May Action Plan.
March and April have been devoted to interviewing potential partners, considering outcomes and evaluations and exploring your community’s career opportunities. Now is the time to put an activity plan together, even if you know it will continue to evolve. For May’s action plan, you will write a brief narrative concerning your plan and how you can encourage students and parents to discuss their future college and career plans.
In May, you will focus on starting to plan an activity with the community partner you feel best suits the project at this time. As we have mentioned before, you may have opened several doors to interacting with various community partners through this exploration, but for the purposes of the grant, you’ll need to decide on one or two (at most) community partner to design and develop an activity that supports middle school college and career readiness. Working with a partner requires activities and skills that aren’t always the same you use when you plan programs on your own. For that reason we think it’s a good idea for you to start small for this first Future Ready endeavor.
In May you will also hone in on how you are going to determine if your outcomes are met. By now you should have identified three outcomes you would like to reach as a part of your project activity. This month includes identifying how you will determine success in meeting the outcomes. You should start by thinking about the best way to determine whether the outcomes are being met. The chart linked here will give you some ideas about different assessment techniques and when they are good to use. (The content on this chart is taken from a forthcoming book from YALSA on teen library services, one chapter is on outcomes.)
With your partner and outcomes in place by the end of May: write a brief narrative to your SMALL GROUP site to read and respond. The brief should describe:
- Who - Is your Community Partner and Target audience, why you selected this partner, and how you plan on patterning with them.
- When – Summer, Fall, Winter and why you think this is the best time to launch the activity.
- Where- Community Partner location or other location outside your library and why this location was selected
- What - Does the program/ event/ thing look like and what will happen take place.
- Why – What are your outcome goals
- How – Will you evaluate whether or not you are achieving the goals?
Many of these considerations may change as you and your community partner advance in the planning stages, but we would like to see the outlines of what your plans now. Evaluation ideas are especially important to include now. And in order to evaluate outcomes, you have to have a firm idea of what those outcomes are and whether or not you have achieved success.
- Talking with Middle Schoolers and their Parents
We have discussed at some length how important seeking community partners and discussing college and career awareness with the middle school students and their parents is. It’s key that you are able to have discussions with middle school students and their families about college and career options. That’s not always easy to do and it often needs to be accomplished not by focusing on college and career readiness but by focusing on interests and needs of youth and families.
I’d rather this than that…..
One method for getting these conversations going, which we discussed in the April video chat, is “I would rather” conversations. You might start with questions that have nothing to do with college or career. For example, I would rather go to the movies or binge watch TV. Or, I would rather eat hot dogs or hamburgers. Starting with general topics and prompts helps to build rapport and relationships before getting into college career readiness details.
Once you have the relationship you can ask youth to respond to statements such as “I would rather work…outdoors …or at a computer.” or “I would rather “go to community college and live at home” or “go to a large university and live in a dorm.” These questions get youth and parents thinking about their options. These questions are limited only by our imagination. Questions for parents might include, “I would rather my daughter or son go to a school in state or get a scholarship out of state” or, “I would rather my child work in my career or do something completely different from what I’m doing.” The idea is there are, of course, no wrong answers but the questions serve to start a conversation.
Keep in mind that knowing your community is key to asking the right questions in this activity. For example, the questions you ask youth and their families need to reflect their lives and their interests. You might work with a community partner who is familiar with the community as you develop your questions and even test them out with some others before “going live” with them.
Getting students to discuss their intentions can be a very important first step in developing their awareness for planning for their future. Getting parents to verbalize their thoughts and feelings regarding their children’s future may be eye-opening for everyone concerned.
Post on your Small Group site two ideas you have for generating discussion with middle school students and their parents. These don’t have to be elaborate schemes. When I was a young adult librarian, I simply asked the teens/young adults who came to the Teen Center or to our programs, “What’s your plan?” (post high school or for whatever phase of their life was in the future). This simple question opened up many an in-depth discussion about what they were doing or planning to do for their education or career future. Just tell us, in your SMALL group, how you plan to get this discussion started.