10th Grade PSP 6/25-26/2009

In 140 characters or less, describe this program, population, and their goals in bringing their group to our facility.
An intensive University preparatory program for promising young H.S. students from Ewing, Trenton, Princeton, and other areas, 2-days w/10th graders.

What did you like or enjoy about your group?
These kids were very open, honest and had a great sense of humor. They were sweet and not too serious, I loved working with our rising 10th graders.

Also, one of the instructors, who joined us the second day, was someone I was blessed to work with last year, and he has such an ease and rapport with the students, and has a real ease with debriefs, creating analogies to math (his subject of choice) it was truly a joy.

What were the soft facilitation skills you feel you did well?
I was paired with T-Money, who's an adjunct and summer facilitator, and she wanted three things from our partnership: 50/50% split in sharing the workload; To work on creating transference from our adventure course activities and the games we played back to these students' intensive summer school experiences and back to school in the fall; And to aid her in being thorough with her directions. I think I helped T meet those needs well, and I think we had a good rapport as co-facilitators.

Also, we had to leave the climbing wall early in the afternoon due to thunderstorms. T and I combined our rising 10th graders with Ryan and Salome's group and we did a large group get-to-know-you with the participants' name tags, then the two groups did pipeline side by side (I facilitated the brief, Ryan spearheaded the debrief). The skill I used when we combined groups was my flexibility and creativity.

What activities did you do that were new to you during the program?

• Puzzle/# debrief which T showed me, similar to an index-card name game where you switch after talking with a partner.
• Hard-boiled egg Full-Value Contract.

What were challenges you encountered while facilitating this group?
I think the one thing I could have improved was urging my co-facilitator to go easy on debriefs in the beginning, making them short and sweet, and then upping the ante towards transference in the end. I think we front-loaded well for transference of skills and learning however fell victim to some over-processing in the middle.

How can you apply what you learned during this program next time? (What groups might it be applicable to?)
Δ Next time this group comes up, we need to work on setting a better pace for debriefs during the starts of the norming stage and adding variety to debriefs:
-Use Chiji cards
-Use LOLCards
-Physical objects (Racecar/Knot debrief from Tony Alvarez @ Association for Experiential Education International Conference last year)
-What-So What-Now What? (KIS)
Δ Because the faculty rotates around, being very creative with get-to-know-you and name games will be key. Think of lots of physical ones.
Δ Have some good tag games for high-schoolers in mind.
+ Relied and trusted a lot in my co-facilitator because I did always know where she was and felt confident leading things.
Δ On the next programs, I need to push my co to give me delta feedback! I didn't get any this go-around which made me sad as that's one of the best parts about summer and co-facilitating (which we don't do a lot during the year).
Δ Increase awareness of my tone and language, want to sound gracious, genuine, and not condescend (which is something I have definitely heard before). For this I will need specific examples from my co-facilitator and alternative ways to get meaning across.