Are you are a teacher, principal, education supervisor, counselor? Are you an adult in an after-school club, vacation club or church youth organization or any other organization that works pre-teens and/or teenagers? Empowering Youth: Accessing Positive Peer Power is written just for YOU!
Empowering Youth: Accessing Positive Peer Power offers a fresh approach to the process of shaping instructional attitudes and ideas and to your efforts to develop skills and practices that will encourage youth to become active participants in their endeavors to set higher academic expectations for themselves. The strategy put forth in the book will encourage them to strive for greater achievement and raise the level of their performance. This exciting book emphasizes the notions of youth participation and input that are goal oriented and outcome focused.
You will want the book that Chuck Gobel and Nicholas Schaeve, retired public school principals, have written. The youth centered approach advocated in this book can be used in schools, youth clubs, churches, camps, or homes - really anywhere that pre-teens and/or teenagers, whether in small groups or large, regularly gather with adults as supervisors, teachers and guides. While larger organizations like schools might choose to use the full offering put forth by Empowering Youth: Accessing Positive Peer Power, the approach can be adopted and adapted gradually and in part or whole as different situations warrant.
Although focused on youth, parents and other caregivers also can benefit by adopting the youth centered attitudes, the enabling behaviors and the use of small circle group problem solving sessions within the family. Similarly teens and preteens can adopt the practices advocated in the book within their informal structures with friends.
Providing an environment for peers to learn how to operate in small groups to problem solve together and to become critical thinkers is a special circumstance that creates natural motivation among peers to want to participate. Providing the opportunity for peers to pick other peers they consider to be leaders compels involvement. With training, the leader peers identified can become initial facilitators for group problem solving and learning. Positive peers become active teachers and learners with one another while enabling adults help structure and guide the process insuring that the necessary organizational goals are accommodated.
Observation tells us that peers of any age enjoy and benefit from interacting and working with one another. Empowering Youth: Accessing Positive Peer Power provides a means to use this enjoyment constructively to change the learning direction of the youth involved. By accessing positive peer power organizations of any size and their members can both learn and grow.
