Proposition 3: Teachers are Responsible for managing and Monitoring Student learning.
Teen VIP Program
Rationale:
The Teen VIP Program assists middle and high School students in developing their work force experience, as well, as expanding their experience as community leaders.These select students spend a large amount of their time assisting and educating other youth in leadership, team-building, science and literacy.Some key components of evaluation and assessment tools used with this group, allows for the coordinator to monitor and gage the youth experience as well as, attitudinal and behavioral change recorded from beginning to ending of the summer sessions.One tool allows students to journal about their experiences during the week that they are assigned to work.Additionally, the students fill out evaluations for their peers, coordinators and program in general.
Finally, the most successful way of managing the Teen VIP Experience, has been to include the group into the social networking site, Face book.This platform has allowed youth to share their personal experiences and thoughts solely based on the program, allows for future participants, teachers and students to be able get a clear sense of what the program is all about.This tool has really been able to honestly and clearly capture the attitudes and comments expressed by youth.
Reflections:
Youth that have participated in the Teen V.I.P. program have made remarkable strides toward highly considering the importance of an education, and how it plays the key part in securing ideals of a life that is wanted by the majority of urban youth.Students had a very strong sense of leadership and youth engagement during the program, and reported being able to talk and present in public, and leading youth during activities.All students felt that it was a great experience to find other youth that had common interests to share ideas and thoughts with others of their same age group.Urban youth need opportunities such as this program to give them options for job training, and professional development.
Some thoughts for improving this program based on evaluations, journal entries and face book entries reflect that some changes should ideally be considered. While management of a group of older youth required careful planning, an important aspect that needs to be considered should be allowing teens to assist in the creation of program growth.Additionally, the idea of expanding this program to first and second year college students to assist them in discovering the education field is a priority.Having older interns will assist the burden with training teens, as well as transporting teen leader teams throughout the area.Collaboration with education departmental heads will ideally be the key in moving this concept forward.