Adolescence corresponds to critical developmental events in the biological, emotional, social, family and cultural domains; Adolescents thus live in a context of tremendous and often difficult personal change. Adolescents who cannot successfully cope with these changes are at high risk for behavioral problems, including substance abuse, contracting sexually transmitted diseases, and dropping out of school.
School administrators often underestimate the importance of developing coping skills for adolescents; the reality is that the development of these skills by young people is essential to help them avoid problem behaviors and to enable them to participate responsibly and actively in their own education in schools.
The A, B and 3 C’s of social, emotional and academic growth
What teens need for social, emotional, and academic growth and strong character development is well known and available to most parents and educators. These needs can easily be remembered as A, B, and the 3 Cs: appreciation, belonging, trust, competencies, and contributions.
– Gratitude: Do not underestimate the importance of small gestures of thanks towards adolescents.
– Belonging: adolescents have a great interest in belonging to groups in which they can be relaxed and do not feel pressured to perform in stressful situations.
– Confidence: Teenagers’ confidence can be eroded when they feel humiliated, either by real or exaggerated problems related to their appearance or relationships, or because teasing and disparagement are part of the culture of their school or peer group.
– Competence: Doing tasks and projects well, exercising leadership skills, initiating actions and working effectively in a group are key signs of social, emotional and academic growth.
– Contributions: Although adolescents appear to be self-centered, that does not mean that they are selfish. Quite the opposite! Adolescents are eager to make meaningful and noteworthy contributions to the world, but few have a clear sense of how to engage in such endeavors and often lack opportunities to do so. However, those who work with adolescents in informal education settings often note the powerful impact of activities in which adolescents can contribute to others and to causes, not just consumers and recipients.
What works best in schools
Therefore, A, B, and the 3 Cs are extremely important guides that educators can refer to when structuring classrooms, school rules, and their relationships with adolescents. These guidelines can be translated into a set of practices that schools can reasonably be expected to adopt:
– Respect students’ biorhythms and their needs for physical outputs (e.g., Minimize the sitting / lecture mode)
– Provide outlets for creativity (for example, vary student product types beyond formal written reports)
– Give opportunities to participate in the establishment of rules.
– Provide clear boundaries; make sure students are aware of expectations regarding truancy, substance use, and violent behavior
– Provide opportunities to establish and review personal norms / standards and meet academic goals.
– Balancing academic emphasis with opportunities to think “outside the box”; Encourage membership and leadership roles in school-related academic, athletic, aesthetic, civic, or service-oriented groups, teams, and clubs, including those tied to but outside of school.
Home-School Partnership Projects
Ensuring a smooth transition to young adulthood requires coordinated action from parents and schools. Another strategy to aid the healthy development and foster academic progress of adolescents is to involve parents by assigning projects that will lead them to areas of clear relevance and understanding to parents. The projects and workshops listed below tend to be interdisciplinary and have obvious importance in everyday life. Parents should be consistently involved in each one, even if only as interviewees or planning resources, although they can play an important role. As parents have the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with school staff about projects like these, excellent suggestions often come up about the roles they can play. They are generally adapted to local contexts and are much richer for it. In addition, many of these projects encourage the participation of community entities and groups in the educational process, thus incorporating them into the alliance. In the case of adolescents, especially, promoting ABC is not a simple matter, and it is best learned by incorporating them, as in the projects below, in activities that do not advertise themselves as beneficial.
Popular projects that link home and school
– Identify, understand and learn to accept differences in the classroom, school and community.
– Analyze advertising in the media, television, written press, radio, cinema, billboards and on the Internet, especially those directed at adolescents and their siblings.
– Understand the functioning of democracy, the government, the press and the media.
– Realize the importance of the environment (e.g. spaceship Earth, earth as habitat / ecological environment, global interdependence, ecosystems)
– Examine the reasons and the interrelation between prejudice, liberty, citizenship and liberty.
– Identify and resist negative group influences.
– Develop participation in community projects.
– Learning / training for leadership roles
Give teens the skills to fly
In conclusion, key social and emotional skills will help teens develop positive ties to home and school, a greater sense of personal possibilities, and a positive view of themselves in their social settings.
References
Brendtro, L., Brokenleg, M. and Van Bockern, N. (1990) Reclaiming at-risk youth: our hope for the future. Bloomington, IN: National Educational Service
Dryfoos, JG (1998) Safe Passage: Making it Through Adolescence in a Risky Society. New York: Oxford Press.
Dryfoos, JG (2002) “Full Service Community Schools: Building New Institutions”, Phi Delta Kappan 83 (5): 393-99.