ABSTRACT
In the spring of 2007, the Children’s Aid Society (CAS) embarked on the process of creating agency-wide core competencies for youth workers, and a corresponding system of professional development for its 28 school- and centerbased afterschool programs. The project was initiated by COO, Dr. William Weisberg, who describes the work as “changing the culture of our agency.” It was about spelling out, in clear and consistent language, exactly what we expected our youth workers to know and be able to do with the young people we serve. We had a good foundation from which to start. As New York City’s oldest and largest family and youth serving agency, CAS had over 150 years of experience running quality programs to support young people’s physical, social, emotional and cognitive development. We provided centralized training to our 300 part-time youth workers at After School Staff Days twice a year, and site-based training through orientation and regular staff meetings. Our training topics were varied, and included everything from homework help strategies to behavior management to cooperative games. Most of the time, staff reported finding the content to be helpful and relevant. However, we continued to find that the quality of staff varied widely from site to site, and even within sites. Like many community-based organizations running afterschool programs, CAS staff were mostly young, college-aged men and women with little to no teaching experience. They were relying on CAS to tell them what they needed to know in order to do the work well and to help them learn to do it. And we realized we were not doing a very good job of communicating to our youth workers the “big ideas” behind all the programmatic training topics. While it was useful to staff, for example, to learn fun games to play with youth during the transition from one activity to another, we were not always making sure that every staff person knew how to structure a basic activity so as to engage youth and retain their interest. Similarly, theme-based arts and crafts projects would get staff only so far if they were unable to modify the projects for the particular age group with whom they were working. Bottom line, we needed to articulate a coherent set of core knowledge and skills for our youth workers, and a corresponding system of professional development, which would ensure our staff would be providing a high quality experience for our youth.
