Youth Development

The goals of youth in care

As part of the Lean Startup for Social Enterprise course that I took through Be Social Change, I started conducting customer development interview with youth in care. This exercise forced me to step back from all the generally positive feedback I’ve had from social workers, child welfare administrators, and other adults in the youth development space to ask a more fundamental question: Will the youth themselves find my programs useful?

So far I’ve interviewed three young people either in care or recently aged out to determine how they set goals for themselves, what internal qualities they possess to help them along, and what other tools and supports they have to reach their goals.

My conversations with them tended to meander, but I was able to gather a lot of knowledge and insight from each young person I spoke to. Already there are some common themes emerging. Note that this is a totally unscientific study with a tiny sample size, but what I learned seemed worth sharing:

1. Young people in foster care develop systemic thinking skills early on. Because they are exposed to the workings of a massive bureaucracy that impacts their daily lives, youth in care know where the pain points are. They see exactly where all the moving parts fail to connect because a lack of communication and coordination. And they sense the irony of how a system meant to serve the interests of children can come woefully short of its goals.  (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Bill Gates on student curiosity

People who are as curious as I am will be fine in any system. […] Unfortunately, the highly curious student is a small percentage of the kids.

—Bill Gates

Every day I have to remind myself that people on all sides of the education debates really do have students’ interests at heart, and that differences in opinion stem from the fact that we don’t all agree on the purpose of education, and moreover, that educating as immense and as heterogeneous a population as ours in the United States is a complex problem that invites us to rehearse a great variety of solutions, many of which are at odds with each other. Sometimes, though, someone makes a remark that strikes me as so deeply wrong and offensive, that it bears calling out.

Bill Gates, who has managed to insert himself into the national conversation on education in spite of his lack of experience in managing a classroom full of kids on a daily basis, believes that only a small percentage of kids are highly curious, and that we therefore need to create for them a more restrictive learning system than the one that gave him free rein to explore his interests to great success.

Pretend we’re in my classroom and let’s “unpack” Gates’s statement. First of all, how does he define curiosity and how does he know that only a small percentage of kids are highly curious? More importantly, why is it that the highly curious student is a rare phenomenon?

I assume that Bill Gates has spent a significant amount of time in the presence of toddlers. Anyone who has knows that, unless toddlers suffer from serious developmental cognitive disabilities or are neglected and abused (more on that later), they are all naturally curious. Curiosity, let’s be clear, is a strong desire to learn and know, rooted in a sense of wonder and awe about the world. Children are born to love learning, because learning is vital to survival.

I read somewhere that the infant who repeatedly tosses his food off his tray to the ground is conducting two experiments at once: one in physics, and another in human behavior. Down goes the apple slice, and off Mommy goes to retrieve it. Curiosity is not exceptional in the very young. At a tender age, learning is play.

Something must happen along the way, however, because anyone who has stood before a classroom full of kids knows that there are a certain few who approach learning playfully, while others view it as complete drudgery. What happened to the latter? Bill Gates either assumes that some people are born with numb minds or (I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here) that the natural store of curiosity present at infancy has been depleted in the greater part of the population. Either way, though, the solution he proposes is to reinforce a two-tier education system, where the mass of kids who either aren’t “curious” or wealthy enough to get into private schools get stuck in a public system where teachers have very little liberty to pursue their intellectual projects, let alone determine how they might serve the individual interests and needs of a very diverse classroom.

What about trying to figure out how all these children lost their natural curiosity? (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Someone must light a fire

Life’s mountain top work is helping a young person have a better life. _________________ Effective programs for young people and families do not happen by spontaneous combustion; someone must light a fire. —Dr. Michael A. Carrera, Lessons for Lifeguards: Working with Teens When the Topic is Hope With anxieties running high Read more…

By Ysette, ago

Know your story, and edit regularly

Yesterday I wrote that the notion of “staying true to yourself” is overrated, but you didn’t think I’d really leave it at that, did you? The point I’m really driving at is this: knowing your story, and being open to editing it, is the most important personal skill to develop. Being able to communicate it to others is a close second. This has been weighing on my mind a lot lately because it’s an idea that I see surfacing in so many different areas. Lately I’ve been reading texts in social entrepreneurship, marketing, and various psychological fields, and the same questions repeatedly arise: What is your story? How did you get to where you are right now? Why do you do what you do?

The skill entails being able to integrate the significant elements of your life and personality into a meaningful and compelling narrative. Not only can you appeal to others more powerfully through the magic of storytelling, but you can live your life more authentically and freely when you know what drives you (to positive and negative behaviors), what has shaped your fundamental outlook, what you believe and cherish most deeply, and so on. You can see how this would be immensely useful not only in defining and marketing your enterprise, but defining and marketing yourself professionally and socially.

But that is only part of the exercise. The second half is being able to recognize when the story you’ve been telling about yourself (both to yourself and others) no longer fits or needs to change. We can’t alter the facts of our past, but we can always reinterpret them through a new lens. A slight shift in the present can bring into view possible selves that we had never been able to imagine. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Staying true to yourself is overrated

This is especially true if your sense of identity has never been thrown into crisis and is largely in line with the outlooks and values that you grew up with. Adolescents necessarily go through a period of “identity crisis” as a result of the changes in their bodies, hormones, and brain development. One of the great lessons of developmental psychologist Erik Erikson is that this crisis period is an optimal time to explore one’s identity: to question their morals, preconceptions, roles, and relationships, and to arrive either at a renewed commitment to those principles, perspectives, etc. or to form new ones. This phenomenon is called “identity achievement.” At the opposite end of the spectrum is “identity foreclosure,” where individuals have a high level of commitment to their self-concept with a very low level of exploration.

An example of a foreclosed individual is the person who joins the family business or enters his father’s profession with nary a consideration of alternative paths. The danger, of course, is a mid-life crisis. Adolescent expert Susan M. Kools has shown that youth in foster care are especially vulnerable to identity foreclosure, since they are pushed into adulthood earlier than their peers.

It sounds counter-intuitive—even irresponsible or heretical—to suggest it, but what if we took a step back from pushing our young people to commit immediately and steadfastly to their goals, and instead encouraged them to look more deeply into themselves, and explore their options more broadly?  (more…)

By Ysette, ago

(Love) letters of evaluation

One of the most pleasurable parts of my job is being able to write letters of evaluation for each of the youth in the mentoring group I work with. The idea didn’t come to me because I had an immediate desire for “assessment.” To be honest, I got into this line of work partly because grading and putting numbers on people are activities that don’t appeal to me. The letters of evaluation grew organically out of the spectacular results from the first workshop I ran with the group. Technically, I can’t say that the youth “exceeded my expectations,” because I had gone into the mentoring group without any points of reference at that stage of my program development, and I barely knew anything about anyone in the group. But they certainly bowled me over with their level of engagement and with their ability to grapple with concepts that I had learned as a college undergrad.

If you’re an educator you’ll understand me when I say I was flying high from the experience even the day after. I couldn’t stop thinking about their projects, so I opened up a Word document and just started writing to each of them. I tentatively emailed them to the program coordinator just to make sure that it was appropriate to send them the letters, and she responded with absolute glee. She said that most of her young clients have never received letters in the mail, so getting an envelope with their name on it and a typed letter inside would be thrilling. And what’s more, it will mean a lot to have an adult engage seriously with them on an individual basis. And indeed, the letters thrilled the youth, thrilled the mentors, and thrilled my clients at Fostering Change for Children (who run the AdoptMent mentoring program). It was a no-brainer to make them a regular part of my workshops with them.

I thought I’d share the process behind each of these letters by identifying the elements that go into them: (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Building identity self-portraits

One of the things I love talking to young people about is their budding identities. There are a couple of Zits comic strips that I like to use to explore the theme. One of them involves Jeremy standing before a mirror, assuming different flavors of masculinity, only to turn into a little boy when his mom catches him in the act. Seeing Jeremy try on different identities is a great way to get a conversation started about identity exploration. We all “try on” different identities or emphasize certain aspects of ourselves at different times, and it can be a bit awkward and embarrassing when someone calls us out on it—especially when we are in our teens.

When I ran a discussion on identity for a writing workshop, we kept the group discussion on a largely abstract level, and then I had the youth write about their personal experiences afterward. With the mentoring group I work with, however, I redesigned the activity as a partner exercise with youth and their mentors. Each young person would write a list of the most important elements in his identity, and then represent that visually in his self-portrait. During presentations, the group would then respond to the portrait, by commenting on what was interesting or surprising about it, or naming other characteristics that they thought were fundamental to the presenter’s identity.

To model the exercise, I very quickly sketched out an impromptu identity self-portrait. Do pardon the scrawl: (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Walking the walk

The reading and work I’ve been doing on marketing is more interesting than I expected. It’s requiring me to take stock of my strengths, identify areas where I could use some help, and—the hardest of all—set long term goals. It’s easy for me to set goals for myself in the Read more…

By Ysette, ago