Positive Youth Development

Overview
A new dynamic approach to learning in schools is emerging from chrysalis. And like a butterfly it has two wings carrying it aloft. I refer to the recognition that academic knowledge must be balanced with life knowledge, hard skills with soft skills, head with heart, and individual sensibility with that of the group.


Positive Youth Development is a helpful rubric for describing a wide range of initiatives designed to foster emotional and social intelligence along with more traditional education goals. These have emerged in response to a crucial gap perceived by practitioners in schools and youth agencies. Simply put, learning is a social process within which human emotions and relationships are powerful intrinsic influencers.

This is a relatively new field and highly interdisciplinary. Moreover, each of these initiatives has a distinct theoretical framework, methodology, and ecosystem of institutions and practitioners. The Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington has identified 161 PYD programs. Some 3 million young people have been involved in related research projects across North America [Search Institute].


PYD is part of an even broader shift in psychological theory, research, and praxis. Related developments include Positive Psychology, Positive Scholarship, and Appreciative Inquiry. These all share a common perspective. That is, that the positive images we create and share - of ourselves, of each other, and our futures - help drive their actualization.

"As you ramble through Life,
Whatever be your goal.
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole."

What Parents Are Saying
Teaching social skills has tremendous importance for the nearly 1,000 people surveyed by Hasbro. 90% of parents consider social skills to be vital to their children's happiness and confidence and nearly 80% consider these more important than academic skills when it comes to happiness.


Social and Emotional Learning
SEL is an umbrella term used to describe the skills needed “to recognize and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively" (CASEL) SEL has grown increasingly important within primary and secondary schools across Canada and the United States.

Developmental Asset Framework
This framework developed by the Search Institute outlines those ‘assets’, or ‘development building blocks’ essential to the health and well being of Middle and High School students. Young people draw on these assets to make positive choices, avoid high-risk behaviors, and thrive. Internal Assets include competencies and values that young people learn and internalize on their way to becoming responsible and healthy adults. External Assets consist of resources like friends, family, mentors, school, and community organizations.

Resilience Education
Resilience Education is concerned with how some youth, despite terribly challenging lives, are able to overcome adversity and thrive. Research has identified these core characteristics and strengths, which are key to healthy development and effective learning. “Changing the life trajectories of children and youth from risk to resilience starts with changing the beliefs of the adults in the families, schools, and communities”. [Benard, Bonnie 2004, Resiliency: What We Have Learned. San Francisco, CA: WestEd]

Character Education
Character Education is an umbrella-term used to describe the teaching of children in a manner that will help them to develop. Concepts that fall under this term include social and emotional learning, moral reasoning/cognitive development, life skills education, health education; violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation. This form of education involves teaching children and adolescents’ values including honesty, stewardship, kindness, generosity, courage, freedom, justice, equality, and respect.

Positive Behaviour Support
PBS is the application of evidence-based strategies and systems that work at an individual level and school wide level. This is designed to help establish a positive and safe environment, which in turn is conducive to increased academic performance.

“One of the wonderful features of a “PBS School” is that the ... selection of interventions and programs is often done collaboratively by a school team ... Positive Behavior Support is different from traditional behavior modification in three ways. First, it is focused on the use of positive intervention strategies that are respectful of the individual. Second, the interventions that are developed are individualized and are based on an understanding of the individual, the individual’s communication abilities, and the unique situations of the individual. Third, the intervention strategies that are developed are focused on helping the individual gain access to new environments, have positive social interactions, develop friendships, and learn new communication skills.”

School Climate
School Climate is another term with a fairly broad definition. In essence, school climate refers to the overall quality and feel of the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours of individuals - students, teachers, administrators, staff. School climate establishes the bounds of acceptable behaviour among all stakeholders, and all are deemed responsible for its maintenance. There are four overlapping relation fields.

• The relationship of a student to her or himself
• A student to her or his peers
• A student to her or his parents and community
• A student to her or his school workers, including teachers, administrators, and all staff

Visual Thinking Is A Snap

The following article from eSchool News caught my eye. It's worth noting that in 2008 alone over 110 million digital cameras will be sold worldwide.

Montpelier High School Principal Peter Evans was meeting with a parent recently when the conversation turned to technology in the classroom, reports the Times Argus of Vermont. What is the school's policy on the use of electronics--iPods, MP3 players, PDAs, digital cameras, and laptops--in class, the father asked Evans. He had been opposed to students using tech devices, the dad told Evans, until he saw his son pull out a cell phone while he was working on his homework one night. The teenager explained that he hadn't had a chance to copy down math equations on the board at the end of class, so he used his phone to snap a picture of it. That really changed [the dad's] mind about how wise kids are using technology.

On Visual Thinking

We think in pictures and words and we use both to communicate. We also tend to favour one cognitive style over the other, just as cultures do. Since the advent of the printing press, the written word has had the upper hand in western society, to mangle a metaphor. This is now changing rapidly.

Thanks to easy-to-use inexpensive computers, digital cameras, and high speed Internet, there’s been a profound upsurge in our society’s capacity to think and communicate visually. The following lists a few ways this is manifesting. As Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin, observes: Drawing things out helps us look, see, imagine, and show ideas that would have remained hidden had we not picked up the pen.

Visual Thinking & Education

Thinking Through Stone
My own study of visual thinking began in earnest in the early 90s. For my doctoral fieldwork, I lived two years in a remote village in western Kenya. Tabaka is the epicenter of a century-old soapstone carving cottage industry. My research focused on how one generation of carvers transferred their visual knowledge to the next generation. Of course, this was largely non-verbal, indirect, and informal. It’s an interesting process to try to externalize a creative visual activity. There’s an entire literature and methodology on this subject. Vera John-Steiner’s Notebooks of the Mind is an exemplar.

Visual Spatial Learners
A significant number of students are visual spatial learners. Dr. Linda Kreger Silverman’s research and website are a tremendous resource. Slightly over half of all early school leavers have a visual spatial orientation. Dr. Silverman makes a powerful case that these young people could be and should be taught to their strengths. -

A computer is as indispensable to the visual-spatial child as a book is to an auditory-sequential child. It is visual, graphic, unconcerned with time, highly motivating, responsive to the inquisitive mind of the visual-spatial learner, and accesses the right hemisphere. It is the skating rink where a visual-spatial mind can perform dazzling feats ... Success in our technological era depends upon different skills than are currently emphasized in school: visualization, grasping the big picture, multi-dimensional perception, pattern finding, thinking graphically, and creativity.

New Innovation: Picturing To Learn
There’s a remarkable pilot program underway called Picturing To Learn through the aegis of Harvard and MIT. One of the co-founders, Felice Frankel, states that ‘visually explaining concepts can be a powerful learning tool.’ Part of the reason is that creating a picture can reveal connections that words alone may not. It fosters a holistic perspective and the ability to tell a complete story. When used to help high school students learn and express scientific concepts, the most amazing results occur. Ms. Frankel and her colleagues have already developed a database with more than 4000 drawings.

Visual Communication Tools

Paper & Pencil
We've been creating images to communicate from the start. The drawing featured below was created in Lascaux 17,000 years ago. How easily we can 'read it' today. The means to communicate visually are almost always at hand. What a profoundly simple and immediate way to convey so much at once.

Mind Maps
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. There are many variations of this mapping process, for example Concept Maps and Semantic Maps. Each has its own centre of gravity, protocols, and practitioners. Mo st have software equivalents too.

Graphic Facilitation
Practitioners help groups better picture what they are thinking and trying to express to each other. They are skilled in literally drawing out the groups’ thoughts and feelings as they emerge through guided dialogue. The results can be very impressive. A graphic facilitator generally works with marking pens on a large (4-feet-high and 10-to-15-feet-long) sheets of butcher paper.

Image Maps
An image map is an online tool featuring one overall diagram with specific parts hyperlinked to relevant destinations. The example here is from the emerging field of Positive Psychology. As its creator’s note, these image maps can help people get a mental structure for storing information about positive psychology, and the attached articles form a reader’s guide for learning about the subject.

Interactive White Boards
This large interactive display enables an individual or group to write or draw on the surface, print off the image, save it to computer or distribute it over a network. Images can also be projected on the screen from a computer and worked on a life size scale, which in turn is recorded on the computer. SMART Technologies, a Canadian based producer of interactive whiteboards alone generates about a billion dollars in revenues.

Surface
Microsoft Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that several people can use simultaneously. The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing small groups to interact with visual content and information in a more natural and familiar way, by using their hands, gestures, and creativity.

Vision Boards
This is an interesting trend that takes the dynamics of visual thinking to another level. Vision Boards are just that, boards on which people draw or collage images of their goals and dreams. It is believe by practitioners that creating a vision board and using it as meditation will help their goals and dreams to materialize. As with practically every other tool, a community of practice and ecosystem of enterprise has evolved. There are software companies offering a streamlined online digital approach as well. I will revisit the related practices of visualization and imagineering in another post. Suffice it to say there’s extensive research underscoring the value of these processes.

Black Boards

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Dylan Thomas