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.

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!”

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

The Arts are a Natural for Positive Youth Development

The arts are a natural for positive youth development. Relevant and engaging, the arts meet youth where they are and empower them to move forward. Here’s one very clear success story — just one out of hundreds that happen throughout our country every day.

One two three, one two three, one two three … Natalie was in a groove and the ensemble was cookin’. Natalie stayed with that simple beat, rode it out to the end, then finished in perfect time. She beamed as the audience roared in appreciation, and if you hadn’t known her you would not have believed that one year ago she’d been unable to count rhythmically or sit still for more than 5 minutes.

But those of us who’d known her before – who’d seen her eyes light up at that first simple beat and watched her grow as she learned to focus, to listen, and to succeed – we knew what had happened. Natalie had found herself through the arts.

The challenges Natalie once faced are growing more common every day. Attention deficits, oppositional defiance, and incidents of youth violence and suicide have increased. We believe it’s due to a society that’s become increasingly preoccupied with materialism. As our focus has gone off taking care of our kids, the opportunities for to them to discover and express their voice have diminished. An after-school arts setting can fill this need –  – especially when implemented with an effective strengths-based approach.

Positive youth development mitigates mental health issues

The arts aren’t only for healing, of course. Anything that can generate healing can also mitigate or even prevent illness. We can see that clearly in cultures where the arts are alive and well.

In many cultures, the arts serve as a cohesive fluid of community. People get together informally through music, dance or song to relax and enjoy themselves and each other, with the performance aspect of art secondary to a self-participatory way of being together.

These often impromptu gatherings create a feeling of community in which all can share the human experience in an upbeat way through a universal language. This creatively expressive resonance with others can be reassuring and therapeutic.

The arts create common ground

Because the arts can convey meaning without words they can create common ground, connecting and bonding people together in ways that transcend culture, race, language, negativity, and other often divisive factors. This kind of participation is often a much easier and more enjoyable way to move forward as individuals and as a society. It can also be a way of expressing feelings that are difficult or make us feel too vulnerable, a way of expressing love and a need for others, a way of alleviating a lot of the pressures that life normally and naturally brings.

The arts are also capable of moving us out of our normal frame of thinking because they heighten feelings, and being accepted in our self-expression can lead us to more readily accept others. When that happens – even momentarily – we are more apt to let in something new, to accept things outside ourselves.

A good example of this is when we share a really heightened experience with people whom we perceive to be different from us, one that so impacts us that we are taken out of our normal sense of reality. At that moment we jointly experience a new reality and a new commonality. Most of us value this kind of experience.

The healing process of a creative community also involves an external experience that reduces isolation, a way of translating and processing with others. It’s an experience that is strengths-based and upbeat, beyond psychopathology, and not burdensome to others. So much in life is communicated without words, goes beyond words, and is beneficial for all people whether they suffer severe challenges or not.

It seems that our nation is ready for real social change now, for a reversal of the increasing violence, polarization, and isolation. Addressing fundamental human conditions and finding positive, common, truthful ways to express them will cultivate the soil to put us on new ground. This will allow for emotional understandings which will be educational for all involved, enabling us to go beyond an orientation of treating symptoms towards one of gaining an effective understanding of underlying problems.

The arts as a prevention

We need to work towards prevention, and this can only occur through understanding root causes. In the same way, we need to have a deeper engagement with at-risk and challenged people of all ages, a more contemporary, grass-roots, flexible engagement that takes their feelings and strengths more seriously. When we do, we will be a part of their growth so that when – like Nate – they beam with satisfaction at their success, we will truly share in their joy.

It’s the rare person who doesn’t face some sort of challenge in his or her life; how much better for us all if we could reassess some of our perceptions and look deeper into ourselves and each other. The arts provide wonderful opportunities for all of this.

Just imagine how many Natalies there are around our country. It’s not just them who lose; we’re all the poorer for not having their participation in our communities. I believe we need the personal will to start to turn things around – and I can’t imagine any group better equipped to do so than the after-school arts mentoring community.

Trouble in Mind,
Lord I’m blue
But I won’t be blue always.
You know the sun’s gonna shine
In my back door one day.
Lyrics from Trouble in Mind, a traditional Blues song

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