- Email: [email protected]
A practitioner’s view: Invited commentary
Journal of Adolescence 34 (2011) 1221–1223
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado
A practitioner’s view: Invited commentary Carol Welsh Gray* Thrive Foundation for Youth, Executive Director, 1010 El Camino Real, Ste 250, Menlo Park, CA 94025, United States
My enthusiasm for the research on thriving hit a high point one day, when I listened to Eva, the first African-American in her 40-year old high school’s history to win a student body-elected office. Eva and her teacher were talking about the strategies and skills that Eva used to win the fall election, and they both credited the recent summer school program that drew upon research on thriving and intentional self-regulation (ISR). The summer program targeted youth who were just entering 9th grade and were at-risk of dropping-out. Eva was an only child, living with a mentally unstable mother, and she entered high school knowing no one. In spite of the odds, Eva built her confidence to lead and contribute to her new community. I listened to Eva share her story of running for office. She said: “I knew my spark was dancing. Before this summer, I never would have thought that being a leader could be my spark, too. I learned leaders go outside their comfort zone. They learn from others, and they show they can listen to others who are different from them. I knew my way around school because of the summer program. I was able to guide others around and make friends that way. I was scared to run, and I asked my teachers for help reviewing my speech. Then I started off: ‘Si, se puede! Viva la clase de 2013!’ I borrowed what Obama said in his race, and I reminded my peers that I understood them. My classmates started wildly stomping and shouting their approval!” Eva’s story articulates a number of dimensions of thriving and intentional self-regulation that are central to this special issue. She shows us the possibilities for shifting youth trajectories toward a hopeful future, when research on thriving is translated into skill-building lessons that make sense to youth and their mentoring adults. Most youth development programs have benefited from the research on resilience and the 1990s focus on positive youth development (PYD) assets and reduction of risk factors. However, while youth development organizations encourage high school graduation, college attainment, growth of positive relationships, or community service, they can miss the larger aspects of the full potential that sits above all. Indeed, evaluations of intervention programs consistently identify gaps in adult-mentor capacity to explicitly support youth aspiration and youth self-reflection, decision-making, and goal management skills that are central to aspirational growth. Practitioners, all too often, focus on outcomes that mirror funding priorities for reducing risky behaviors and lowering metrics of societal failure. These metrics do not encourage a focus on “all that a youth can be.” Yet, mirroring Eva’s response, youth can soar above environmental challenges when adults support them in growing their aspirations, and youth adopt a belief in their ability to direct personal change. The research findings on thriving explicated in this journal lift up and spotlight nature’s design for adolescents, in this phase of rapid socio-emotional development and brain growth. The business of adolescents is to ask, “Who do I want to be?” and to develop their brain muscle to interact in a dynamic exchange with their environment. Taken together, these articles fill a void by elucidating how to tap into and enrich the adolescent search for meaning. I expect that adults who care for youth will resonate with the opportunity inherent in these research findings that connects thriving with growth of intentional self-regulation skills. Every youth development program works on youth goals, and good program leaders know the importance of a youth-driven process. However, many organizations stay stuck on goal setting and a non-motivational, hard-to-remember SMART formula to help youth shape a good goal. They have not had the scientific basis upon which to teach skills and build youth intrinsic motivation through the optimization and compensation stages of the goal management process.
* Tel.: þ1 650 485 2944. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0140-1971/$ – see front matter Ó 2011 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.07.019
1222
C. Welsh Gray / Journal of Adolescence 34 (2011) 1221–1223
While there is clear demand from practitioners, the challenge lies in theoretical psychological research that is complex and hard-to-understand for non-scientists. Words like “optimization” and “compensation” are not easily adopted by the average mentoring adult or youth. As the academic world uses somewhat artificial constructs to prove an experimental point, it is often left to practitioners with few resources to translate the science into their own context that is wildly different from the controlled research. In the translation, the potential impact of the science is often severely weakened in their effort to make messages simple and scalable. Sometimes the translated message actually does harm. The enormity of this challenge is apparent when we study this special issue’s focus on individual-contextual bases of thriving. At Thrive Foundation for Youth, our sweet spot is this research-to-practice synthesis. We study scientific content and wrestle with scientists and practitioners on-the-ground, to develop a common, explicit language for a social change process. In 2008, with the release of Dr. Lerner’s 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, Thrive Foundation developed a theory of change d Step-It-Up-2-Thrivedthat pulled this thriving research into tools for practice. Immediately we encountered three tough questions that continue to be our recommendations for future study: #1. How do we marry this aspiration content with the lives of youth living in some of our toughest urban environments? #2. Success at scale, with a psychological innovation, requires precision of messaging across a wide array of individuals and contexts. What can science tell us about key phrases and key cautions as we cascade a complex set of behaviors across diverse niches of organizations, mentoring adults, and youth? #3. How do we explicitly measure progress in thriving attributes and ISR skills? We know that with organizations and individuals, what happens is what is measured. Thrive Foundation encountered the first question as we introduced Sparks, those inner talents and passions in every individual that have been identified by Dr. Peter Benson at Search Institute as the catalyst and energy for growth of indicators of thriving. Street-savvy grantees told us that this first element of our theory of change would not work with youth living in the norms of tough urban environments. They shared that urban youth of violent neighborhoods pay lip service to aspirational conversations, because in that neighborhood reality, they do not believe their aspirations have a chance. These grantees adapted our theory of change by shaping ways to unpack dreams and dream thieves as a prelude to the sparks content. As mentors help youth grow their sparks and spark champions, they introduce the second element of our theory of change, applying the Growth Mindset content from Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford University. In helping youth understand how the brain thinks, mentors promote a youth belief that one’s brain is a muscle that grows stronger with effort, challenge and practice. A growth-mindset framework promotes Step-It-Up-2-Thrive’s third element, which is a set of mentor-youth conversations or lessons that present youth with a holistic view of the indicators of thriving and risk factors that might be in the way. Youth are encouraged to self-reflect about the strengths they have developed and how to apply those strengths to reaching new indicator goals. Addressing the second question, in development of the growth mindset and thriving indicator conversations, we had to make frequent adjustments to messages that were fraught with peril from either the view of a practitioner or an academic partner. Sometimes the practitioner’s drive for simple language made great sense and we could easily align suggestions with the science. Other times we influenced practitioners to try using especially rich words like “initiative” or “aspiration” because we saw a strong connection between the words and delivery of the content. And then there were times, in spite of deep study of the research, when Thrive required clearer explanation from the scientists because there were nuances they saw, and “unchangeable” parts of the message that were not as obvious to the rest of us. The fourth element of the Thrive theory of change promotes ISR or what we translate to goal-management skills. We asked Dr. Richard Lerner’s team at Tufts Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development to conduct a review of the literature on what is known about growing ISR in youth. To address the last question, the Lerner team was commissioned to develop a set of measurements (rubrics) that would quantify narrative evidence of growth in indicators of thriving and ISR skills. The rubric definitions were anchored with video exemplars of ISR skills developed by Dr. Lerner’s team in partnership with the Harvard Center for Media and Adolescence. The videos feature young adults talking about their ISR skills in pursuit of thriving goals. Early pilot evidence suggests that these rubrics and video tools can powerfully elevate observation, reflection and conversation skills of adult mentors in their work with youth to grow these skills and attain goals. The rubrics provide adults and youth a common view of initiative and skill, at stages of growth for each thriving attribute and ISR dimension. They have a shared, explicit language for discussing the path to thriving and addressing challenges along the way. In the long process of developing a user-friendly language that accurately reflected the research, there was a great deal of give and take. The Lerner academic team flew to Chicago to meet with on-the-ground Thrive grantees. At their suggestion, Lerner adjusted SOC academic language (Selection of Goals, Optimization and Compensation) to a sticky metaphor of a GPS guidance system (Goal Selection, Pursuit of Strategies and Shifting Gears). The GPS visual image ties to a teen’s interest in cars and the concept of a movement along a life journey. As pilot organizations learn about these GPS skills, in the context of rubric training, we find adults sharing beliefs that underlie and influence the way they guide youth. Sometimes these beliefs align with the research on thriving in adolescence and sometimes they are in conflict with the new research. Youth mentors have healthy debate that influences organizational development and frameworks for practice. This healthy debate extends across organizations as they compare notes about how to promote thriving with their clientele.
C. Welsh Gray / Journal of Adolescence 34 (2011) 1221–1223
1223
Eva experienced Thrive Foundation for Youth’s translation of this recent research on thriving to the caring adult-youth unit. We revamped a 15-year-old summer school called out by the high school superintendent as having no measurable impact. Our investment in a set of summer lessons resulted in these youth outperforming a matched control group in terms of GPA and credits for the subsequent first and second freshman semester of high school. Youth told the evaluation team in focus groups and online surveys that they learned how to talk about strengths they had developed, scope out what it takes to reach dreams, and how to label and tackle risk factors in their way. They learned goal-management skills to reach their goals. We often heard from these youth targeted as at-risk of dropping-out of high school: “I now know that I can change.” At Thrive Foundation For Youth, we also know that change occurs when we bridge the best of research with practice. This special issue provides practitioners a fascinating new view of intentional self-regulation growth trajectories and contextual conditions that influence intentional self-regulation and indicators of thriving. The papers further elucidate parent and program intervention opportunities, and they raise a host of practitioner questions about “what to do”. The identification of four ISR growth trajectories (Bowers, Gestsdottir, Geldhof, Nikitin, von Eye, & Lerner, this issue) causes a practitioner to beg for additional research to discover the individual strengths and ecological assets that mitigate for low parent involvement and socio-economic status in the Late Onset trajectorydor to understand the “why” and the “how” to intervene with youth and their families of higher socio-economic status in the severe drop-off trajectory. As practitioners strive to shape lessons and tools that impact and measure thriving trajectories of youth, in a wide range of cultural and environmental contexts, this special issue shines a beacon on the applied research path ahead.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Adolescence journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jado
A practitioner’s view: Invited commentary Carol Welsh Gray* Thrive Foundation for Youth, Executive Director, 1010 El Camino Real, Ste 250, Menlo Park, CA 94025, United States
My enthusiasm for the research on thriving hit a high point one day, when I listened to Eva, the first African-American in her 40-year old high school’s history to win a student body-elected office. Eva and her teacher were talking about the strategies and skills that Eva used to win the fall election, and they both credited the recent summer school program that drew upon research on thriving and intentional self-regulation (ISR). The summer program targeted youth who were just entering 9th grade and were at-risk of dropping-out. Eva was an only child, living with a mentally unstable mother, and she entered high school knowing no one. In spite of the odds, Eva built her confidence to lead and contribute to her new community. I listened to Eva share her story of running for office. She said: “I knew my spark was dancing. Before this summer, I never would have thought that being a leader could be my spark, too. I learned leaders go outside their comfort zone. They learn from others, and they show they can listen to others who are different from them. I knew my way around school because of the summer program. I was able to guide others around and make friends that way. I was scared to run, and I asked my teachers for help reviewing my speech. Then I started off: ‘Si, se puede! Viva la clase de 2013!’ I borrowed what Obama said in his race, and I reminded my peers that I understood them. My classmates started wildly stomping and shouting their approval!” Eva’s story articulates a number of dimensions of thriving and intentional self-regulation that are central to this special issue. She shows us the possibilities for shifting youth trajectories toward a hopeful future, when research on thriving is translated into skill-building lessons that make sense to youth and their mentoring adults. Most youth development programs have benefited from the research on resilience and the 1990s focus on positive youth development (PYD) assets and reduction of risk factors. However, while youth development organizations encourage high school graduation, college attainment, growth of positive relationships, or community service, they can miss the larger aspects of the full potential that sits above all. Indeed, evaluations of intervention programs consistently identify gaps in adult-mentor capacity to explicitly support youth aspiration and youth self-reflection, decision-making, and goal management skills that are central to aspirational growth. Practitioners, all too often, focus on outcomes that mirror funding priorities for reducing risky behaviors and lowering metrics of societal failure. These metrics do not encourage a focus on “all that a youth can be.” Yet, mirroring Eva’s response, youth can soar above environmental challenges when adults support them in growing their aspirations, and youth adopt a belief in their ability to direct personal change. The research findings on thriving explicated in this journal lift up and spotlight nature’s design for adolescents, in this phase of rapid socio-emotional development and brain growth. The business of adolescents is to ask, “Who do I want to be?” and to develop their brain muscle to interact in a dynamic exchange with their environment. Taken together, these articles fill a void by elucidating how to tap into and enrich the adolescent search for meaning. I expect that adults who care for youth will resonate with the opportunity inherent in these research findings that connects thriving with growth of intentional self-regulation skills. Every youth development program works on youth goals, and good program leaders know the importance of a youth-driven process. However, many organizations stay stuck on goal setting and a non-motivational, hard-to-remember SMART formula to help youth shape a good goal. They have not had the scientific basis upon which to teach skills and build youth intrinsic motivation through the optimization and compensation stages of the goal management process.
* Tel.: þ1 650 485 2944. E-mail address: [email protected]. 0140-1971/$ – see front matter Ó 2011 The Foundation for Professionals in Services for Adolescents. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.07.019
1222
C. Welsh Gray / Journal of Adolescence 34 (2011) 1221–1223
While there is clear demand from practitioners, the challenge lies in theoretical psychological research that is complex and hard-to-understand for non-scientists. Words like “optimization” and “compensation” are not easily adopted by the average mentoring adult or youth. As the academic world uses somewhat artificial constructs to prove an experimental point, it is often left to practitioners with few resources to translate the science into their own context that is wildly different from the controlled research. In the translation, the potential impact of the science is often severely weakened in their effort to make messages simple and scalable. Sometimes the translated message actually does harm. The enormity of this challenge is apparent when we study this special issue’s focus on individual-contextual bases of thriving. At Thrive Foundation for Youth, our sweet spot is this research-to-practice synthesis. We study scientific content and wrestle with scientists and practitioners on-the-ground, to develop a common, explicit language for a social change process. In 2008, with the release of Dr. Lerner’s 4-H Study of Positive Youth Development, Thrive Foundation developed a theory of change d Step-It-Up-2-Thrivedthat pulled this thriving research into tools for practice. Immediately we encountered three tough questions that continue to be our recommendations for future study: #1. How do we marry this aspiration content with the lives of youth living in some of our toughest urban environments? #2. Success at scale, with a psychological innovation, requires precision of messaging across a wide array of individuals and contexts. What can science tell us about key phrases and key cautions as we cascade a complex set of behaviors across diverse niches of organizations, mentoring adults, and youth? #3. How do we explicitly measure progress in thriving attributes and ISR skills? We know that with organizations and individuals, what happens is what is measured. Thrive Foundation encountered the first question as we introduced Sparks, those inner talents and passions in every individual that have been identified by Dr. Peter Benson at Search Institute as the catalyst and energy for growth of indicators of thriving. Street-savvy grantees told us that this first element of our theory of change would not work with youth living in the norms of tough urban environments. They shared that urban youth of violent neighborhoods pay lip service to aspirational conversations, because in that neighborhood reality, they do not believe their aspirations have a chance. These grantees adapted our theory of change by shaping ways to unpack dreams and dream thieves as a prelude to the sparks content. As mentors help youth grow their sparks and spark champions, they introduce the second element of our theory of change, applying the Growth Mindset content from Dr. Carol Dweck at Stanford University. In helping youth understand how the brain thinks, mentors promote a youth belief that one’s brain is a muscle that grows stronger with effort, challenge and practice. A growth-mindset framework promotes Step-It-Up-2-Thrive’s third element, which is a set of mentor-youth conversations or lessons that present youth with a holistic view of the indicators of thriving and risk factors that might be in the way. Youth are encouraged to self-reflect about the strengths they have developed and how to apply those strengths to reaching new indicator goals. Addressing the second question, in development of the growth mindset and thriving indicator conversations, we had to make frequent adjustments to messages that were fraught with peril from either the view of a practitioner or an academic partner. Sometimes the practitioner’s drive for simple language made great sense and we could easily align suggestions with the science. Other times we influenced practitioners to try using especially rich words like “initiative” or “aspiration” because we saw a strong connection between the words and delivery of the content. And then there were times, in spite of deep study of the research, when Thrive required clearer explanation from the scientists because there were nuances they saw, and “unchangeable” parts of the message that were not as obvious to the rest of us. The fourth element of the Thrive theory of change promotes ISR or what we translate to goal-management skills. We asked Dr. Richard Lerner’s team at Tufts Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development to conduct a review of the literature on what is known about growing ISR in youth. To address the last question, the Lerner team was commissioned to develop a set of measurements (rubrics) that would quantify narrative evidence of growth in indicators of thriving and ISR skills. The rubric definitions were anchored with video exemplars of ISR skills developed by Dr. Lerner’s team in partnership with the Harvard Center for Media and Adolescence. The videos feature young adults talking about their ISR skills in pursuit of thriving goals. Early pilot evidence suggests that these rubrics and video tools can powerfully elevate observation, reflection and conversation skills of adult mentors in their work with youth to grow these skills and attain goals. The rubrics provide adults and youth a common view of initiative and skill, at stages of growth for each thriving attribute and ISR dimension. They have a shared, explicit language for discussing the path to thriving and addressing challenges along the way. In the long process of developing a user-friendly language that accurately reflected the research, there was a great deal of give and take. The Lerner academic team flew to Chicago to meet with on-the-ground Thrive grantees. At their suggestion, Lerner adjusted SOC academic language (Selection of Goals, Optimization and Compensation) to a sticky metaphor of a GPS guidance system (Goal Selection, Pursuit of Strategies and Shifting Gears). The GPS visual image ties to a teen’s interest in cars and the concept of a movement along a life journey. As pilot organizations learn about these GPS skills, in the context of rubric training, we find adults sharing beliefs that underlie and influence the way they guide youth. Sometimes these beliefs align with the research on thriving in adolescence and sometimes they are in conflict with the new research. Youth mentors have healthy debate that influences organizational development and frameworks for practice. This healthy debate extends across organizations as they compare notes about how to promote thriving with their clientele.
C. Welsh Gray / Journal of Adolescence 34 (2011) 1221–1223
1223
Eva experienced Thrive Foundation for Youth’s translation of this recent research on thriving to the caring adult-youth unit. We revamped a 15-year-old summer school called out by the high school superintendent as having no measurable impact. Our investment in a set of summer lessons resulted in these youth outperforming a matched control group in terms of GPA and credits for the subsequent first and second freshman semester of high school. Youth told the evaluation team in focus groups and online surveys that they learned how to talk about strengths they had developed, scope out what it takes to reach dreams, and how to label and tackle risk factors in their way. They learned goal-management skills to reach their goals. We often heard from these youth targeted as at-risk of dropping-out of high school: “I now know that I can change.” At Thrive Foundation For Youth, we also know that change occurs when we bridge the best of research with practice. This special issue provides practitioners a fascinating new view of intentional self-regulation growth trajectories and contextual conditions that influence intentional self-regulation and indicators of thriving. The papers further elucidate parent and program intervention opportunities, and they raise a host of practitioner questions about “what to do”. The identification of four ISR growth trajectories (Bowers, Gestsdottir, Geldhof, Nikitin, von Eye, & Lerner, this issue) causes a practitioner to beg for additional research to discover the individual strengths and ecological assets that mitigate for low parent involvement and socio-economic status in the Late Onset trajectorydor to understand the “why” and the “how” to intervene with youth and their families of higher socio-economic status in the severe drop-off trajectory. As practitioners strive to shape lessons and tools that impact and measure thriving trajectories of youth, in a wide range of cultural and environmental contexts, this special issue shines a beacon on the applied research path ahead.