Youth Workin' It

Consultancy and Resources for Youth Workers and Organizations Worldwide

Choose Your Own Adventure – Session Plan Idea

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Choose your own adventure - youth work session plan ideaThis week’s youth work session plan idea is a throwback to those childhood favorite books – Choose Your Own Adventure.

If you’re not familiar with these books, they start off as a normal book but with you assuming the role of the main character in the book. After a few pages, you’ll be given a choice of two or three options, with each option taking you on a different path through the book. Every few pages, you’ll be given further choices, meaning that there are dozens of different stories and endings within the book.

This activity is therefore perfect for helping young people explore the choices they make and the consequences that go along with them – an essential life skill.

Here’s how to run this session:

Resources

Preparation

Stick a long stretch of the paper roll on a wall (or stretch out on the floor).

Explain

Explain to the youth that they’ll be creating their own Choose Your Own Adventure story, explaining briefly what this is in case they don’t know.

Situation

Choose an initial situation that they might commonly find themselves in and write this on the left hand side of the paper roll.

This could involve any kind of situation, but try to choose something that might be an issue for your young people, such as:

It may be that your group of young people is together as a result of a certain issue, like substance abuse, criminal behavior, etc. If so, those would probably be a better choice for an initial situation.

It’s worth having a situation already chosen before starting the session, so that no time is spent having to reach a consensus – they’ll get a chance to choose a situation later in the session.

Identify Options & Consequences

Read out the initial situation that you’ve chosen. The young people then need to choose two different options that they’d have in that situation.

Branch out from that first situation and write down the two options they’ve come up with. Both of these choices would have consequences, so write the consequences next to each of the choices.

Next, have them come up with another two options for each of these subsequent situations that they find this in. Continue with this until there are many different ultimate conclusions. There’s no limit to how many choices and consequences you do in this activity, but see the example below for what it might look like:

Choose your own adventure example

 

Individual Situations

Once they’ve completed this activity as a group, give each young person a long stretch of the paper and a pen and get them to create their own Choose Your Own Adventure.

Encourage them to choose a situation that they struggle with – explain that no one other than you will see what they write. If you’re concerned that they’d still have a hard time being open about this, you could just as easily set it up so that they get to keep what they’ve worked on so that no one else will see it.

Discussion

Once they’ve completed this activity for themselves, discuss what they thought about it. Here are a few questions to get you started:

  • How hard did you find the activity?
  • Was it easy to think of the different choices you had in each situation sitting here?
  • Is it easy to think of the different choices you have when you’re actually in the situation?
  • How do you feel about some of the consequences you came up with?
  • What can you do in the future when you find yourself in this situation?

For similar activities that help young people with making choices, check out these other ideas:

You may also like all our other youth work session plan ideas.

Question: Do you have any additional ideas of how to run a Choose Your Own Adventure session? We’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below.

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Preparing For Christmas – Youth Work Session Idea

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Preparing for Christmas youth work session ideaIt’s less than 10 weeks until Christmas, something that seems to have come around way too quickly. It’s therefore worth making plans for any special programming or events you want to run during the holiday season, particularly if you haven’t started already.

Instead of being the sole person deciding on what activities you do at Christmas, why not involve your young people – this can help your young people in making informed decisions, encourages youth participation and helps them gain important life skills.

To help get you started, here are a few suggestions on how you can get your young people involved:

1. Fundraising

Christmas is a great time to organize a youth group fundraiser, so here a few ideas for how to do this:

Involve your young people in deciding what type of fundraiser to organize, how to plan it, when and where to do it, its promotion, etc.

2. Partying

Organize a Christmas party, but one that’s planned by the young people themselves. You could put them in charge of:

Make sure they’re also included in the less fun parts too, like the cleaning up after!

3. Volunteering

Christmas can be a miserable time for many people, whether that’s due to poverty, loneliness or some other factor. Encourage your young people to get involved in the local community and to make a positive change in the lives of others – they’ll find that they’re the ones who benefit the most.

4. Planning

Once Christmas is over, it’ll soon be the New Year. Depending on how far out you’ve already planned, the weeks leading up to Christmas could be a great opportunity to discuss with your young people what issues they’re currently facing.

The answers you receive can then help guide your programming for the forthcoming year, ensuring that the topics you cover will have a true resonance with your youth.

Question: How do you involve your youth when preparing for Christmas? Share your ideas in the comments below.

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How To Explore Natural And Logical Consequences

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Natural and logical consequences
Image courtesy of swigart, Flickr

Young people can sometimes find it hard to consider (or don’t care about) the consequences of their actions, which results in them making choices that have a negative impact on themselves or others.

This week’s youth work session plan is designed to help youth explore the natural and logical consequences that result from a variety of different behaviors. By having your young people consider consequences, they’ll be better placed to make informed decisions and make better choices in the future.

What are natural and logical consequences?

Natural consequences are those that happen naturally and aren’t imposed by anybody else. Logical consequences are those that happen as a result of a choice that they’ve made and which are imposed by somebody else.

To give an example of the difference between natural and logical consequences, take the situation of a young person who sometimes babysits in the evening. If they had arranged to babysit one night and didn’t show up, a natural consequence is that they wouldn’t earn any money that night, while a logical consequence could be that the family wouldn’t ask them to babysit for them again as they think they’re unreliable.

Scenarios To Explore

For your youth work session, we’ve provided a list of different scenarios below. Have your young people consider each of these scenarios and work out both the natural and logical consequences they might encounter. Think through the issues and pressures that your young people face and add extra scenarios to the list that you think might be relevant to their lives:

  • Going out without a coat and it starts raining
  • Smoking
  • Not eating fruits and vegetables
  • Texting while driving
  • Doing drugs
  • Not doing homework
  • Insulting someone on Facebook
  • Having sex without a condom
  • Bullying someone
  • Not tidying your bedroom
  • Not showing up to work
  • Stealing from a store
  • Stealing from a friend
  • Stealing from parents
  • Eating too much candy
  • Not exercising
  • Watching porn
  • Gossiping about friends
  • Getting in a fight at school
  • Getting in a fight outside of school
  • Not doing chores
  • Cheating on an exam

Consequences From Different People

Depending on the scenario, they may receive logical consequences from different people. For example, if they don’t do their homework it’s unlikely they’ll receive a logical consequence from their friends, but they might get a detention from their teacher or be grounded by their parents.

Explore these different kinds of consequences and which ones they feel have more impact on their actions.

Consequences For Other People

The behavior of young people will often not only affect themselves, but others as well. When going through the scenarios, have them also consider the impact on the following people:

  • Friends
  • Parents
  • Siblings
  • Teachers
  • Employer
  • Members of the public

This can help them to consider their actions in a different way than if the focus is purely on themselves. For example, getting young people who smoke to consider the impact it has on a younger brother or sister could lead them into re-evaluating their actions. Even though they know smoking is harmful, they often don’t care about their own health. Young people can be loyal and staunch defenders of their younger siblings though, so getting them to stop and think about how their example could encourage their brother or sister to smoke could have more impact.

Ways To Explore Consequences

This session could be hard-going for your youth, so try to explore the different scenarios and their natural and logical consequences in some of these different ways:

  • Discuss as one large group
  • Discuss in smaller groups
  • Have young people call out their ideas for you to write on a flipchart
  • Provide the youth with sticky notes to write their ideas on, with them then sticking the notes on a flipchart
  • Provide the youth with a worksheet that has a table listing scenarios and spaces for them to write their thoughts on natural and logical consequences

This session plan could prove to be uncomfortable for your young people, especially if they’re not used to having consequences for their actions. It’s therefore important for the session to not be an exercise in being judgmental against their behaviors, but about equipping them to make positive decisions for the future.

Question: How would you explore natural and logical consequences with your young people? We’d love to hear your suggestions in the comments below.

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3 Ways To Help Youth Make Informed Decisions

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Q: How do I help young people make ‘informed decisions’?How to help youth make informed decisions

A: Looking back at our post, which was a basic introduction to youth participation, most adults fall into two ways of thinking about youth and decision making.

They either make most decisions for youth or they make very few. But among youth workers there is also this idea that we’re responsible for helping young people make informed decisions.

I believe this often translates to adults doing the reasoning about what is a good choice and what is a bad choice, then giving young people one or two of the best options for the situation and helping them choose one.

I contend that our greater role and area of impact comes not in helping young people make informed decisions once all the reasoning has been done, but actually teaching them how to reason and create options in the first place.

Research shows that young people’s brains are not as developed as adult brains. Adult brains use much less of the ‘gut/fight or flight’ portion of the brain and more of the frontal lobe reasoning regions, whereas a teenager’s brain is still developing the reasoning skills and relies more heavily on instinct and gut reactions.

Other research shows that teens get a new portion of grey matter in their brain that needs to be developed and “pruned”, or else it gets lost. This is why it’s so important to teach young people the process of creating options and reasoning out the consequences. Like all learning, the more they engage in these activities the better those synapses develop, helping them have better cognitive reasoning skills in their later teen years and adulthood.

So what does all this mean for you as a youth worker? Here are 3 ways to help youth make informed decisions

1) Identify options & ideas

Help young people learn how to identify options and ideas. Yes, even the bad ones. I know you want to protect the young people in your care. But often, young people can’t rationalize all the reasons behind why an idea might not be a good one, and therefore they interpret your ‘no’ as an infringement on the autonomy and identity that they’re trying to form (another part of adolescence).

I once had a group who wanted to run a bikini car wash fundraiser. In November. In England. I allowed the idea to go on the list of options and then one-by-one we went through the options. Yes, there were thirty ideas to go through, and yes, it was a time-consuming process since I, as an adult, could easily pick out the best 3 options and discount the other 27 in about a minute and a half.

Young people can’t do that yet though. They need time to sort out what their options are, then which are poor, good and better options. By giving them the time to explore all the options, you’re allowing their brains the opportunity to learn a new skill of option identification, rather than simply relying on ‘either/or’ (Fischhoff et al., 1999) decision making processes.

2) Explore consequences

Take the time to go through the possible consequences – both positive and negative outcomes. By asking young people questions, they’re able to think through the answers and then come up with a decision or group consensus that makes sense to them, because they thought up the rationales for why the idea would or would not work.

With my group and their fundraising ideas, we went through each idea and considered the pros and cons for each idea. In the case of the bikini car wash, one identified benefit was raising a lot of money, because what man doesn’t want their car washed by a cute girl in a bikini?! The identified negatives included being cold, including possible hypothermia and objectifying the girls in the group.

Through thorough questioning and group facilitation by me (the youth worker), the group came up with these consequences all on their own and identified that the negatives far outweighed the benefits.

3) Provide a safe environment

Provide a safe place for identifying ideas and exploring consequences through good boundaries and reasonable expectations. Maybe this is the first thing you should do if you’re not doing so already.

The young people in my example knew that it was okay to give any idea they had because we would discuss them; I didn’t just make all the decisions for the group. The young people in my group knew they could trust me because I had built my relationship with them on mutual respect, clear expectations and a willingness to explain why I made decisions or rules and how they benefited from them. They also had a hand in producing the ‘rules’ or group agreement for our times together, giving them ownership and empowerment from the outset of the group.

By teaching young people the process of identifying options and exploring consequences and by providing a safe environment to do this, you’re giving them the tools they need to make a decision for all the times when you’re not there.

It will take time and, most likely, several attempts and some questionable choices, but by starting young (10-12) you’re helping them to develop the best parts of their brain that they will continue to use into adulthood. You’re setting them up for long-term future success.

You might like to check out this activity that also helps young people explore the difference between their brain development and the adults in their lives.

Question: Do you help the young people in your youth group identify their options? If so, how? Please join in the conversation in the comments section.

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