Urban NJ HS Juniors on-track for Ivy League Schools

I love working with high school students. Where college students challenge and deviate, high school students from programs like this one are on the ball and generally very present. I had a great discussion with a student who lives in a group home, and who wants to be a program coordinator at a group home one day. I gave him a CD that Nyle made when he was a freshman at NYU (Frosh)

I remembered them from last year because I did a Full-Value Contract I've only ever done with that group (which involved burning pieces of paper symbolically).

This program has a middle-school group which comes to our campus each summer, but this group of students are high-schoolers selected through an application process. Their families must make under a certain amount each year, and the students do 3 weeks residential each summer and go to school every Saturday to prepare themselves for the goal of placement in Ivy League schools.

Last year their communication needed more work, but this year we were asked to focus on SMART Goals.

This worked really well since I had Juniors and I took the time to make a handout for my students. It's covered by Creative Commons but is available for non-commercial use here on my own web space. It's targeted at high-school students. but may be good for middle school and early college students. In fact, even my chaperone, the program coordinator, and I did these worksheets right along with our students, to fantastic results.

It tries to walk students through some brainstorming of values, prioritizing, selecting what they want to work on, how to turn that into a SMART goal, and a place for them to create three smaller goals and sign the document. I also included a half-sheet with many of my SMART goals from this past year.

After they finished filling out their sheets, I copied them onto
bright yellow paper and gave them to my students right before they started
loading on the bus. As I did, I reminded each of them to put it on their wall as soon as they got home. Out of sight, out of mind. As a bonus, the coordinator of their program got to keep their originals, which will be a boon to their program instructors, I hope.

In a lot of ways, revisiting SMART goals with my students reminded me of the goals that I need to update for the last few months before my second performance review in April.

Next time, I'll try and be more efficient with getting the goal-setting done so we can do more outdoor activities. But my students who got to sit inside and sip hot chocolate all morning would probably disagree with that.

University LAX team

A couple weekends ago a group of about 50 male athletes came up for come general team-building and high ropes activities.

My Δ feedback that I want to remember:

1. For other adult groups: If they want to fool around, then that's fine. They are more than old enough to understand that there are consequences for their actions, and my students did turn out to have extra time.
2. Also, I did an activity called Tap 2, where two people's hands are squeezed, those people tap two people according to facilitator guidelines before silently returning to their spot. I should have selected more students at a time, and this was not a group that could handle having eyes closed and not messing with one another.
3. At the final debreif, I got the impression that the program coordinator really wanted me to do a Yurt Circle silently (I led Tap 2 and Yurt Circle as large group closings), however I am really not all about facilitating something for the first time in a large group context. I'll save it for something special, and I don't know that it would have worked with this group.

On the + spectrum of things, I really feel much more comfortable facilitating the high element Multi-Vine after this second time going at it.