virtual Connexions Centre‘
I’ve been thinking about the concept too but haven’t yet come up with any ideas as to how an online youth service might actually look. Its easy to see how lots of information can be stuck online and lots of ways to support young people to access that information - whats not so easy though is to think of how a ‘virtual service’ could support young peoples development through their actions ie. not just digesting information but actually motivating and supporting them to do things that are self developmental, and of course being able to record those experiences and developments and attribute them to the online service.
The challenge that really interests me is in the use of the web as a ‘positive/purposeful activity’. Years ago when I started designing training courses for young people it was a challenge to convince people about the use of leisure/recreational activities within training courses and how these could be the most effective medium for getting young people involved in community activities. Looking back now it seems relatively simple but I was thinking about how I’d approached that as a challenge and whether a similar approach could be used here.
So very quickly I drew up some challenges that an online youth service could set out to achieve: Continue Reading »
We’ve just made a second resource available for free download and given it a makeover too!
Know Your Group Cards is a card based discussion activity designed to help groups discover the skills and qualities of members. The activity works best for groups that either already know each other or who have recently formed but members have some knowledge of each other.
The activity involves a self assessment sheet that allows each participants to rate their own various skills. There are then two sets of cards and the first set is placed in the middle of the group. Each member takes it in turns to take a card and then without anyone else seeing whats on the card they give ito to the person they think most appropriate.
After all the cards have been dished out the process is repeated with the second set of cards. When all cards have been allocated participants can look at the cards they have been issued and then if they wish they can choose to pass some on if they think they’re more appropriate for other members.
The activity is designed to provoke discussion and needs good facilitation, especially to be able to deal with situations where some members receive no cards (usually an indication this person isn’t well known rather than they have no skills!). The main purpose of the cards is to help groups consider what skills members have so that when they’re allocating tasks during activities and projects they put the skills available to the most effective use.
Know Your Group Cards can be downloaded for free from the Resources section.
Please note that to receive the free download you need to ‘checkout’ - you will then be sent a download link (please make sure you’re logged in to the resources section when you click the link).
Something thats been on my todo list for a long time is to write up some lesson plans for how to use some of our resources. I’ve now taken it off my list - not because I’ve done it but because I don’t intend to for the foreseeable at least.
It was towards the bottom of my list anyway, mostly because I wasn’t sure how much value they’d actually have - afterall each resource already has a written guide on how to use it. The lesson plans would have been more along the lines of helping people see how the use of the resources fit within whatever curriculum they were using it within. But having seen some of the teaching resources my wife has had available during her teaching practices I now thinking writing lesson plans would in some ways be supportive of something I’m in principal against - the accreditation culture. Continue Reading »
I’ve done quite a bit more on this but I’ve stopped myself because I’m sure other people will be wanting some flexibility and opportunities to be creative over the weekend - so hopefully I’ve now got a clear brief but not too rigid to allow for some further innovation.
You can read the brief in the attached pdf. The first page gives an overview of the purpose of the Personal Development Report concept, and this is followed by some ‘case studies’ illustrating how different people might use the system. I had quite a few further examples but I think this is enough to give people a picture.
So now its a case of taking along these ideas tomorrow and hoping that there will be a few people interested in developing the idea further. If so I think one of the interesting debates will be about which model to use for sustainability and I think there are several opportunities towards this (but I’ll save the discussion for the weekend!).
So fingers crossed that I’m lucky enough to meet up with some enthusiastic talented people (well I’m sure I will but lets hope they want to work on this idea!). Personally I can see all sorts of potential and there is a strong need for a system like especially if we can make the use of what technology has to offer now. I can also see a system like this paving the way for many similar ones by various award schemes etc.
I’ve been starting to pull ideas together for the Social Innovation Camp this coming weekend. I’m already to think the ‘Personal Development Reports‘ will be more of a ‘Soft Skills Plotter’ albeit the measurement of development over time is critical so hopefully a better name will come up in time.
For the concept to work there are two key factors - usability and credibility. Credibility will take some time but one of the main ways of achieving this will be through use so I’m very much hoping that over the weekend I’m lucky enough to get to work with technical people who are able to make very complex things very simple!
In terms of use I think those that will find the system most useful will be:
- Young People - becoming aware of their skills and feeling confident to talk about them
- Practitioners - measuring impacts of projects and comparing different the outcomes of different programmes and projects
- Employers & Educators - understanding what soft skills are and who has what
So we’ll need to understand what soft skills are too! And then having worked out what they are we then need to find a sensible way of helping people assess them over time (and in a way that they understand and enjoy).
This isn’t something new to me - our kind of work has far more outcomes in the soft skills area than anything else and its always been a frustration that its so difficult (and questionable!) to measure the ‘journey’ that people have gone on. If you ask yourself the question “what kind of a person was I five years ago and what skills have I developed during that time?” - its very difficult to answer other than in terms of hard skills & experiences “I was a Supervisor, now I’m a Manager” or “I completed my Diploma or I did a First Aid Certificate” - but this doesn’t give a real insight into the person you are and what you have to offer.
Anyway back to what those soft skills are. I’ve been building a list and Continue Reading »
I’m very pleased (and surprised) that an idea I submitted for ‘Personal Development Reports’ has been selected to be one of the ideas to be developed at the Social Innovation Camp next month in London. This convention has had a fair amount of positive publicity lately particularly on online media. It’s been mentioned numerously in passing in various forums with huge traffic, just a couple of days ago a long thread about this was posted on Pokerstars
You can read the details about what this is here (and please do add comments if you have suggestions for its use/development).
The concept is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time and is based on the booklets we use (details here) and also the Youth Awards site that we’ve been developing for some time (and still have a very long way to go!).
The Personal Record Cards we currently offer aren’t designed to be an assessment of young peoples skills - their purpose is to try and make young people aware of their personal skills and qualities and also to encourage adults working with them to have conversations about these things.
Now in theory the booklets could also be useful as evidence of young peoples learning/development - but to use them this way depends on young people using them honestly (and understanding the various ratings), and the supporting adult keeping good records.
An online version can take the principle of this idea much, much further. First of all the questions can be Continue Reading »
I’m in the process of updating our information sheets and along the way also giving some of our downloadable resources a makeover. We’re also making some of them free to download and heres the first one!
The ‘Group Rating Sliders’ are taken from a section on the Prospective Sheet. They are used for two reasons:
- To help young people understand what the qualities are of an effective group
- To help groups measure their own development as a group when involved in an activity or project
The download includes cards that groups can use to assess themselves at various stages during a project/activity. It also includes a facilitator guide that includes descriptions of the various qualities so that a facilitator can help participants understand the qualities when making their assessment.
The ratings are a self assessment and so can’t be compared Continue Reading »
Its a constant challenge for people working with young people in projects and activities to be able to prove the value of what they’re doing - especially if many of those benefits are in so called ’soft skills’ - things like confidence, working relationships, being organised etc.
They’re called soft skills but they’re towards the top of the list of things that employers look for, so they’re very important. We had the same issue for our Apprentice Trainer Programme - if you speak to the young people involved with that many of them will talk about all sorts of benefits the experience had for them - but we never had any way of measuring this - even the research that was done on the programme doesn’t really give a true picture.
A main feature of our Prospective resource is the process of linking up young peoples skills and interests with other peoples needs. Prospective ends with young people identifying various’ actions’ they would like to take, and these Actions can be group or individual actions. The Outline resource includes ‘Personal Record Cards’ - these are things we developed because we recognised that many youth workers weren’t taking advantage of the opportunities available during a project to help young people develop personally - there was a tendency to just see it as a ‘group thing’. So we developed Personal Record Cards to allow young people to give themselves Continue Reading »
