Youth Workers Training: Expected Competencies

Youth Workers Training:Expected Competencies Youth Minister’s Relating to Youth, Self Care, Working in Youth OrganizationEffectiveness in Training Youth MinistersDean Borgman

Basic Questions • We bring our experience and skills to youth workers, not imposing any wisdom we’ve picked up, but asking questions first—the answers to which can be integrated into our training. • So here are three sets of Questions in the Process of effective Training.

(1) Three Preliminary Questions(from a student just out of prison) • How are you disappointed in your present situation or status? • What would you like it to be? • What single step could you take to change your situation?

(2) Four Basic Questions(first three from street addicts; universal use) • What’s (really) happening in your life these days? • Where are you coming from (your story)? • Where are you headed (your hopes & dreams) • How can we help you to help yourself to get there? (goal setting with resources)

(3) Ongoing Questions • What positive progress are you making? • What obstacles or hindrances are you facing? • What ways around the obstacles can you/we brainstorm? • What new resolve or resources might help?

Boston Youth Enablement Programs • Promoting excellence among youth ministers through relationships and training • Encouraging youth ministry in churches and organizations through networking and collaboration • Seeking out principles of best practices through the collection and dissemination of most relevant research

Caution! • Youth worker training is a collaborative endeavor • We don’t know the answers to most effective training • We must use sociological imagination… through wise and sensitive questions, listening and learning with grassroot youth workers—experts on their own lives, the streets, and the youth whom they serve. • We must always beware of our own egos and professional baggage. They can help us with this. Hopefully some of this presentation comes from what we’ve learned from “them.”

Meeting youth ministers,we look for, and seek to grow: • Commitment to youth and excellence in youth ministry • Competency in helping youth heal and grow, taking care of self and operating on a team within an organization • Confidence in personal life and ministry with expectation of continued growth and success

Put another way, we look for • A genuine and persistent passion for youth and their culture with ability to communicate with young people. • Energy which creates genuine hustle in keeping the many facets of youth work in motion. • A deep love for God, commitment to Jesus Christ and dependence on the Holy Spirit. • How we can learn from and help each other.

But, how can we measure these things?What are we measuring?What is our special product as an organization?How well are we doing?

Measuring three aspects of a Youthworker’s Ministry • Relationship and leadership of young people • Self care • Working as a team within an organization

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Leadership • We easily refer to youth leaders; people call themselves youth leaders, but…. • A leader is someone who has followers. • Why do we say this, and why do some object to this definition?

First of all, How many followers, and what kind of followers, does this leader have? This can be measured and described.

Secondly,What kind of leader is she or he? • Someone who builds up her/himself, or who builds up others? • How many leaders have you equipped, released or discipled?

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Facilitating Healing and Growth with the Four Basic Questions • Evoke the telling of personal stories. • Antidotes to a toxic society which has robbed youth of their roots and stripped them of their dreams, encourages self-help and confidence • Are a style rather than an interview, adaptable • Adaptable to personal conversations, group discussions, weekend retreats, etc. • Knowledge and use of “4 basic ?s” can be measured in several ways.

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Understanding Youth Culture • Understands and appreciates different views and emphases of Christ and culture (e.g. the exegesis and use of hip-hop) and is aware of the position of one’s own church and tradition. • Understands and can explain (living) systems thinking • Understands a young person’s > endosystem (internal make-up) > microsystem (five primary external social systems) > macrosystem (our culture’s individualism, consumerism, hedonism, racism, classism, elitism) > mesosystems (systems in between micro- and macro-, e.g. parents’ jobs not yet touching youth)

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Understanding and Passion for The Gospel • Has pondered: What is Good News to the these kids in these times? • Has considered the Good News both individually and systemically; both spiritually and in terms of social justice. • Has moved beyond truncations of the Gospel by “narrow” preachers and churches to a full understanding of the Gospel, combining personal and systemic aspects, combining personal acceptance of Christ with social obedience to God’s Word (1 Cor. 15:3 and Luke 4: 18-19)

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Understanding and Passion for The Gospel • Has enough biblical and theological instruction to understand the Gospel as the Divine Drama: understands and can outline (four to seven points) the grand epic from Creation to Final Restoration • Has demonstrated effective communication of the Gospel to young people in a way that’s measurable.

1. Relationship and leadership of young people:Forty Assets in and for Youth • Benchmarks for youthful growth • Have been thoroughly researched and evaluated by SEARCH Institute • A holistic approach to youth work, treating a young person as a living system within living systems • Their aim: healthy youth in healthy communities • Can measure the effectiveness of youth worker’s relationship and efforts with a young person. • Youth minister’s knowledge, understanding, and use of Forty Assets can be measured.

We add or integrate into these expectations,the nationally-approved Ten Competencies • Came out of $55 million dollar research (DeWitt-Wallace) • National Collaboration for Youth (NCY) • And adapted differently by other collaborations (Youth Development Institute of NYC, with its Collaborating Network of 9 NYC organizations)

Ten Competency Areas • Understands and applies basic child and adolescent development principles. • Communicates and develops positive relationships with youth. • Adapts, facilitates and evaluates age appropriate activies with and for the group • Respects and honors cultural and human diversity. • Involves and empower youth

Ten Competency Areas (cont.) 6. Identifies potential risk factors (in a program environment) and takes measures to reduce those risks. • Care for, involves and works with, families and community. • Works as part of a team and shows professionalism. • Demonstrates the attributes and qualities of a positive role model. • Interacts with and relates to you in ways that support asset building.

So far…. • We’ve dealt mostly with the youth minister’s competency in doing youth work—with youth.Obviously, this is basic. • But we have two more areas of competencies to cover: • The Youth Minister’s Care of Self • The Youth Minister’s understanding of church as an organization, or of a Christian organization.

2. Youth Minister’s Care of Self • Has established clear self-identity, including core values, purpose statement and appropriate boundaries. Has or willing to work on life-goals. • Has demonstrated concern for self-exegesis (self-reflection and analysis) through journaling, support groups, and opportunities for self-care groups. Is willing to consider counseling. • Is aware of the need for healing of past wounds and spiritual brokenness with a wise and caring mentor. • Has worked on his or her management of time, money, sex and personal responsibilities. • Demonstrates a well-balanced physical, emotional, intellectual, social/family, recreational, spiritual life.

2. Youth Minister’s Care of Self • Has clear academic goals and demonstrates some progress toward these goals. • Can describe a future dream, a professional life path. • Can describe individual and group support and accountability.

3. Youth Minister: Working as part of a Team within a Church or OrganizationThe Ten Stages • Youth Minister can recite and explain the Ten Stages of Youth Organizations • Can explain the use of Ten Stages in Planning and Evaluation • Can describe failures due to neglecting the logic of the Ten Stages—especially of the First Stage • Can demonstrate his or her use of the Ten Stages in current church or organization

The Ten Stages • Building a Support Base (3 levels) • Research (3 types) • Networking and Collaboration • Contact and Hanging Out • Activities and Trips • Counseling, Referrals, Case Management • Sharing the Gospel • Nurturing Young Faith • Service Learning and Leadership Training • Growth and Management of Youth Program

3. Youth Minister: Church or OrganizationProblems and Dysfunctions • Youth Minister can describe hypothetical or real examples of addictive organizations and/or dysfunctional churches. • Understands organizational change and how to negotiate conflict. Is willing to patiently work at the slow process of organizational change (systems thinking). • Able to resist enabling addictive situations and can accept the possibility of leaving situations that are detrimental to self and others. • Has underlying hope for spiritual revival and organizational renewal.

3. Youth Minister: Church or Organization • Is willing to accept, and able to give, consultation. • Understands: Mission or Purpose Statements Vision Statements Strategy Statements Core Values, Basic Principles • Understands: Goals & Functions under Purpose Sate. And how to measure these. • Youth ministers understanding and use of these has been observed and measured.

Now again, we have so far: • Been attempting to measure the competencies of our youth ministers. • Now, to the competency of neXus Boston itself: > if the preceding has described our product (healing and growth of more effective/professional youth workers, > how well are we doing—how do we understand and measure our product?

We need some Measuring Stick • Let’s take the Dreyfus/Benner Model of Skill Acquisition or Competency/Capacity Building. • Will this help us judge our effectiveness in helping youth ministers grow toward excellence? • Then, can we see ourselves, as Council, Advisors, Administration, moving from a Novice to Advanced Beginners, Proficient—maybe even toward Experts in the field of youth minister development?

Hubert Dreyfus • Believes: “To become competent you must feel bad.” • Dreyfus began to study/research competency. • Studies the following Activities: > Airplane pilots > Chess players > Automobile drivers > Adult learners of a second language

Dreyfus noticed Five Stages • Novice • Advanced Beginner • Competent • Proficient • Expert This became the Dreyfus MODEL OF SKILL ACQUISITION

The Dreyfus Model • Was picked up by a Patricia Brenner • She applied it to her Nursing (and medical) Profession • It became a heralded method for planning curricula and evaluating those in training • She came in touch with clergy and began applying these methods to clerical preparation

Benner’s Stages of Clinical Competency[Benner’s text: From Novice to Expert](Adapted here toward Ministerial Competency) The Dreyfus model posits that in the acquisition and development of a skill, a student passes through five levels of proficiency: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert. These different levels reflect changes in three general aspects of skilled performance:

Three General Aspects of Skilled Performance • One is a movement from reliance on abstract principles to the use of past concrete experience as paradigms (learning from success and failures). • The second is a change in the learner's perception of the demand situation, in which the situation is seen less and less as a compilation of equally relevant bits, and more and more as a complete whole in which only certain parts are relevant. • The third is a passage from detached observation to involved performer. The performer no longer stands outside the situation but is now engaged in the situation.

Application of Five Stages to Ministry Think of your own areas of experience in (nursing) ministry. Think of how you’ve come to use the Internet or Cell-Phone. Rate yourself as a Youth Minister (or Trainer of Youth Ministers”) on an "expertise scale" of 1 to 5, with 1 being "novice" and 5 being "expert,” according to the following descriptions:

Stage 1: Novice Beginners have had no experience of the situations in which they are expected to perform. Novices are taught rules to help them perform. The rules are context-free and independent of specific cases; hence the rules tend to be applied universally.The rule-governed behavior typical of the novice is extremely limited and inflexible. As such, novices have little or no "life experience" in the application of rules. "Just tell me what I need to do and I'll do it."

Stage 2: Advanced Beginner Advanced beginners are those who can demonstrate marginally acceptable performance, those who have coped with enough real situations to note, or to have had pointed out to them by a mentor, the recurring meaningful situational components. These components require prior experience in actual situations for recognition. Principles to guide actions begin to be formulated. The principles are based on experience.

Stage 3: Competent Competence, typified by the (nurse) minister or youth leaderwho has been on the job in the same or similar situations two or three years, develops when the ministerial leader begins to see his or her actions in terms of long-range goals or plans of which he or she is consciously aware. For the competent (youth) minister, a plan establishes a perspective, and the plan is based on considerable conscious, abstract, analytic contemplation of the problem.

Stage 3: Competence (cont.) The conscious, deliberate planning that is characteristic of this skill level helps achieve efficiency and organization. The competent minister lacks the speed and flexibility of the proficient clerical leader but does have a feeling of mastery and the ability to cope with and manage the many contingencies of clerical leadership. The competent leaderdoes not yet have enough experience to recognize a situation in terms of an overall picture or in terms of which aspects are most salient, most important.

Stage 4: Proficient The proficient performer perceives situations as wholes rather than in terms of chopped up parts or aspects, and performance is guided by maxims. Proficient ministersunderstand a situation as a whole because they perceive its meaning in terms of long-term goals. The proficient clerical leader learns from experience what typical events to expect in a given situation and how plans need to be modified in response to these events.

Stage 4: Proficient (cont.) The proficient youth pastor can now recognize when the expected normal picture does not materialize. This holistic understanding improves the proficient minister’s decision making; it becomes less labored because the pastor now has a perspective on which of the many existing attributes and aspects in the present situation are the important ones. The proficient pastor uses maxims as guides which reflect what would appear to the competent or novice performer as unintelligible nuances of the situation; they can mean one thing at one time and quite another thing later. Once one has a deep understanding of the situation overall, however, the maxim provides direction as to what must be taken into account. Maxims reflect nuances of the situation.

Stage 5: The Expert The expert performer no longer relies on an analytic principle (rule, guideline, maxim) to connect her or his understanding of the situation to an appropriate action. The expert leader, with an enormous background of experience, now has an intuitive grasp of each situation and zeroes in on the accurate region of the problem without wasteful consideration of a large range of unfruitful, alternative diagnoses and solutions.

Stage 5: The Expert (cont.) The expert operates from a deep understanding of the total situation. The chess master, for instance, when asked why he or she made a particularly masterful move, will just say: "Because it felt right; it looked good." The performer is no longer aware of features and rules;his/her performance becomes fluid and flexible and highly proficient.

Stage 5: The Expert (cont.) This is not to say that the expert never uses analytic tools. Highly skilled analytic ability is necessary for those situations with which the youth pastor has had no previous experience. Analytic tools are also necessary for those times when the expert gets a wrong grasp of the situation and then finds that events and behaviors are not occurring as expected. When alternative perspectives are not available to the expert, the only way out of a wrong graspof the problem is by using analytic problem solving. Patricia Benner (1984) From Novice to Expert: Excellence and Power in Clinical Nursing Practice, Menlo Part: Addison-Wesley, pp. 13-34.

To Use Dreyfus/Benner Model • It must be adapted to our fields—whether Youth Ministry, Women’s Ministry, or Pastoral Ministry • We must be clear as to what we are measuring • We must find an effective way of measuring self-evaluation student-evaluation peer-evaluation supervisory-evaluation

Of course, • We must continue to recognize “professional” ego and professional baggage. • Theology and spiritual principles need to be added to social science and humanistic training. • We recognize the importance, for instance, of spiritual brokenness, the filling, empowering and guidance of the Holy Spirit. • Hopefully we teach the tension of human/divine, natural and spiritual. • But there is much to be learned here regarding levels in the acquisition of professional skills for ministry.

The Dreyfus/Brenner Model • Has not really affected or influenced seminary education in its training of ministers. • Has not been brought into Youth Ministry and other ministerial trainings. • As a result, Christians and the Church are not benefitting from what social science has found and nurses’ training has demonstrated. • This undermines our efforts to revise curriculum for excellence in ministry.

What we’re missing: • “The utility of the concept of skill acquisition lies in helping the teacher (trainer/mentor/Trng. Program) understand how to assist the learner in advancing to the next level.” • While the trainer continues to learn from and with the learner. • Learners need benchmarks for encouragement; missing these they can become discouraged and stagnant. • We professors/mentors are thus often at a loss in evaluating, and therefore planning and renewing, our efforts. • Ministry muddles along, often reinventing the wheel, with waves of success and failure—depending on charismatic leaders… who shine, often move on, and sometimes fall.

Youth Workers Training: Expected Competencies