[Obligatory apologies for neglecting this blog.] I’ve been meaning to write about an idea coming out of the Adoptment program to bring more structure into their mentoring sessions. The group has recently handed over the planning of one session to each mentor/mentee pair. Aside from allowing young people to take more responsibility Read more…
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…)
Welcome, new readers, to my humble blog. I wish I’d had the time and the forethought to dress it up for the occasion of Diane Ravitch posting a link to my previous post. In honor of national foster care month I’m sharing the Children’s Bureau’s new website for this year’s Read more…
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…)
On October 11, 2012, BNY Mellon convened community and thought leaders, practitioners, funders, and other stakeholders in the child welfare space for the Powering Potential Thought Leadership Summit. The main topic of concern was how to improve the life outcomes of youth aging out of foster care. They lay out Read more…
I recently wrote about the need to engage youth more deeply in matters of race/ethnicity and gender identity. The importance of these sorts of conversations—especially in the context of youth in foster care—is treated with a lot of thought and wisdom in Casey Family Program’s Knowing Who You Are curriculum. Read more…
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…)
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…)
Yesterday I was fortunate enough to chaperone a handful of youth at the Felix Organization‘s annual Thanksgiving dinner at Hill Country. The event gives NYC’s children in foster care a chance to come together and let their talents shine on the dance floor and the open mic. Here are the Read more…
I just got off the phone with someone from Mentoring USA to find out if she had any words of wisdom for mentoring older youth/young adults. As it happens, Mentoring USA is trying to develop their own program for that demographic, since one of their interests is to help youth age Read more…