School Clubs, Community Youth Programs Teach Kids Real-Life Skills
Published: Aug. 15, 2005
URBANA - The skills teens learn in school activities and community programs are not the ones they learn in classrooms or even on a job. But extracurricular activities teach real-world skills that will be valuable in future employment, says Reed Larson, a University of Illinois professor of family ecology, in an upcoming article in Human Development.
"In the classroom, you learn a set of academic skills for solving certain kinds of problems. Extracurricular activities, on the other hand, are fertile ground for developing what I call initiative," he said. "Young people learn to work toward a goal with other people, and as they do, they're often engaged with the complexity and messiness of real-world tasks and assignments."
Even though teens describe what they're doing in these groups as work, they're highly motivated to be taking part in the activity because they've chosen it. In these groups, teens develop basic insights about the relationship between effort and outcome. "They learn that if you work at something every day, if you're patient, if you keep at it, eventually you'll get somewhere. It seems obvious to adults, but it's something you have to learn."
Larson became interested in extracurricular activities while doing research in which he signaled teens at random times to assess their emotional state. When they were taking part in organized activities, teens reported feeling more challenged and motivated than at any other time in their daily routine.
Since then, Larson has monitored an FFA group as they planned a day camp for fourth graders and studied a civic activism program in Chicago as they worked to change school disciplinary policy.
In both groups, teens learned self-management and organizational skills that will be vital in the workplace, he said. "They learned to do strategic planning, and they acquired valuable teamwork and interpersonal skills. In these groups, teens learn to regulate their emotions, such as dealing with disappointment, handling jealousy, overcoming obstacles, and coping with overexcitement.
"At the youth activism program, we saw an even more advanced level of initiative development. Teens began to think very logically not only about their own effort but about the challenges of doing something effectively in a complex human system. What should you do first? What should you do second? How will you respond to different contingencies?"
Members of the program learned to think like school administrators and teachers so they could plan thoughtful responses to them, he noted.
Both groups benefited from what Larson calls scaffolding, the support and guidance of adults who advise these groups. Providing scaffolding is a skilled task; adults must give teens enough control for them to experience ownership in the project, but be available to lend support if teens get stuck, flounder, or get discouraged.
Although parents in Western cultures are good at providing scaffolding for younger children, they are less involved in their teens' daily lives and engage in less joint planning with them. "This leaves a gap in opportunities for teenagers to develop their planning and initiative skills," Larson said. "It's a gap that youth programs often fill."
He noted that group members also provide scaffolding for each other, building each other's confidence in their ability to succeed and learning to work as a team. Youth programs provide a more productive way of spending time with peers than just "hanging out." Unstructured leisure can account for up to 50 percent of an adolescent's free time, Larson said.
What if a child doesn't have the initiative to participate in programs that build initiative? "It's easier to get youth involved in activities before they hit adolescence, which is a more independent stage. But the key is to offer lots of choices--some kids like sports, others like drama or media arts programs, and still others prefer service activities," he said.
"Modern life doesn't provide much opportunity for youth to develop certain skills outside of these clubs and programs. I really believe parents and communities should support these groups any way they can," he said.
David Hansen co-authored the study of the youth activism program, which will appear in the November issue of Human Development. Hansen and Kathrin Walker worked with Larson on the FFA study, which is discussed in a chapter of Organized Activities as Contexts of Development: Extracurricular Activities, After-School, and Community Programs. Both studies were funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. -30-