Blob Trees - Youth Workin' It

Honest assessment and implementation of a youth work session evaluation from your young people will improve retention and attendance in your sessions.

Ownership improves retention and attendance.

Completing session evaluations creates ownership.

Therefore, completing youth work session evaluations improves retention and attendance.

However, it only works if you, as the youth worker, take youth opinions seriously. No, you probably can’t implement an all trip, all games, all pizza youth work session every week.

But can you make some changes? Can you make your discussions shorter and more engaging? Can you add an extra trip or two, even just short ones to another room within your own building to add interest and intrigue? Can you add in an extra pizza night once a quarter that’s just for fun and games?

By giving youth an opportunity to have their say in a variety of short, easy and fun ways using various evaluation tools – and implementing some of their suggestions when possible – you’re helping them feel invested in the work you’re doing and that they’re participating in.

There are many different evaluation methods, but here are five ideas that can work well:

Rate experiences on a scale of 1-10, 1-5 or 1-3
Complete brief paper surveys
Use post it notes to give anonymous feedback
Use a blob tree
Use smileys

Here is one youth work session evaluation tool that works very well – particularly in the UK – but can easily be altered for wider cultural use.

Tops & Pants

In the UK, ‘pants’ refer to underpants/underwear, but it’s also an expression that means something isn’t very good. “That movie was pants” means the movie sucked. You can explain this fun difference in language usage to your youth, or you could just do ‘tops’ and ‘bottoms’ which will have the same effect.

Objective

Have youth identify what was ‘tops’ (good) about a session and what was ‘pants/bottoms’ (not good) about a session.

How To Do

Cut out the shape of a T-shirt and underpants, shorts or pants/trousers from a large piece of paper, or draw one on your chalkboard or white board. For more fun with paper cut outs, hang them on a clothes line with clothes pins
Give each youth 3 post-it notes or slips of paper and tape in one color and 3 post-it notes or slips of paper and tape in another color. One color is for ‘tops’ and the other is for ‘pants/bottoms’
Have the youth write one thing that was tops/pants on each of the pieces of paper. They should therefore each have 3 good areas and 3 areas for improvement written down
Have them stick their feedback papers to the top or the pants

This is a really easy and fun way to get youth engaging in youth work session evaluations. In the coming weeks we’ll explore some of the other session evaluation methods in more detail.

Question: How do you get youth to evaluate your sessions? Let us know in the comments below.

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