How and Why to Build a Great Board

Are you ready to build a startup nonprofit board that actually moves your organization forward? If you’re reading this, chances are your nonprofit has been operating for a while and you’ve discovered that your current board isn’t quite doing what you hoped.

Most founders begin with a nonprofit board made up of friends. It makes sense — you need names and addresses for the IRS form, plus some cheerleading and support. And unless you’ve done this before, it’s all new territory. How could you possibly know who would be best for your board?

Your friends may have been wonderful encouragers, so kudos to them. But there often comes a time when you realize that as much as you enjoy them, they’re not really helping move the organization forward.

Why Early Nonprofit Boards Stop Working

Many people join a board with the caveat that they “don’t have much time” or “just want to help where they can.” Others simply don’t have the skills your nonprofit really needs to grow.

For example: do you have even one board member who is great at fundraising?

If you did, you probably wouldn’t be reading this. Need we say more?

Who You Need on Your Nonprofit Board

You need board members who:

• are passionate about your mission
• truly want to give their time, energy, and creativity
• understand that their role goes beyond attending quarterly meetings

After 20+ years in nonprofits, I can tell you something hard learned:

Many people join boards for reasons unrelated to your mission — networking, personal visibility, or résumé padding. That can drain time and energy from your real work.

Be sure that their motivations match your mission and that they want to serve.

Which Professions Make Great Board Members?

Certain professions consistently make for strong nonprofit board members:

• A financial professional to act as Treasurer, offer fiscal oversight, and possibly submit your IRS Form 990
• An attorney to handle bylaws, risk, and legal questions
• A strong communicator and note-taker to serve as Secretary and document meetings

These are helpful roles, but don’t stop there. You need more than professional expertise — you need people willing to roll up their sleeves.

Who else should you consider?

• Someone with experience in your service field
• Someone with local connections
• Someone who can open doors to decision-makers

But what’s the one trait that matters most?

Funding: The #1 Need for Nonprofits

It’s simple: your organization cannot survive without funding.

And what is the thing that most people (including board members) avoid?
Asking for money.

People may say they’re willing to help with fundraising, but as your balance sheet likely shows, that doesn’t always happen.

You need board members who:

• can personally donate
• represent companies with strong charitable giving programs
• know individuals who care about your mission
• are comfortable making “the ask”

When someone has both capacity and passion, fundraising transforms from stressful to natural.

How to Cultivate an Effective Nonprofit Board

If you want to make an experienced nonprofit director laugh, tell her most boards are “proactive.”

Effective boards are rare. They don’t just appear — they are built, developed, and encouraged.

A proactive nonprofit board can take your organization further, faster, than almost anything else.

But it requires:

• Strong leadership
• Modeling
• Gentle, consistent pushing

Notice the word consistent. Not a one-time training session. Not a binder of bylaws. Consistent encouragement and accountability.

The Executive Director Must Be Willing to Make the Ask

This is non-negotiable.

Why?

1. Modeling matters.
   If the Executive Director isn’t willing to step out and ask, why should board members?
2. Confidence grows with practice.
   Asking gets easier the more you do it. The seasoned asker will have credibility when encouraging others to ask.

If you want a strong fundraising board, you must first become a fundraiser yourself.

Why Is It So Hard to Ask for Funding?

It helps to face the problem squarely: why is asking for money uncomfortable?

Three big reasons:

• In American culture, wealth often defines status
• Wealthy people tend to be guarded about finances — asking can feel intrusive
• Asking puts you in a vulnerable position

Your mindset is everything.

If you believe you shouldn’t ask, you probably won’t succeed. But if you believe you are offering something valuable, everything changes.

Why Giving Feels Good: A Story You’ll Remember

There’s a traditional story that illustrates why it’s better to give than receive.

A man asked a saint to show him the difference between heaven and hell…

Hell: people in a room with bowls of food they can’t feed themselves because of long spoons attached to their hands.

Heaven: people in a room with the same setup, but they are feeding one another.

The moral?

Giving creates joy, connection, and meaning. That would sound trite if it weren’t so true.

When You Ask for Support, You Give Others an Opportunity

I learned this early in my nonprofit career:

When you ask people to support your cause, you’re giving them an opportunity to feel good about themselves.

Our culture could use more generosity. When you invite someone to support your mission, you are offering:

• belonging
• purpose
• significance
• joy

You’re not taking. You’re inviting.

Your Startup Nonprofit Board Culture Matters

What makes a great nonprofit board?

It goes beyond titles and bylaws. It’s a shared energy — active, not passive.

It’s the joy of a shared mission. The positive energy that comes with putting ego aside and focusing on service.

Be willing to:

• take risks
• encourage growth
• expect participation

When you do that, you will cultivate a nonprofit board that truly supports your vision and helps you achieve it.

Want tools that help program directors demonstrate impact and secure sustainable funding?
Learn how Merge Education’s SETS software helps organizations track student outcomes, improve teaching, and strengthen funding proposals.

Mary Helen Rossi is Co-Director of Merge Education, which grew out of 20 years of after-school fine arts mentoring to over 2,500 challenged young people. Merge’s student assessment and program management software reflects this experience: as one client said, “It’s clear that a lot of thought and love went into SETS!”

How to Assess Vulnerable Students After-School

Youth development programs are often challenged to find an assessment program that’s an effective way to assess vulnerable students. Since their mission is to empower youth to succeed, they find that generic assessments don’t drill deep enough to evaluate the vulnerable/marginalized students they serve.

Merge Education developed SETS software to fill this gap. Assessing students can serve many purposes, and this post details some of 0f SETS’ benefits. Here are just a few:

1. Assessing students gives you great data, proof of your program’s value that you can present to funders.
2. Student assessment helps program managers evaluate their mentors (and provide training when necessary).
3. Assessing students helps mentors see what kind of success they’re having with students.
4. Student assessment helps mentors better understand how to teach.

That fourth item is SETS’ secret sauce. Although most assessment tools give you a general idea of students’ strengths and weaknesses, SETS asks questions that drill deep. And if you have a mentoring program, that’s what you need.

How Youth Development Programs Use SETS

Youth development programs almost always serve vulnerable children and youth. And if you serve them, you know they need more than a few hours of after-school tutoring … they need a good relationship with someone who cares enough to dig in and get to know them.

Vulnerable Students Need a Targeted Approach

The problem is that teaching marginalized or vulnerable youth after-school can feel a bit amorphous. Even if the mentor has experience with strengths-based teaching, it can feel like unchartered territory. That’s because it is. You may be able to pull out a method book or other stock teaching guide for a well-adjusted student, but that doesn’t work with challenged youth.

Teachers Improve Their Teaching when they Assess Vulnerable Students

As I said, SETS’ secret sauce is in how it helps mentors and teachers improve their ability to teach vulnerable, marginalized students. Basically, it does this by helping the teacher focus her attention on how the student is (or is not) learning. It does this very specifically by focusing her on the skills and abilities we all need in order to learn. Educator and author Bill Rossi refers to these as the Principles of Empowerment:

1. Ability to concentrate
2. Level of motivation
3. Self-confidence to succeed
4. Frustration tolerance
5. Consistency of effort
6. Listens to teacher
7. Understands directions
8. Communicates needs
9. Communicates ideas
10. Respects equipment and materials
11. Willing to try new steps
12. Freedom of expression
13. Identifies correlations (relationships)
14. Able to build on prior learning
15. Incorporates elements of the skill

This scale is just one of three that SETS utilizes (the others track behavior and self-esteem). Since this has an educational focus, it implements anchor points so mentors will understand the scoring variables. This helps create an objective assessment.

When the teacher consistently uses this scale to assess her students, she becomes increasingly focused on where the student is with each of these skills and abilities. This not only gives her a framework within which she can work to improve her students’ skills and abilities, but it also improves her awareness.

Well-Documented Success Impresses Funders

I don’t think many of us choose to work with challenged students for the kudos, but we all need sustainable support to do it, and being able to prove your program’s success is the very best way to get it. We can tell wonderful success stories until we’re blue in the face, but it’s the data that brings home the award. Funders are far more likely to write a significant check if a program’s value and integrity are clearly documented by detailed reports.

Are You Serious About Empowering Youth After-School?

SETS was developed for small and growing youth development programs that are serious about empowering their youth. Try SETS, and you’ll get it. SETS makes sense, and it will help you get sustainable funding. It has a 30-day guarantee so it’s risk-free.

Would you like a tour? We’re at your service. Or just get started with SETS today!

Mary Helen Rossi is Co-Director of Merge Education, which grew out of a nonprofit that provided after-school fine arts mentoring to over 2,500 vulnerable young people. Merge’s SETS software reflects this experience: as one client said, “It’s clear that a lot of thought and love went into SETS!”

How to Assess Mentoring / Youth Development

If you’re a skill-building program, chances are you know you need to assess youth development. But what, and how?

As we reported in 5 Ways to Assess After-School Outcomes there are countless tools available in a variety of formats, and most are based on a particular philosophy as to what’s important to assess.

So, how do you know what you should assess, in order to choose the tool or process that’s right for you?

It all starts with “Why?” Why assess youth development?

Choosing an assessment tool is a bit like choosing the perfect pair of sports shoes, with the two main considerations being why you need them (for running? soccer? workouts?) and how they feel on your feet.

When considering assessment programs, you can even back up a bit to ask the (almost) obvious … why are you assessing your program in the first place?

Hah! You’d be surprised how few people ask this question. Understanding the benefits that are important to you is a simple first step to take. Here are just a few that you might consider:

• better general oversight (including managing classes and student numbers)
• better teacher and mentor oversight (knowing who needs a little help and who can mentor other teachers)
• better teacher / mentor training (good metrics can minimize the need for outside trainers)
• better student outcomes (which always come from good oversight and better teaching)
• better support — financial and personal (which always comes from good oversight and great data)

These are just a few of the myriad benefits. Can you think of more?

Next, ask “What?”

Once you’ve decided on your “whys”, you can think about “what”. What do you want to assess? If you’re a mentoring program, chances are you understand that the more closely attuned your teachers are to how your students are learning, the greater success they’ll achieve. But typically, teachers and mentors in youth development programs aren’t highly trained teachers. So if you want to fine-tune their teaching it’s very helpful to have them assessing students ongoing, based on the qualities and abilities that empower student learning.

Merge Education’s director Bill Rossi has made a life-long study of this, and he identified 15 qualities and abilities we all need to be able to learn well. He defines and explores these Principles of Empowerment in his book Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed, and these are the metrics we used to create one of the assessments in our software SETS: Student Evaluation & Tracking System.

So, those metrics (here) can give you a good feel for SETS, just as looking at the metrics in other tools will give you a good feel for those. Because just like a pair of running shoes, it typically comes down to which one feels the best … all the way around.

Numero Uno … how do you feel?

Chances are, you’ll ultimately make your best choice by intuition … even if two or three align with your criteria, one pair will simply appeal to you most. My advice is to do the same when choosing an assessment process or program. Find two or three that you think might work for you, then dive into them one by one and see how they feel. Get a tour or a demo. Read and re-read the sites and FAQ, until you know your answer. Since you’ve already narrowed the field, it’s really a visceral and intuitive decision and you need to feel comfortable with your choice.

What’s the big deal? Why assess youth development?

Why does it matter so much? If you end up with a tool that focuses more on attendance than learning, for example, then your data won’t tell your story. But if you’re tracking benchmarks that are meaningful to you, the reports will mean something. And by reflecting you and your program, they’ll give your supporters a better feel for you and good insight into why they should support you.

Merge Education is for Youth

At Merge, we really are in this for the youth. Try SETS, and you’ll get it.

SETS makes sense, and it will help you get sustainable funding just like it did us.

Would you like a tour? We’re at your service. Or just get started with SETS today!

Mary Helen Rossi is Co-Director of Merge Education, which grew out of 20 years of after-school fine arts mentoring to over 2,500 challenged young people. Merge’s SETS software reflects this experience: as one client said, “It’s clear that a lot of thought and expertise went into SETS!”

The Best Assessment for Youth Development Programs

If you and your teachers think most assessment for youth development is senseless, you’re in good company.

In fact, the majority of teachers we talk with tell us they don’t like to do them, saying the metrics feel so generic they’re pointless … they’re also a chore to use.

But you know that you should be assessing students, right? You know that if you want sustainable funding, you have to do assessments. Why? Well for starters, assessing your students will give you the data you need to prove those great stories you have about your students’ success.

Youth development assessment data proves it!

Funders today hear a lot of great student success stories, so you need to ‘prove it’ with data. Let’s say you have a great story about Jack who’s done a 180 since he came into your program. If you can provide the data on how Jack has changed, you’ll connect those changes to your program.

To make your data count you need to collect assessments from two or more sources. That way, your assessment is not just a single perspective. That’s why SETS contains three assessments:

1. the teachers’ assessments of their students
2. student behavioral assessments from ‘significant others’ like parents or social workers who see the student often, and
3. the students’ assessments of themselves.

The data will tell you and funders in finite terms how your students are doing. And isn’t that the sure proof of the value of your program?

Why assessing your teachers helps you get sustainable funding too

You also need to assess your teachers if you want a successful program with sustainable funding. Why? Because it will give you some of the oversight you need for a solid, effective program that gets funder respect.

Consistent and uniform teacher assessment will tell you a lot about your individual teachers. You’ll be able to discover who’s most effective and who needs more training, for example. You’ll also get a clearer picture of how your program is operating. (Take a tour and we’ll fill in the details).

Teacher and youth development assessments give you great program feedback

Wait … what? That’s right, your teacher assessments, combined with youth development assessments, will give you a gold mine of information about what’s working, what’s not working, and why. And with SETS, you’ll get that information in real-time, so you’ll be able to pivot on a dime before it’s too late.

Here’s a simple example. Let’s say your new teacher Shannon looks like a great teacher. She does a lot of things right:

• she’s always on time and submits timely reports
• she’s friendly with students and their parents

So you’re pretty sure she’s going to be a great addition to your staff, and you’ve been looking forward to sitting in on one of her classes.

But when you sit in on her class you notice:

• she talks a lot, so much that the students are mostly quiet and not engaged
• her instructions are so vague that most of the students don’t know what they’re supposed to do
• the students leave looking disinterested or even dejected.

Come to think of it, that explains why the assessments for her students look so blah.

Aren’t you glad you’re assessing students and teachers?

Fortunately, if you’re using SETS: Student Evaluation and Tracking System, a real-time assessment tool, you’ve learned the truth before any serious problems. What’s more, if you’ve spent time with the Teacher Observation tool, you know you can show Shannon how to use this to improve her teaching. (More on that in our post Why SETS is a Teacher Training Tool).

When the youth development assessment makes sense, it’s not a chore

So, piggy-backing off that last thought, here’s our final point: student assessment doesn’t have to feel senseless and if you use SETS, it won’t. The points SETS uses to assess students include things like students’ ability to:

• focus and concentrate
• understand directions
• communicate their needs.

The teacher assessment scale has 15 metrics in all, great points for teachers to observe in students. Even better, by being aware of these points teachers can use them to support students’ strengths and weaknesses.

We created SETS after 20 years of after-school programming. We had reviewed every product on the market and weren’t happy with any of them, so once we had a little time we worked with software engineers to create SETS.  (Well, more than a little time … years of thought and development have gone into SETS).

SETS makes sense, and it will help you get sustainable funding just like it did us. It has a 30-day guarantee so you’ve everything to gain, risk-free.

Would you like a tour? We’re at your service. Or just get started with SETS today!

Mary Helen Rossi is Co-Director of Merge Education, which grew out of 20 years of after-school fine arts mentoring to over 2,500 challenged young people. Merge’s SETS software reflects this experience: as one client said, “It’s clear that a lot of thought and love went into SETS!”

5 Ways to Assess Youth Development Outcomes (and why you should)

If you run a small youth development program, you’ve probably had some challenges finding an evaluation tool that isn’t super-complicated or cost a small fortune. You may also be frustrated because programs that track youth development outcomes are all so different. This post is designed to help you find what you need.

First, let’s face it: it can be a challenge to assess youth development outcomes. Why? Because students are usually learning far more than just the skills you’re teaching.

If you teach music, for example, it’s obvious that students are learning how to play their instruments and express themselves musically, but that’s not all they’re learning. They’re also improving their ability to tolerate their frustration, listen to other players, collaborate, persevere, take risks, and a lot more. These “soft skills” are very valuable.

Students don’t just need these skills and abilities to play music – they need them to become good at anything. As a program director or teacher, you already know this, but if you’re going to get the support you need for your youth development program, you need to assess and report on their learning so you can connect the dots for parents and funders.

Student assessment after-school connects the dots for more funding

You’ll connect the dots when you evaluate student improvement in the skills and abilities I mentioned above, those skills that are important to all learning. By evaluating those, you’ll show that your students are becoming more capable learners.

A teacher observation scale can accomplish this nicely, and if you want to really ramp it up you can add a student self-esteem scale and possibly assessments by other people who know the student (like a parent, coach, or pastor). Then you’ll convincingly demonstrate your program’s competency in youth development.

Assessment will communicate the real value of your program to parents or funders. It will raise your program above the usual “skill-building program” to the greater sphere of youth development. Even better, it won’t be nebulous … your detail will show you know exactly what you’re doing.

Outcomes assessment ensures more sustainable funding

Joanne Fritz’s post “How Nonprofits Benefit From Measuring Outcomes” at thebalancesmallbusiness clearly states why assessing student outcomes is so important:

Demand keeps growing for nonprofits to provide proof that what they are doing accomplishes something. All stakeholders of charities should have ample access to information about the organizations to which they donate and volunteer, and from which they seek services.

Data is everywhere. That’s why charitable nonprofits must come to grips with explaining their results and their social impact.

This demand for data has grown steadily over the years, so it’s no longer a question of “if” you should evaluate, it’s a question of “how” you should evaluate.

A step-by-step guide to measuring outcomes for youth development programs

Let’s start with an overview of what’s available for small youth development programs and how they work. Our research over the years has identified some overarching classifications that can be helpful in your search. These include:

• One-time or periodic?
• Cloud- or computer-based?
• Free, affordable, or higher cost?

One-time or periodic student assessment?

One of the first questions you should ask yourself is whether you want an assessment that takes a one-time snapshot or one that provides periodic feedback. Your program’s age could be the deciding factor here.

If you’re a startup youth development program or just developing a new one, you will probably want to conduct frequent oversight assessments as you grow and tweak your program for success. In that case, the periodic assessment would probably be best for you, at least for now.

If you’re an established program serving large groups of young people, a yearly or bi-yearly assessment might be appropriate for you. Programs serving large student groups typically don’t perceive the need to drill deeply into individual student needs. They also often have the funding necessary to purchase outside assessments, which can be very pricy (our research revealed that the least expensive starts at just under $3,500 for the first year). However, a larger program that incorporates mentoring might consider ongoing assessment for just the mentoring component.

Actually, no matter what your size, if your program provides one-on-one mentoring services, the periodic assessment will probably be best for you. We say this because mentoring services typically address young people with higher risk factors, and regularly assessing at-risk students will allow teachers/mentors to drill down on students’ needs so they can provide the necessary support.

Just keep in mind that if you choose a periodic assessment, you’d better find one that your teachers and staff will like! If they don’t resonate with the metrics you’re using for assessment (the framework, or questions), they might not use the tool most effectively.

Cloud-based or computer-based?

Most cloud-based assessment solutions we’ve found are for large, well-established social service organizations. These tools go beyond surveys and reports to include management tools such as case management. They are typically expensive, with onboarding fees and extra charges. Since we’re focusing on affordable tools, we have not included those in this post.

Free, affordable, or higher cost?

Consider what you want to spend on your tool. While you probably have a budget in mind, we encourage you to read the rest of this post before you cast your budget in stone. While a free assessment tool might look perfect, for example, in the long run, it could end up being more expensive …

What do you want to measure?

While most tools attempt to measure overall student development, including their relationship with themselves and others, you may also want to measure two other important areas:

• student learning, by focusing on specific skills and abilities
• teacher effectiveness

So, what tool is right for you?

We hope you now have a frame in which you can position some of the available options and decide which is right for you. First, though, you’ll need to decide if you want to create an assessment tool on your own or use any currently available resources.

We’ve outlined a range of choices below to give you an overview of the available options.

Using an existing assessment tool or a mix of surveys

In this post, we offer five options for your consideration. Each is unique, so your choice will likely be determined by your decisions on what and how you want to measure, as well as whether or not you want to create a tool from scratch or use one out of the box (just be sure it’s customizable).

There are hundreds of choices available today! We hope this list offers something interesting or, at least, helps you narrow your field in terms of what kind of tool you want.

1. The Search Institute — Surveys

The Search Institute offers a well-established cadre of surveys based on their Framework of Developmental Assets – the 40 assets they delineate as the building blocks of positive youth development. They group these assets as external or internal; they cover almost every aspect of a student’s life.

The Institute’s surveys address the following topics:

• Attitudes and Behaviors
• Developmental Assets Profile
• Developmental Relationships
• Youth and Program Strengths

Once you’ve implemented their surveys and collected your data, the Institute will organize and report on the data you gather. Prices range from $250 – $400 for up to 100 surveys.

2. Youth.gov — The Youth Involvement and Engagement Tool (surveys)

The Youth Involvement and Engagement Tool is a 2-page .pdf survey. It’s available at youth.gov. This tool addresses:

• Youth Involvement
• Youth Engagement (Community)
• Youth Retention

While it, like many surveys, focuses on overall program outcomes rather than those of individual students, it does provide a good overview of program competence. This tool has no reporting facility. It is free of charge.

3. Merge Education — SETS: Student Evaluation & Tracking System (software)

The Student Evaluation & Tracking System is integrated software for mentoring programs wanting to delineate, track, and report on specific student progress, with a drill-down on student learning as it relates to youth development. Originally developed to legitimize the arts as a powerful tool for learning and mentoring, this software assesses and reports on students and staff and manages students and classes. It implements educator Bill Rossi’s Principles of Empowerment detailed in Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed.

It offers three assessment surveys, all of which can be modified if you’d like to use other metrics:

• Self Esteem
• Teacher Observation
• Assessment (by a ‘significant other’)

As noted below, Merge Education offers a free printout of the assessment scale on its site.

This tool is PC-based (not in the cloud) and can be purchased for a one-time fee or on a subscription basis.  It’s the most affordable tool we have found on the market; it is sold by Merge Education at https://merge-education.com.

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4. The After-School Initiative — Toolkit for Evaluating Positive Youth Development (guidance)

Published by The Colorado Trust, this Toolkit is a free resource for assessing youth outcomes. This toolkit falls somewhere between “available tools” and “do it yourself” since it simply suggests focus areas and provides questions that you can use when surveying youth. It does not, however, provide a means of organizing or reporting on data gathered.

5. The Afterschool Alliance — The Alliance offers information on organizations that offer STEM program assessment resources and tools here.

As noted on their site, these are:

• PEAR’s Assessment Tools in Informal Science, a searchable database of assessment tools for evaluating program quality and outcomes
• Assessing Women and Men in Engineering Project, a set of surveys and assessment tools you can use to evaluate afterschool STEM programs
• CAISE’s evaluation toolkit, for those who have been awarded an NSF grant for informal science projects and useful for learning how to successfully evaluate a program.
• Better Evaluation, an international collaboration focused on improving evaluation theory and practice through the development and sharing of resources

Creating your own assessment tool (DIY)

If none of the existing tools suit your needs, you may want to create an assessment process on your own. If that’s your choice, be sure to enlist all of your staff in the effort. Everyone can be helpful, including your teachers, front-office staff, and even volunteers… and you’ll need everyone’s buy-in.

Plan on two or three meetings in which you and your team can drill down on what you feel constitutes a skillset that’s essential for empowered youth. Your list can be as simple or lengthy as you want – just don’t overdo it, since you’ll need to conduct assessments on a regular basis.

Once you’ve developed your list, think about how to reasonably organize the skills or abilities. Organizing your data is a prerequisite to generating reports to share with parents and funders. As we suggest below, combining surveys with Excel is a good way to do this.

DIY: Tool design

Following are two very different methods you can use to design your tool. The first provides guidelines and an Excel template to create your tool; the second provides specific skills and abilities you can use as the basis of measurement.

1. The Emerging Markets Foundation (EMpower) provides a wide range of youth development evaluation guidelines on its website including:

• data collection methods
• pre- and post-test design
• measuring changes in self-esteem and confidence
• measuring changes in gender belief and norms
• an Excel template for pre- and post-analysis

2. Merge Education director Bill Rossi has identified an empowerment skillset he calls The Principles of Empowerment (POE). These principles highlight the most important skills and abilities students need in order to learn.

As detailed in his book Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed, these are divided into Relationship to Self, Relationship to Teacher, and Skills Development. Following is a brief sketch of these principles and how they apply to assessing students in your afterschool program.

• Relationship to Self: These are the personal qualities and skills a student needs to develop so she’ll be able to learn well. Self-confidence is high on the list, as is her level of motivation. Another is how well she does under pressure — including the pressure of her own frustration. These are delineated as: Ability to concentrate, Level of motivation, Self-confidence to succeed, Frustration tolerance, and Consistent effort.
• Relationship to Teacher: Students’ relationships with others is an important indicator of empowerment, and your teachers are well-positioned to evaluate this. How well does the student listen? Better yet, does she understand what she’s hearing? Can she communicate her ideas and her needs, or is she frustrated but unable to explain why? These are delineated as: Listens to the teacher, Follows directions, Communicates needs, Communicates ideas.
• Skills Development: This concerns whether or not the student is becoming a more capable learner. Does the student stay safe with what she already knows or is she willing to try new steps? Is she able to build on prior learning? How does she relate to the equipment and materials in the classroom — does she treat them carefully yet with a sense of curiosity and freedom? These are delineated as: Respects equipment and materials, Willing to try new steps, Freedom of expression, Identifies correlations (relationships), Able to build on prior learning, Incorporates elements of the skill.

DIY: Organizing and reporting on your data

Of course, your youth development assessment system needs to do more than collect data … you also need to organize that data to provide valuable reports you can use to manage your program and share with parents and funders.

If you’re doing it yourself with any of the free survey apps for data collection, you can use an Excel-like app to aggregate the results.

If you’re using existing surveys you can purchase reporting from the organization from which you purchased the surveys, such as the Search Institute, to aggregate your data.

If you’re a well-established after-school program such as Big Brothers, Big Sisters, or The Boys & Girls Club, you have a wide range of choices, although those tools typically focus heavily on program management.

Youth development outcomes data can improve teaching

One last thing to consider is how your program assessment data could help your teachers improve. If your assessment finds that students typically do not “feel valued for who they are”, for example, teachers will begin to find ways to let students know they’re appreciated. If you’re using an app that measures specific learning skills and it finds that some students are respectful of the environment but many are not, teachers will begin to consider how they can empower students to take more self-responsibility.

This might be a new experience for teachers since they typically haven’t learned how to identify these skills. This means their teaching isn’t grounded in the principles of learning.

They also haven’t been trained how to assess those skills. This results in a lack of data, and the data can seriously enhance teaching. By taking periodic snapshots of your students, you not only clearly understand where they are today, but you also see what they need in order to take the next step. It’s like a roadmap through unfamiliar terrain – once you know exactly where the student is you can devise a path to help her get to where she needs to go… step by step.

Take it one step at a time!

A smart skill-building student assessment tool helps you stand back and look at students from a more comprehensive educational perspective. This helps you delineate the skills and abilities they’re actually developing. As you do this, you’ll also start to see more clearly how they’ll use those skills to learn everything else.

So, as I said, parents and funders typically don’t get how learning one skill relates to learning others. But they will, once you begin implementing an effective evaluation tool.

We hope we’ve offered a way to understand student assessment! If you know of an awesome tool we haven’t covered … or want more information on how to develop your own tool, contact us! We’d love to hear from you.

Mary Helen Rossi is Co-Director of Merge Education, which grew out of 20 years of after-school fine arts mentoring to over 2,500 challenged young people. Merge’s SETS software reflects this experience. As one client said, “It’s clear that a lot of thought and love went into SETS!”

Why Strengths-based Creativity Empowers Youth

Strengths-based creativity means creativity in all learning.

Although many people consider creativity to be the sole purview of musicians, artists, or other “creative” sorts, strengths-based creativity can (and we feel should) be a part of all endeavors… especially teaching. A teacher who is alive with and excited by his subject will convey that excitement to students. This will enliven the learning experience and bring new meaning to “strengths-based.”

Strengths-based creativity provides relevancy in learning

Strengths-based creativity provides relevancy in learning. For a student to learn, her experience needs to consistently contain meaning for her. For that to happen, the teacher needs to meet her where she is, and meet her with something she cares about, something that’s exciting to her. If the experience is to contain meaning it has to touch or move her in some emotional way so she can be stimulated by the experience and motivated to further explore it.

Strengths-based creativity empowers students towards independent thinking

As this process begins to develop in her she will, in her exploration, be stimulated to ask for clarification, a perspective, or other input from the teacher. If encouraged and assisted she will gain the confidence to initiate her own thinking and formulate some of her own ideas, which should be a major goal of education. As her guides, we need to help her see how this subject that she’s beginning to ingest and digest affects not only her but her community or group.

Strengths-based creativity provides an existential, practical basis for learning

Relevant learning also needs to have a real existential basis or practicality to it: the child has to have a place to put it in her life, by which I mean she has to be able to use it based on what she is feeling, not as some theoretical, intellectual point. As teachers, we then play a critical part in making concrete connections between what is being taught and its history or tradition.

If the student is allowed this experience she will naturally begin to form her thoughts in a way that her intelligence will develop, and she will be able to form and ask theoretical questions in order to solve them. But if we present the theoretical and intellectual information without providing a meaningful experience for her learning, we will have put the cart before the horse: we won’t have given her enough of an emotional, practical, experiential base to make the correct sense of the information.

Strengths-based creativity integrates learning to create a gestalt (a true story)

Providing this experience helps to create a gestalt, which is defined as a physical, biological, psychological, or symbolic configuration or pattern of elements so unified as a whole that its properties cannot be derived from a simple summation of its parts. The following story illustrates a gestalt, a highly desirable integrated way of learning, and also demonstrates a traditional reaction to this kind of environment.

Many years ago we had a small percussion workshop in our after-school program for young children led by a percussionist from Ghana. During the first session, the children formed a semi-circle of kids around him, each with their own drum.

The teacher played the rhythm and the children either tried to copy what he was playing or simply listened and then tried to get it on their own. It wasn’t important that they copy exactly what he was doing at first; they were free to feel the rhythm in a personal way such as dancing or playing a part of the beat while moving their bodies. The teacher frequently repeated the rhythm, watching each student and then giving individual help as he intuited the way in which they were starting to put the rhythm together. Through repetition, the kids were learning the beats specifically, but the process was one of call and response — and fun.

Somewhat into the session, a new child was brought into the class by his mother. The other children kept working with the rhythm as the teacher showed the new child the beat the other kids were learning, playing the rhythm so that he could begin to participate. The new child was so stimulated and happy to be there that he spontaneously began to dance around the drum.

How depressing creativity harms students

His mother became alarmed and expressed her dismay that her child was not sitting in his seat trying to play exactly the way the teacher had shown. We told her that the first stage of her child’s learning was to ingest and feel the rhythm and that it was much more important that he first do this in an enjoyable way rather than sit in a chair and mimic the hand movements.

We let her know that when he was ready to put the rhythm into his own hands, it would be quite natural for him to sit down and play and he would then be much more accepting of the technical aspects. We added that this was a valuable process in which he was engaged, one that would provide a deeper, more meaningful learning experience.

Unfortunately, she didn’t accept this explanation and couldn’t tolerate this style of learning and teaching. Even though she saw that the other students were indeed learning in this way, she pulled her child from the class. We felt this to be unfortunate for the child, but it does show a certain thinking that is prevalent in traditional ways of teaching, thinking that is not only counterproductive in children’s learning but can ultimately depress a student’s creativity.

Why youth development programs are perfectly positioned

Again, the after-school youth development environment is a perfect place to infuse the oxygen found in a strengths-based approach. When the teacher engages with students as a mentor, creatively bringing out and developing students’ strengths, the community becomes positive and inclusive.

It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing – Duke Ellington lyrics

Merge Education’s software SETS: Student Evaluation & Tracking System helps teachers develop their strengths-based approaches.

Read Bill Rossi’s Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more on how to work with a strengths-based, creative approach.

The Arts for Youth Trauma: An Answer to the Cry of Our Time

Interview with Bill Rossi, 2009

Digging in to look for the life within us can bring about a release and transformation of the pain. That’s where the therapy is.

When you use creativity, you can cut below the layers to get to the survival mechanism and creative spirit. If you hit that place right it’s like natural energy – healing will start to take place.

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable emotional disorder in a given year while 9-13 percent of children ages 9-17 have a ‘serious emotional disturbance with substantial functional impairment’ (www.nimh.nih.gov).

No matter what you perceive to be the cause of the continuing decline of America’s emotional well-being, it’s clear that we need to begin to deal with it.

How? We don’t have to look too far for ways to turn the tide — in fact, there’s a readily available antidote that was specifically developed for survival in dark times, music that we now call Blues and Jazz.

In understanding Blues and Jazz we find a powerful tool for dealing with the many challenges life gives us. It has the power of hope and the power to transform circumstance so life with spirit will somehow prevail.

Following is an interview with Bill Rossi, author of Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed and creator of the educational and therapeutic approach that harnesses that power.

MHR: How do the Blues speak to the suffering of today, and how can it be therapeutic?

BR: The Blues grew out of the intolerable conditions of being enslaved. So what did slaves do with those intense feelings of pain and depression, how did they find a way to relieve them? They dug in to find a way to deal with their circumstance.

They started with field hollers, call and response to each other, singing notes they knew from common scales. Then, to better express their pain and condition they bent and lowered notes, producing a feeling of tension. These notes became known as the Blues notes.

Blues notes are the expression of a sadness or pain but at the same time make you feel better – the expression leads to release and creative use of this leads to a transformation.

The color blue represents the Blues as sadness, or feeling down. These notes eventually became a part of what is known as the Blues scale.

As the notes were developed they took the shape of longer phrases that started to tell stories. So the Blues went from words “I’m sad” to explaining why they were sad. Singing about their pain brought a feeling of release because along with the rhythm they were feeling the life inside themselves. So although there was an almost intolerable feeling on the outside, they sustained their existence by getting in touch with a deep sound and rhythm, the life pulse, inside themselves.

And then they generated that life and they kept themselves generated by looking for … for what? We are all conditioned to look outside ourselves for relief from the human condition but when there’s no life without, and it’s just an oppressive painful thing, you have no place else to go but in. And digging in to look for the life within us and getting in touch with it brings about a release and transformation of the pain.

MHR: How can this be therapeutic today?

BR: Creativity is life.

So it starts growing, right? You’re enlivening it, so it starts to have its own life, a power inside you. It starts to overtake the outside circumstance. So at the moment anyway, while you’re expressing and doing the music, the music becomes larger so it can become competitive with the outer circumstances. This causes relief and causes you be able to maintain and grow in life.

This can be such a powerful therapy because it grows from a very primal source of creativity that’s inherent within human beings. When you have no place to go to escape the pain, oppression, trauma, you need to go deep inside yourself. That is where there’s creativity, life. It’s a God-given place.

The musical expression of the slaves became a language. Blues and Jazz are a universal language because they come out of a primal human condition which is that every human being suffers somehow. So this music talks directly to that place.

There are many ways of expressing that condition, from the field holler to Rock and Roll to very sophisticated forms of Jazz like Duke Ellington’s. That’s why the Blues has affected so many different forms of music, because it expresses a basic human condition that underlies everything.

The purpose of art is to express a basic human condition, whatever that might be. Sadness, happiness, anger, injustice, celebration. But art has to be grounded in a real life experience. No matter how much sophistication or intelligence you implement you have to remain with a gut level, real experience; if you leave that and begin to intellectualize it the art no longer has that quality.

When you listen to the best musicians such as an Ellington or Coltrane, despite their high level of sophistication they never leave the real gut life experience. All of their music is built on that foundation, and that foundation is always being developed because as the tree grows the foundation has to also grow.

All good art also express a basic life force. Man is born with a sense of survival so no matter what the circumstance is, the instinct to survive is there. Man’s creativity is at that core. When you’re looking for your survival and there’s no other outward means, you go to the absolute core of the survival mechanism. That’s where the Blues resides – it evolved from the field hollers and never left its core. That’s why it’s so powerful.

That’s why it’s such an effective therapeutic intervention. Whereas many therapies treat the symptoms, when you use creativity you can cut below the layers to get to the survival mechanism and creative spirit. If you hit that place right it’s like natural energy – healing starts to take place.

You need to take it creatively deep enough so that a person who has experienced trauma, for example, will also experience something that is deeply upbeat. If a person re-experiences past challenges or trauma without experiencing something upbeat at the same time, they will go out of balance.

MHR: You have to have a positive place to go?

BR: Yes. You have to release the trauma or challenge or it will explode, but it has to be a therapeutic release. You’ve got to go to a creative place. You have to have goodness to go to, to direct yourself towards, so you release it in a good way. Otherwise you’re just out of control with your emotions and you will probably hurt yourself or other people.

Creativity needs to always be a component of anything therapeutic. In our music lessons we begin to get empathetic to what the student’s feeling, where their rhythm is in them, what their state is. Then we can start to play things that relate to where they are rhythmically or melodically, all the while trying different things to see what they respond to and what’s resonating with them. Then we exploit those ideas.

MHR: What do you mean?

BR: We get them in a groove, a cycle or repetition to feel the rhythm, and we get them to feel the notes in the rhythm, so the two are going together. That begins to get into their body, and then their ear, and then it gets them into that creative place inside them. Then you start to do call and response, and develop a phrase, a sentence out of that, and build from there. You and the student venture together from there and just keep growing it.

MHR: So they’re communicating their pain from a deep, honest place and going somewhere.

BR: They’re releasing, and it feels good to them because they’re releasing it in a creative way, in a way that makes sense to something very deep and primal in them, and that’s home – that’s like home base in a way, it’s mother earth, the life force in them. That’s a beautiful place to anybody. So then as you grow it, step by step, you stay empathetic so you grow it from where they are, just like the music grew.

Then you start to add more rhythms, more harmony, and out comes a phrase, then a sentence, then 4 bars, then 8, and then a whole complete thought in the 12 bar Blues or 8 bar form. From there you can find all kinds of ways to vary it – rhythmically, melodically, ways you can color it which give you articulation. You’re articulating more and more of what you’re feeling, you’re continuing to release, and that grows into creativity.

Then that becomes a language, just like we’re talking. And because it’s deep it hits those universal conditions and experiences, and this sharing of those conditions and experiences makes people feel good. Because it’s improvisational music it also gives choices about ways of building on the story, so it leads to a feeling of personal freedom.

MHR: That’s why you see the Blues and Jazz as an answer to the cry of today.

BR: Yes. All music with these qualities is a dynamic expression of the meaning of being human. It was one of the only means available under the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and racism, and this creative orientation is one that could be very helpful today.

Being human inherently means expressing and striving for fulfillment and growth; being human means being creative. We need to pay attention to that.

Music and the other arts can alleviate suffering through truthful yet graceful expression, can open up a person to feel alive and relevant as a human being, can stimulate insight and understandings of one’s individual potential towards life’s higher purpose, and can bring people together for a higher degree of communal support, all of which can help people rise above their circumstances.

The Blues are a particularly potent way to state a fact or a feeling, positively release an emotion, and create a good feeling that can bring about hope and a way to something higher. Many Americans are suffering right now; the Blues can help.

Vulnerable Youth: Creativity Transforms Trauma

Creativity transforms trauma. Since trauma creates tension that often feels unbearable, people have no choice but to find a release. A hallmark feature of trauma and other emotional disorders is the fight-or-flight syndrome, brought about by the intense feeling of being trapped. Another is helplessness leading to hopelessness.

People suffering from serious emotional disorders need intense, positive outlets for releasing and channeling overwhelming feelings such as these. Unfortunately, positive outlets are typically limited, especially on a consistent basis, so these emotions are usually expressed and energy released in negative and destructive ways.

Creative self-expression brings release

A potent answer lies in the artistic mediums whose very essence is communication. Being able to express the truth, however difficult, is an important part of healing and finding a new direction. The arts allow for many different, positive ways of releasing and expressing without the stigma or concern of what is the right or wrong way to feel.

In fact, the more difficult it is to say the words about what hurt them, the more important it is to have other ways for children to express themselves and get their story told. – Joseph Benamati [Joseph Benamati, CSW, Parsons Child Trauma Study Center, Albany, NY.]

It is important to be in touch with all feelings and somehow express and communicate them, whether it is to oneself or to others. The arts can be very effective and in many cases may be necessary to help people tap into the real persons they are behind their defensiveness. Once they have done this and confronted difficult feelings they can reach through to their positive ones.

‘Nice’ Pictures?

Of course, that expression can be uncomfortable for everyone involved. I remember a meeting of child care workers and artists in which we were discussing an upcoming photography unit. As we began to discuss the range of emotional responses the students might experience during the classes and how to guide them, some of the child care workers became visibly nervous.

One of them expressed this discomfort by asking if they couldn’t just encourage the students to take nice pictures. We encounter this reaction fairly frequently, but it’s self-sabotaging. Any attempt to avoid, divert, or deny feelings – to specifically disallow people to express from an area that is meaningful and come to terms with what is really going on within themselves—will only lead to more difficulty . . . for everyone.

It’s good for people in trouble to be around artists. You unravel a bit when you make art—it’s like creating order out of chaos to make something unique. We artists have something in common with troubled kids. We also understand rage . . . artists aren’t afraid of rage. – Katheryn Charbonneau, teacher

Creativity transforms trauma by rising above

Expression that enables people to find meaningful resources within themselves provides a way to transcend difficulty. This can open the way towards normalcy and good emotional health. A person who is engrossed in playing music, painting a picture, or dancing, for example, can travel to another world where stress is alleviated, imagination is stimulated, good feeling is produced and new areas are discovered within –all-important ground where a person’s innate intelligence will thrive and where painful feelings can be processed and channeled. Strength and hope also have residence there.

Sam wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing without this arts program. It helps students step outside of the box, by which I mean go outside of routine ways of approaching situations so they can experience new horizons. This process and experience has helped Sam recognize that he has an appealing future, a future with possibilities that are meaningful and productive. Social Worker

Trauma as the spur for action

Emotional turmoil can be a great creative spur. George Bernard Shaw wrote, If you can’t get rid of the family skeleton, you might as well make it dance. Many artists, both professional and amateur, will attest that their involvement with the arts is necessary for their very survival because it gives them control and meaning in their lives, a reason for being, and an expression that keeps them going. The love of doing and creating is no small part of this, for where there is love there is healing. The following personal life experience of one of our former teachers provides a case in point.

Music is what I turned to: it was a lifeline to me. As a child it was a place I could go – I could play music and make sense of the world to a certain extent. I could find comfort there, I could find progression there. It helped me understand about going beyond certain feelings that I had about myself, or at least cope with certain traps that I might have felt in my environment. So it was important just to be involved in music whether it meant I was to be a professional musician or not. I could feel it in both my emotional state, my feelings, and I could feel it in my intellectual state. It made a lot of difficult feelings at least tolerable for me at that time.

And then as I grew I met other musicians. I found that this was a theme, and the creative process, whether it was music or art, had the same effects on other people. We’d share that with each other. As I got more involved in the teaching aspect I could clearly see how important involvement in the creative process was, not just for youth, but for anybody. I could see my students’ need for expression and how that could carry over. It could make them feel stronger and happier in other things, especially with kids who had more obvious difficulties. It’s something that I’ve grown with all my life.

Read Bill Rossi’s Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more.

Group Mentoring for Positive Youth Development

Often thought of as a one-on-one experience, mentoring is really a way of being with students. A mentoring orientation is also very effective within a group experience, because the group offers opportunities not otherwise available.

Group Mentoring exposes prejudices in a safe environment

Success in group communications gives students confidence in assuming responsibility for their actions, and when they’re given opportunities to understand their actions they can learn that their actions can bring negative as well as positive responses. These are avenues of learning in which students and mentors/teachers can explore many choices before a real problem develops.

When we help students understand how their actions (and inactions) affect others, we provide a pathway that leads them to become less prejudiced, and to the realization that we all have very similar feelings and that everyone wants their feelings respected, not hurt.

Viewing divisive attitudes and behaviors as misunderstandings provides us with a positive way to address them. Misunderstandings and mistakes are part of the process of growing and learning. When we understand prejudice or aggression as a mistake stemming from ignorance, we can emphasize the ability to change. Students will learn through new perspectives and better choices.

Teaching that prejudice is simply ignorance

Having this kind of freedom draws people out and allows them to discover their own abilities, their own power. The key to so much of this growth is that students experience it within a well-guided group and obtain a deep understanding so these things become willingly internalized.

Mentors can see (and explain) what’s going on

Another area worth careful consideration is the misperceiving or misinterpreting of others’ words and actions. We can show students, for example, how we often take others’ anxieties personally where that might not be appropriate.

• People often feel anger for one person but take it out on another
• A person who is experiencing loss often becomes upset with other people
• People blame other people for their own insecurity.

Additional awareness and skills that can be taught and gained in a group include:

• Listening without interrupting
• Not putting oneself above another person
• Acting with fairness and empathy instead of dominating or imposing ourselves.

Learning the art of give-and-take after school

The workings of healthy group dynamics become clear when viewed through the lens of playing music in an ensemble. In order to make good music in a group you have to have confidence in your abilities and listen to what’s going on around you so your response will be one of give and take. When you are able to most freely express yourself and listen to and appreciate the others in the ensemble, you can respond to them appropriately, as in a good conversation.

This interaction of give and take, or hearing and responding, will produce a third dynamic which in its best sense produces the music. This dynamic of solidarity or harmony is a universal feeling which results in communal expression.

Mentorship opens students’ awareness

The ability to make connections, a capacity that is learned through making sense of and broadening an experience, is another ability that we can facilitate within the group. This is one of the most important skills a person can learn. A 16-year old guitarist in our program years ago eloquently summarized the personal benefits this can bring:

Being in a group of people [in this case an ensemble class] has shown me that lots of people have different ideas and that my idea isn’t always the best and isn’t always right. When a group plays together, you have to work with each other to make it happen. It helps me understand how to listen to people, even outside of the program in the other parts of my life.

Where this student had previously been quick to shut out others simply by not listening, he’d learned how to listen because he had to in order to do something he badly wanted to do – play music. He somewhat jokingly told us later that this could present some problems – he actually wasn’t able to shut people out anymore. It’s important to note that his teacher had often made him aware that he was developing this skill — when he was actively learning it.

His example demonstrates how the workings of an evolving group can be so valuable and readily understood in relation to many other areas of one’s life. This youth was originally not very skilled in either communication or music, but because the music was so important to him and he wanted to make the group sound good, he was willing to take the necessary steps and put in the required effort to learn acceptance and communication skills.

There were many “trials and tribulations” in the process, so he also learned that by sticking with something to achieve goals you develop the lifelong skill of perseverance.

Read Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more

Strengths-based Mentoring Transformed my Teaching Experience

Strengths-based mentoring changed the way I teach. Now I look only for the good, knowing that the weaknesses will diminish as the strengths grow.

Over recent years I have been struck by the feeling that our young people are falling through the cracks. Without even realizing why until now, I felt disturbed and protective when listening to adults complain about kids being unfocused and withdrawn.

At the same time, I have noticed a growing social awareness around the environment, politics, agriculture, and so on, and observed so many kind-hearted, open-minded people putting together and running organizations to benefit the greater good. I have often wondered why, then, with all of these new developments and community awakenings, are our youth slipping through the cracks?

Too many of our children are being left behind. While holding these questions in my heart, I have come across public and private school teachers, social aid workers, and mentors, who have added another component to my confusion because the one trait that seems common in these fields of work is that everyone seems very tired. Even extraordinarily compassionate mentors who mention recent breakthroughs and accomplishments and seem to be bordering sainthood, suggest that the work is so taxing that they don’t know how long they will be able to sustain it.

As I began my teaching career I quickly saw that I was at risk of becoming just as burned out as so many others, and began to wonder if this wasn’t at least one of the reasons there was so little progress being made in education.

It wasn’t until I started learning Bill Rossi’s Strengths-Based Mentoring Approach that I began to find a way out of my disillusionment, and a solid way into connecting with, reaching, and truly teaching my students.

When I started working with Rossi’s approach, I realized I have sometimes felt like I didn’t even have the child’s attention. I teach dance during and after school, and if a student wasn’t dancing right away, I would perceive a lack of interest and react by shifting into autopilot and losing momentum. It was disheartening, for sure.

Bill Rossi helped me recognize that a young person has many levels of engagement. I learned, through working with his approach, that many more students were with me in their attention than I realized. I learned in simple ways how to recognize that a student was interested … eye contact was a big one! So, maybe a student wasn’t ready to dance right away, but that student was not missing a beat – with their eyes – of what was going on. They were taking it all in until they got their footing, so to speak. As I loosened up, I realized that they were ready to join in small ways – clapping of hands, shaking a shaker, playing a drum – and then they would join the dance, already having the feeling of being part of a group.

Bill’s strengths-based approach has really helped me to see the different ways in which students learn. You may already know this to be true for the way you learn; you may need to understand a process mentally before diving in … you may need to walk through the experience physically before understanding it mentally … you may need to see the bigger picture first, and so on. As I continue to work through this approach, I am inspired by how students will show me (or in some cases, even tell me) how they learn most effectively.

As I observe, listen, and creatively honor their different learning styles, I am finding the learning process to be student motivated (not something forced) and I am slipping into the role of facilitator. Without some of the power struggles that come from trying to fit students into a mold they may never fit into, their personalities (and mine) are coming alive, and we are covering more material than I thought possible!

Read Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed for more.

Dawn Smelser, Director, MotherHeartStudio