October 24, 2017

Whether your 21st CCLC program is new or well-established, new students, families and teachers arrive every year. Refresh your messaging often to catch attention. Every spring, summer and fall, reach out with a message that pops and bring in new students, families, volunteers and partners. 

Tip 1. Target messages to each audience. Each group has a different perspective, and wants you to address its concerns. Once you have identified the students who meet your admission criteria, create invitations and messages that will appeal to them and other stakeholders

- Students want to have fun while they learn outside of school. They want activities that respond to their interests and look different from the school day.

- Families want their children to continue learning, do their homework and enjoy social interactions.

- Teachers want their students to get targeted support and make connections between academics and everyday life.

- Community members want young people to engage with local activities and issues in productive ways. And, they want to know how they can support better educational outcomes.

Tip 2. Deliver your messages through multiple and appropriate channels. Do quick surveys of stakeholder groups to find out which method each prefers.

- Print media, such as newspaper stories and flyers, can help you reach families and the community. Use languages other than English, so you touch everyone.

- Broadcast media, such as television and radio, also reach community and family members. Be sure to invite foreign language outlets to learn about your program.

- Be active online. Keep your website up to date, and be smart about using Facebook, Twitter and other social media to promote program enrollment deadlines and special events. Remember to protect student privacy, and check with the school or district about getting release forms before posting photos or videos that show students.

- Get into the community. Set up information tables or displays at street fairs, and outside grocery stores or at farmers markets. Visit families in their homes or at gathering places such as churches and cultural festivals.

Tip 3. Live the messages every day. The positive environment you create will keep students coming and encourage family engagement!

- Offer professional learning events for staff and partners to help them support positive youth development adult-child relationship building, student voice and choice, and 21st century skill development.

- Welcome family and community members to your advisory board and program planning team, and hold special events that bring everyone to the program to celebrate student learning and accomplishments.

- Hold special celebrations that bring everyone to the program to witness student learning and accomplishments.

Resources

Remember, although everything here comes from the Summer Learning course, it also applies to school-year programs.

Creating Positive Environments for Summer Learning
Get research-based tips for supporting student engagement and positive youth development.

Youth Recruitment Planner
You and your colleagues can get into the nitty-gritty of intentional recruitment with this tool.

Facilitating Positive Youth Development Training to Go
This ready-to-use presentation can be customized to your needs for professional learning with staff and partners.

Developing 21st Century Skills Training Starter
Everyone can benefit from better skills in communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. This training starter can help staff and partners learn to support skill development for students.

July 10, 2017

You probably know about the Coaching My Staff section of every Y4Y course. It contains training materials that address key topics within the course. The materials are ready to use as is or customizable to your needs. Here’s a quick introduction to what’s available if you haven’t tried them yet.

Training Starters

Each Training Starter is a two or three-page Word file (also available in PDF) that provides prepared content you can customize, and helps you organize and manage the event. The template includes a set of objectives and important information to include during the training — this is structured to use as a script or as a jumping-off point for the content you want to deliver. You can determine how to open the training and introduce the topic, then wrap up and close the session. 

Trainings to Go

Trainings to Go are hour-long training plans that include a PowerPoint, handouts and training guides. These materials can be downloaded and used as is; they provide all the information for a fully developed learning session on a specific topic area. You can invite participants, print handouts and set up a meeting space, then follow the prepared presentation. If you want to expand or customize the content, you can revise the PowerPoint version to fit your needs. A PDF version of each training is also available.

Find the Training Materials

You can get to topic-specific materials by three routes:

1. On the Y4Y home page, in the navigation area select Train Your Staff from the Learn tab. From this landing page, select a course topic to go to a page that has links to topic-specific Trainings to Go, Training Starters and Tools. 
2. On the Y4Y home page, in the navigation area select Courses from the Learn tab. From the Courses landing page, click on the topic you want to address. When you reach the Course landing page, scroll down to find and click on Coaching My Staff. This landing page presents a short overview that suggests steps for designing your training events. The Training Starters and Trainings to Go materials are located and described within this part of each course. You can also access the materials from the Resources tab within the lesson screen.
3. On the Y4Y home page, in the navigation area select Course Tools from the Resources tab. On this landing page, click on the topic you want to address. When the list of tools for that topic opens, you can find the Training Starters and Trainings to Go under the Train heading
 

July 10, 2017

Summer has started and before you know it, the staff will be preparing for the next school year. No doubt you have plans in place for fall activities, and have done some intentional design to target student needs. Now it’s time to identify and target staff needs.

You may have collected some data in the spring to determine what types of professional learning would be most valuable. A staff survey, ongoing program observations and requests from individual staff members can all inform your training plan. You’ll also want to look at the delivery strategies, activity types and general knowledge areas your staff needs to master. This list suggests some possibilities:

Delivery Strategies

• Project-based learning
• Blended learning
• Service learning
• Themed learning

Activity Types

• Academic learning
• Academic enrichment
• Family engagement
• Recreation
• Health/nutrition

Knowledge and Skill Areas

• College and career readiness
• 21st century skills
• Positive youth development

Don’t let this list overwhelm you — you don’t need to do them all! Your returning staff members may already have expertise in some areas, and introductions to topics for new staff can be refreshers for continuing staff. To further support new staff, you might identify experienced staff to act as mentors or leaders in specific areas. However, if you want to use a strategy such as blended learning or project-based learning for the first time, or at a deeper level than before, you might make it a focus of your fall training. 

Be sure to include the “evergreen” topics. For example, academic enrichment — the practice of purposefully incorporating academic skills and knowledge into many types of activities — deserves ongoing emphasis. If your students need to learn and practice math skills in fun, relevant ways, embedding those skills in citizen science, art, music, recreation and other activities can be powerful. You want your staff to understand how to make this happen.

Whether you plan to dive deep into a topic, or brush up on existing knowledge and skills, here are some tips for how to prepare for effective learning events. Y4Y and other resources that can help are listed at the end of this article.

Tip 1: Know Your Needs. Review your observation notes for areas where you need to build capacity. Then, survey your staff to find out which areas they want to know more about. Shape your learning event around the results and provide time for introducing and practicing the high-priority skills. 
Tip 2: Use Your Experts. You and your staff have built knowledge and skills you can introduce to new staff members. Share leadership of training with your in-house experts. 
Tip 3: Include Your Partners. Your school and district partners have knowledge about delivery strategies and activity types. Your community-based partners can help you think about ways to integrate academic enrichment into the arts, recreation and other activities they lead.

Resources

The Magical Mathematics of Music. See illustrations that show the mathematics behind the sounds we hear.
https://plus.maths.org/content/magical-mathematics-music 

Music and Math. Go here for lesson ideas to help students use music to understand mathematical concepts.
http://www.nea.org/tools/lessons/music-and-math.html 

Maths and Sport: Millennium Mathematics Project. Get activities, video challenges and more to help students explore connections between sports and math.
http://sport.maths.org/content 

Intentional Activity Design Diagram. Customize this tool to look at staff wants and staff needs to design powerful professional learning experiences.

Y4Y Courses. Get ideas and video examples to use during your training from any or all these courses: Citizen Science, Project-Based Learning, College and Career Readiness, and STEM.
 

April 18, 2017

We've all experienced it, whether personally or on the job: that sinking feeling that there will never be enough money to do everything you want, no matter how you juggle the numbers. Fortunately, Y4Y can help take the pain out of financial planning for afterschool programs. Start here:

•    Getting a Jump Start on Summer: Budgeting. This two-part blog from a former director of the Providence After School Alliance offers practical planning advice for summer and school year programming. Read part 1 for budgeting tips, and part 2 for program planning advice.

As you tally funding and expenses for the coming summer or school year program, consider doing more to recruit and retain volunteers. Volunteers can help stretch your budget so you can offer more and better services. Try these Y4Y tools to recruit the help you need and to make volunteering a rewarding experience for everyone:

•    Recruiting Volunteers. Consider which program areas could benefit most from extra help, and match volunteers to needs with Y4Y’s Sample Volunteer Skills Grid. Then work with school and program staff to select a variety of targeted in-person and online recruitment strategies. Get the campaign started with our Volunteer Job Description template, which will help you craft a posting that appeals to potential volunteers. 

•    Retaining Volunteers. Because volunteers often don’t have experience in education, expect them to learn as they go, and help them along the way. Consider Y4Y’s Volunteer Coaching Scenarios, and think about how you would react in each situation. To get staff onboard with supporting volunteers, use our Working With Partner Volunteers Training to Go.

March 16, 2017

Students need to feel safe, encouraged and welcome to keep their stress levels down and their minds open for learning. But creating a positive, inclusive environment is easier said than done. Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone! In fact, it’s often best to enlist the help of school-day staff, parents and community members. Here’s how you can start:

Take positive steps to prevent bullying. 
The first step to stopping bullying is knowing how to spot it. Know how bullying is defined and learn about warning signs that can tip you off if a student is being bullied or is bullying others. When you see bullying happening, intervene immediately. Then follow up by finding out what happened and supporting the students involved.

Work with school-day teachers. 
Coordinating bullying prevention efforts is an important part of sharing responsibility with school staff. Align policies with schools to send a consistent message to students that bullying is never okay. Improve your connections to schools with the Communication and Collaboration Checklist.

Engage parents and family.
Including family members in bullying prevention can help students feel safer and more secure, and make parents worry less. Help parents and family develop the skills needed to talk about bullying with youth in productive ways, and share ideas for how family can be part of the solution. These efforts can support your goals for family engagement.

Get the community involved. 
Bullying affects entire communities. Taking the lead on prevention can be a service learning project for students, and a great opportunity to demonstrate the value your program brings to your community. Consider which of your existing partners might help, reach out to new ones and recruit volunteers.

Share knowledge and resources with others. 
Online or in person, bullying causes misery now and can lead to unhealthy behaviors in the future. The website StopBullying.gov offers many free, research-based resources and strategies to help young people and adults stop aggressive behavior and build a positive community climate. For example, learn about the different roles: students who bully, students who are the targets of bullying, students who assist and reinforce, students who defend, and students who want to help but don’t know how. Also see The BULLY Project website for ideas about how to take action.

When students don’t feel safe, you can’t possibly expect their full attention. Don’t let bullying-related stress be an obstacle to their happiness and their ability to learn!