How to Catalyze the Magic of Strengths-Based Teaching

This post sheds light on why strengths-based teaching is uniquely effective in empowering students to succeed in all areas of their lives, and how to harness its magic.

Finding Students’ Strengths

We’ve written a number of posts about how SETS (Student Evaluation and Teaching Sytem) helps you organize your program and secure more funding, but here’s the thing: while SETS does all of that beautifully, that’s not the main reason educator Bill Rossi and the Merge team created it. So what’s the point? It’s all about a student’s strengths.

At its core, SETS was developed to give teachers the orientation and tools they need to empower students to be the unique individuals they are.

If you believe that education should empower students to learn about themselves, perhaps you’ve already worked with strengths-based teaching (SBT). When implemented well, SBT empowers students to understand themselves and learn in a way that works for them—ultimately helping them find their place in the world.

Seeing Students as the Individuals They Are

The beauty of strengths-based teaching lies in its ability to arm teachers with the special focus they need to recognize each student as a unique individual. While this can be more demanding for teachers, it it is also far more rewarding. When teachers take the time to understand how each student processes the world around them, they can use their understandings to create learning environments that tap into students’ strengths and challenges.

This approach creates an atmosphere where students feel validated and important, simply for being themselves.

That said… strengths-based teaching can sound great in theory, but as you may know, it’s not always easy to implement. It requires teachers to be highly attuned to each student’s individual needs and to recognize where they are in their learning journey.

What is Strengths-Based Teaching?

Strengths-based teaching (SBT) works for all students, but it’s especially transformative for those who face more than the normal amount of challenges in their lives. Simply put, SBT focuses on nurturing students’ strengths while addressing and supporting their challenges. It’s a process that empowers students to:

• Discover and understand their unique strengths
• Develop their strengths through practical, hands-on experience
• Strengthen their challenges in a way that supports their strengths
• Build confidence in their ability to learn and succeed

This is quite different from traditional standards-based education. While standards-based education has its merits, we advocate for a shift in focus—one that prioritizes students’ strengths, natural inclinations, and unique learning styles.

To explain further, here are a few key points from Bill Rossi’s book Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Learn (you can also scroll down to see how the software SETS encourages SBT):

• Strengths-Based Teaching celebrates uniqueness. It promotes different ways of thinking and focuses on teaching how to think, rather than what to think.
• Strengths-Based Teaching nurtures individual abilities. It’s all about developing each student’s natural talents and capabilities.
• Strengths-Based Teaching encourages self-awareness. It helps students understand their internal drives and use them to reach their goals.
• Strengths-Based Teaching honors diverse learning styles. It recognizes that every student learns in their own way.

At the heart of SBT is the belief that, rather than rewarding conformity, we should empower individuals to discover and embrace who they truly are. This process not only gives them the best chance to succeed in life—but also helps them appreciate and enjoy the uniqueness of others along the way.

How SETS Encourages Strengths-Based Teaching

Our SETS software (Student Evaluation & Teaching System) is a comprehensive, 3-scale student assessment tool. Its Observation Scale trains teachers to focus on where their students are with the Principles of Empowerment—fundamental learning and development principles that every student needs to thrive.

As teachers observe their students, they begin toidentify each student’s strengths and challenges. This scale helps teachers move beyond subjective impressions, offering concrete, measurable insights into student progress and areas that need attention.

In terms of program oversight, the scale turns subjective observations into actionable data—allowing teachers to track milestones and identify next steps for each student.

Identifying Student Strengths and Abilities

You might have noticed that the concept of “strengths” can vary within different educational models. Many lists focus on attributes like leadership, exam-taking ability, or fitting into traditional systems. While these traits can be important, we believe true strengths lie in how students learn and engage with the world around them—once students are able to really learn, they can lead, test, or fit in as they wish.

In our experience, it’s most effective to focus on how individual students process information and learn. When we meet students where they are and accommodate their unique learning processes, we set them up for success.

Challenged students, in particular, typically don’t understand how they learn and, more importantly, they’ve probably not had a teacher who did, either. When a teacher adopts a strengths-based approach they’re communicating their intention to understand a student’s learning process. That alone builds trust and motivation.

The Principles of Empowerment (POE), which are at the heart of SETS’ Observation Scale, help teachers identify and nurture each student’s strengths. By focusing on how a student learns—rather than just what they learn—teachers can form deeper, more meaningful relationships with their students.

Strenths-Based Teaching Focuses on The Principles of Empowerment (POE)

The Principles of Empowerment are the core qualities and skills involved in learning.  These qualities and abilities are essential for learning, and while they are inherent in all of us, they must be actively developed for effective learning to take place.

The POE are grouped into three categories: Relationship to Self, Relationship to Teacher, and Skills Development.

Relationship to Self:

These are the personal qualities and skills that influence how a student engages with their learning. Key areas include:

• Ability to concentrate
• Motivation and persistence
• Self-confidence
• Frustration tolerance
• Consistency in effort

Relationship to Teacher:

The student’s connection to their teacher is a vital aspect of empowerment. These metrics include:

• Listening and responding to the teacher
• Understanding directions
• Communicating needs and ideas effectively

Skills Development:

This area focuses on how the student is learning specific skills, including:

• Respecting materials and equipment
• Willingness to try new steps
• Freedom of expression
• Identifying connections between concepts
• Building on previous learning
• Incorporating new elements into their skillset

SETS: The Trojan Horse

Perhaps the original developer of SETS was right when they observed that SETS could be a “Trojan Horse” for a more empathetic approach to teaching, especially for students who face challenges.

We hope this overview of strengths-based teaching has added to your understanding. We’d be happy to give you a virtual tour so you can see for yourself how SETS can help you empower your students.

How SETS Makes Your Data Work for You

Transforming Observations into Data

Does your program work to see students as individuals and teach to their strengths? If so, this post is for you.

These days, we can’t make it far without running into data. People may be more or less the same as we were fifty years ago, but the collection and use of our contact points with the environment have become increasingly complex and targeted. Since advertisers are able to effectively market down to the individual consumer, it should also be possible to make your data work for you.

How can you apply the immense value of data? Merge Education has developed an evaluation system that empowers your students through their individuality. SETS (Student Evaluation & Tracking System) meets learners where they are, creating a baseline for their progress based on their goals, their relationships, and their own reporting of their self-esteem.

Our system measures progress in both technical competence and social and emotional growth so that you can best serve each student and demonstrate and develop the efficacy of your program.

A Variety of Feedback for Comprehensive Oversight

By allowing students, staff, and ‘significant othrs’ to provide feedback, SETS allows you to create multifaceted and balanced assessments and reports. SETS anchors traditionally qualitative concepts to specific numerical points with detailed yet simple guides, That empowers your staff to assess their students with confidence that their feedback is grounded in direct interaction and observation. In so doing, mood, bias, and other unhelpful factors are greatly limited.

The product of this feedback is reports within reference ranges that have come from decades of programming experience combined with thoughtful research in the social sciences.

Simplify, Organize, and Improve

Running extracurricular programs comes with an overwhelming number of administrative tasks like scheduling, staffing, and maintaining biographical and demographic records. For many programs, tracking the progress of individual students doesn’t even make it onto the to-do list.

SETS creates a single space for all of the above, cleanly and simply tying your students’ participation and background information to their personal progress. Organizing this data within a single system creates the opportunity for teachers to be more deliberate, to grow in their own performance, and to more deeply understand what the individual student needs most to feel empowered and to excel.

Empower Students through Your Observations

We’ve all felt seen by marketers, often to a degree that makes us feel uncomfortable. Imagine when the students in your program feel truly seen by your staff, and then imagine you were able to show the benefits of this exchange to all of the stakeholders in the process, whether it’s parents, funders, or referring programs. SETS helps you to do this.

Help your staff to empower your students as individuals while benefiting your program with data that provides words for the previously indescribable. We can do better with our data. SETS can help.

How the Sandbox database helps youth development practitioners learn SETS

The concepts behind the Student Evaluation and Tracking System (SETS) were conceived in the Youth Development field, so the program makes sense to youth development practitioners. That same thinking was carried over to SETS’ development as software, so it’s also easy to learn and use.

How we best learn new technology is unique to each of us, but for most, learning new tech is not a favorite weekend hobby. According to VerywellMind “some experts believe that we all suffer at least a small amount of nervousness when confronted with new technology.” A small amount? Many of us suffer a lot more than that!

All of the concepts behind SETS were developed by former teacher and afterschool director Bill Rossi who is not a techie, and his intuitive learning style has influenced everything about the SETS program.  That’s why SETS comes with a Sandbox database.

Almost a day at the beach?

That’s a stretch, and yet … one of the joys many of us experience in childhood is spending time in the sandbox. Free to play, free to experiment, free to just be. And as its name implies, SETS’ Sandbox database is a place to play around … you know, sit back, relax, sift the sand between your fingers, and get the feel of things. No pressure! When the pressure’s off you can absorb and assimilate, so it’s a great way to learn.

An example for youth development practitioners

A student’s identification screen is a good example of how the Sandbox database helps familiarize you with SETS. When you look at this screen filled with Sandbox (hypothetical) data, the fields make sense. On the screenshot below, you’ll see that the Population field is self-explanatory …

If the meaning isn’t clear enough, you can click on the down arrow for that field and see other options which should clarify it:

If you’re still in doubt, you can consult the SETS Program Director Manual for clarification. But consider the manual excerpt below.  Wouldn’t you say it would make more sense once you’ve explored SETS with the Sandbox data?

Populations

SETS asks you to specify a population when you enter a student in your database. A population groups students for data management and statistical purposes. Each student comes from only one population.

Populations may be any groupings you want for your comparative needs – they could be the sources for your students (social service organizations, schools, etc.), or age, grade level, gender, race, parents’ marital status, etc. Just keep in mind that a student’s population will determine how he is grouped in reports: SETS reports are organized by population, activity, student, and staff.

Have we made our point? Do you see how the Sandbox database can help you learn the program? For that matter, do you think most people learn best by experiencing what they’re learning? Experiential learning!

We’d love to hear your take!

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 Use SETS as a Youth Development Teaching Tool

Are you looking for a youth development teaching tool? Youth empowerment programs often seek out ways to help their teachers become more effective at empowering their students. They also typically have limited resources for training teachers, and it can be hard to know how a person teaches until you see their results. Perhaps you’ve had a disappointing hiring experience?

Here’s one example. Let’s say you’ve hired a new teacher whom we’ll call Shannon. Shannon really understands her subject (she’s a painter with a degree in fine arts and a minor in teaching), and she does a lot of things right:

• she clearly loves painting
• she’s friendly with students and parents
• she’s always on time.

You’ve seen her work and she’s talented and accomplished. You’re pretty sure she’s going to be a great addition, so you’ve been looking forward to sitting in on one of her lessons.

But when you sit in on her class you see she needs help:

• she’s using a generic lesson plan and seems aloof from students
• she’s nervous and talks a lot, so students are mostly quiet and not engaged
• students leave looking disinterested or even dejected.

Does this sound familiar? Shannon is like so many other mentors and teachers working in after-school environments … well-meaning, accomplished, and deep into their subjects, but with so little teaching experience they don’t know how to connect to share what they know.

Teaching — especially teaching vulnerable youth — is an art. How do you connect your subject with people you don’t even know? As a teacher, how do you get to know them? What do you look for to understand how they are (or aren’t) learning? How can you ascertain what they need so they can grow into more capable people?

Learning How to Connect with Youth

To connect with students teachers need to meet them where they are, and to do that they need to discover just where that is. This is especially true for working with vulnerable youth.

Unfortunately, teacher training often focuses more on delivering lesson plans than on assessing/understanding individual student learning. Understanding how students are learning gives teachers a focus and empowers them to engage each unique student individually.

Merge Education’s SETS (Student Evaluation and Tracking System) is an assessment program that was developed to serve as a teacher training tool. Using the Teacher Observation Scale monthly to assess students (and referring to it throughout the month), Shannon will learn what to look for to discern how students are learning. That will help her understand them as individuals.

Discernment is an important component of good teaching. A great teacher knows how to step back and observe students while staying emotionally present. This ability takes attention and practice, but it’s essential for effective teaching. It’s an ability that teachers acquire (or hone) when they work with SETS.

SETS helps teachers focus on and develop specific abilities that help lead the student to feel successful — a necessary ingredient for empowerment.

The strengths-based connection

Everyone has strengths, even the most vulnerable and challenged students. A strengths-based approach can be especially effective in youth development programs because it can re-enliven youth who have essentially shut down. As Merge Education’s Bill Rossi says:

Many challenged students have significant strengths and talents that lie beneath their troubled exteriors. This orientation enables us to be like miners digging for ore.

SETS supports strengths-based teaching by helping teachers find students’ strengths and limitations. SETS accomplishes this via the Principles of Empowerment (POE).

The Principles of Empowerment

SETS uses The Principles of Empowerment (POE) as its metrics (quantifiable measures) to assess student learning. Identified by  Merge Education director Bill Rossi, the POE are the qualities necessary for learning. Although inherent in and natural to us all, these qualities must be developed.

As detailed in Rossi’s Venturing Together: Empowering Students to Succeed, the POE are grouped as Relationship to Self, Relationship to Teacher, and Skills Development.

Relationship to Self: These are the personal qualities and skills students need to develop in order to learn well. These are delineated as:

• Ability to concentrate
• Level of motivation
• Self-confidence to succeed
• Frustration tolerance
• Consistency of effort.

Relationship to Teacher: The students’ relationships with others are important indicators of empowerment, and your teachers are well-positioned to evaluate this. The metrics are delineated as:

• Listens to the teacher
• Understands directions
• Communicates needs
• Communicates ideas.

Skills Development: This concerns whether the student is becoming a more capable learner. The metrics 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.

Youth Development Teaching Tool. Smart Metrics = Improved Teaching

So back to Shannon, your hypothetical new teacher. She knows her craft and has a lot going for her as a teacher, and now she can work with SETS to learn how to connect with her students where they are. It seems obvious, yet so few assessment tools utilize the concept. When metrics concern essential principles of learning, they make sense to teachers. They’re like specific signposts, pointing where to look.

So, after spending time with SETS, Shannon will no longer be unfocused because she’ll know how to observe and understand her students. And she’ll no longer be as nervous because she’ll start to connect with them. And your students? They’ll become engaged so they can start learning and growing.

SETS is A Comprehensive Youth Development Teaching Tool

The Teacher Observation Form is just one of SETS’ three scales. The others are a self-assessment completed by students and an assessment completed by a ‘significant other’. While just one can be used as a simple standalone, using all three gives a comprehensive view of each student.

SETS is described in some depth here.

SETS can be purchased here or contact us for a quick tour.

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!”

SETS is an Affordable Youth Development Assessment Software

“SETS looks like a great tool for assessing youth development outcomes, but there’s no such thing as “affordable youth development assessment.” Why does SETS cost so much less than other youth development assessment tools?”

We hear this reaction a lot at Merge, so we thought we’d better clarify.

Merge director Bill Rossi founded and ran a nonprofit youth development program for 20 years, and during that time the need for outcomes data grew — not just for program oversight, but for sustainable funding. Like many other youth development programs, it was a constant struggle to:

• get sustainable funding
• compete with larger programs
• find an evaluation tool that made sense to teachers and staff

Rossi left the nonprofit world in 2010 and began creating SETS … a simple, easy-to-use assessment tool. It wasn’t automated, but it had a powerful effect on program funding. He later decided to create software that would work for a variety of after-school programs.

So, back to the original question: why is SETS so affordable? As we say in the SETS Overview video, we believe programs that individualize their instruction are uniquely effective with their students.

So, if smaller programs are going to use SETS, it needs to be affordable. There are also a few “nuts and bolts” reasons why it’s so affordable.
Here they are:

• SETS is not in the cloud (it lives on your PC)
• SETS is an essential, easy-to-use program that requires almost no tech support
• Merge employs almost no salespeople.

So perhaps that answers at least a part of the question. If you’d like to know why and how SETS was created and what it does, read on.

How (and why) SETS was created for affordable youth development assessment

Working with social workers, other teachers, therapists, and software developers, educator Bill Rossi created SETS after 20 years in the youth development field.

He’d reviewed most of the available tools, but they are typically expensive and complicated and don’t track what Rossi found to be the skills and abilities we all need to succeed in life.  This leads us to what is most unique about SETS. SETS is a very effective youth empowerment tool.

SETS as a youth empowerment tool

Rossi believes that the most essential and potent way to empower students is by developing their ability to learn. In fact, he believes students should be empowered to self-educate … but that’s for a future post. Suffice it to say that if students can’t learn well, they won’t be successful (or happy) in life.

So, when Rossi created SETS, he built the Student Observation Scale around the skills and abilities that everyone needs in order to learn. He calls them the Principles of Empowerment. There are 15 skills in all, including the ability to:

• teamworking
• listen well
• understand directions
• critical thinking
• tolerate frustration
• persevere

These “soft skills” are being seen as even more important as the world becomes increasingly digital. So, this one way SETS is unique.

SETS helps create a wrap-around youth development environment

SETS incorporates and reports on an array of assessments from a variety of sources:

• goal setting, recording, and assessing
• a Student Observation assessment by your program teacher
• a Self-Esteem assessment for student self-assessment
• an Assessment Scale for student assessment by significant others to evaluate students
• opportunities for in-depth teacher input on students (“Profiles”) which helps satisfy human services departments
• notes about any changes in student’s lives that may affect their ability to progress
• and other opportunities to incorporate information on all important areas of students’ lives

This variety provides an in-depth view of the student that gives you great program oversight and demonstrates to funders that your in-depth approach is providing significant results. Social workers consider this an essential component of a wrap-around environment.

Affordable Youth Development Assessment — 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. 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!”

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!”

Survive & Thrive with this Youth Development Software

In fact, during the 2008 recession, the director of the local county Department of Human Services said SETS was the deciding factor in their giving an afterschool program a four-year contract.

SETS has received a comprehensive update yet it’s still the practical, down-to-earth tool small and mid-size nonprofits love.

Youth development outcomes assessment ensures more funding

In Joanne Fritz’s post “How Nonprofits Benefit From Measuring Outcomes” at thebalancesmallbusiness Fritz states:

Demand keeps growing for nonprofits to provide proof that what they are doing accomplishes something. All stakeholders should have ample access to information about the organizations to which they donate their resources or from which they seek services.

Data is everywhere. That’s why charitable nonprofits need to clearly explain 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. SETS makes sense to youth development teachers because it asks questions they feel are relevant. How are students learning? How is their focus, their persistence, their ability to understand directions? SETS is practical, so teachers enjoy using it.

SETS also shows funders that your program is unique in how it addresses students’ individual needs. So, not only will you have great stories to share … you’ll have the data to back them up.

Give SETS a try. You may come to see SETS as a life preserver for your youth development program.