Strategies For Teaching Youth Development In The Undergraduate Classroom

College Student Journal, March, 1999 by Scott D. Scheer

Teaching youth development represents an always-evolving process, as individuals, families, and communities evolve in the United States and throughout the world. The purpose of this paper to provide information and techniques for effectively teaching youth development in the college classroom. Teaching strategies are given based on the research literature and my own tenure as a university professor. A pedagogical approach of active learning in conjunction with cooperative learning is recommended for teaching youth development in the college classroom. Also, three student groups are examined, freshman-sophomore level students, junior-senior level students, and parents-returning adult students, for their unique learning and teaching characteristics. Many freshman-sophomore students are still experiencing adolescence, junior-senior students are either completing adolescence or able to easily reflect back a few years to draw their own hypotheses and thoughts on youth development, while parents and or returning adult students have special insights of parenting youth and of their own adolescence.

Introduction

Adolescence is as unique as any other life stage, although it is a relatively recent period of the life span to be labeled and studied as compared to childhood and adulthood. Youth development became prominent by the work of G. Stanley Hall (1904) with his two volume composition, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relation to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. Hall described adolescence as a breaking away from one's childhood to prepare for adulthood. He proposed a theory of ontogeny (individual) recapitulating phylogeny (species), with youth described as a period of "storm and stress" coinciding with the barbaric-bestial evolutionary time of non-civilized man thousands of years ago. Even though Hall's recapitulation theory has been widely criticized (Bandura, 1964; Montemayor, 1983; Offer & Offer, 1975), his notion of adolescence as a difficult time for some youth receives support today (Holmbeck & Hill, 1988; Scheer & Unger, 1996).

The purpose of this paper is to provide information and techniques for effectively teaching youth development in the college classroom. Teaching strategies are given based on my own tenure as a university professor and the research literature. Also, three student groups are examined, freshman-sophomore level students, junior-senior level students, and parents-returning adult students, each for their unique learning and teaching characteristics.

Pedagogical Approaches

I view teaching as analogous to cooking; excellent gourmet chefs describe the preparation of their favorite dishes with "a little bit of this and little bit of that." This approach is recommend for teaching youth development - one that is not set and rigid, but a flexible mixture of learning and teaching formats. "A little bit of this and little bit of that" refers to employing a variety of teaching techniques to promote active learning (i.e., student involvement through discussion, reading, and writing) by engaging the student through a conglomerate of activities from debates to visuals to role play to panel discussions. The literature describes this philosophy as an active learning approach (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991).

Literally hundreds and hundreds of studies on teaching effectiveness have been conducted with some consistent findings about the characteristics of good teaching. Results indicate that effective teachers thoroughly understand their subject, motivate students, clarify ideas and relationships, organize and emphasize, and are open, concerned, imaginative, and reasonable people (Seldin, 1987). Teaching philosophies associated with these characteristics have been shown to promote effective teaching.

The research literature supports active teaching formats of teaching over passive ones (Bonwell & Eison, 1991; Chickering & Gamson, 1987; Johnson, Johnson, & Smith, 1991). Significant features of active learning in the classroom occur when: students are involved in more than listening, less emphasis is placed on giving information and more on developing student skills, students are involved in higher-order thinking (analytically, critically, and relationally), and students explore their own attitudes and values (Bonwell & Eison, 1991).

These active learning aspects require that students process information by doing and saying, not only through listening and reading - the trademarks of traditional teaching. Research in the area of memory and understanding indicate persons on average retain long-term: 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, 50% of what they see and hear, 70% of what they say, and 90% of what they do and say (Magnesen, 1983). Doing and saying are recurrent themes of active learning, which many educational researchers agree is best obtained by using a wide variety of teaching techniques to stimulate the senses with "a little bit of this and a little bit of that."