This article presents research on collaboration between the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development and the New York Academy of Sciences to provide STEM learning opportunities in out-of-school time.
Professional development, training, workshop, technical assistance—from program to program or region to region, these can mean the same, or quite different, things. Let’s start a conversation toward consensus in the out-of-school time (OST) field on common definitions of our professional development terms.
The example of two pilot credentials in Massachusetts, The School-Age Youth Development Credential (SAYD) and the Professional Youth Worker Credential (PYWC), can help us to understand the importance of establishing credentials and what we can expect to accomplish in doing so. This knowledge can guide the next steps in establishing a national credential for afterschool and youth workers.
This article examines the literature on best practices in content-specific professional development and then aligns this work with the practices of a citywide afterschool chess program run by After School Activities Partnerships (ASAP) in Philadelphia. This analysis shows that implementing content-specific professional development based on best practices can lead to long-lasting and content-rich OST programming.
Our study looks at how participation in a continuous quality improvement initiative produces higher-quality practice in Rhode Island’s afterschool community by fostering change in program management practices. Among other findings, we discovered that quality improvement begins with program managers, who then lead the process of change.
Afterschool staff need to be able to supervise young participants so they can engage safely in a variety of activities. Afterschool programs should create a strong procedural plan to protect young people from harm and the program from liability.
Afterschool programs that strive to be inclusive should remember to welcome participants with disabilities. A new instrument can help afterschool programs determine how well they are doing at including kids with disabilities and assess whether those providing the services—leaders and staff—overestimate their organization’s inclusiveness as compared to those who use the services.
Practitioner research fellowships help transform out-of-school-time practitioners from consumers of others’ research to makers of knowledge based on their own experience and practices.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Sarah HillSusan Matloff-NievesLena Townsend
Social network analysis of a local afterschool ecosystem in Dallas County, Texas, reveals programs’ relative isolation from one another and their dependence on just a few funding sources. Considerable opportunity exists for programs to collaborate to build a more cohesive system of afterschool programming.
This case study sought to understand why educators participate in museum summer institutes and how participation transferred to personal development and professional practice. The study found participation was affected by an interest in and need for learning about a particular time in history, ability to transfer institute content to curricula, the chance to share their experiences with peers, and factors such as museum reputation, design and facilitation of the institute, and institutes' speakers and presenters. Participants were able to transfer institute experiences into their professional
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Robin Grenier
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
This study documents the views of effective professional development held by eight professional development (PD) providers, representing four informal science institutions (ISI) and four programs within two institutions of higher education (IHE) in a large Midwestern metropolitan area in the United States. This study finds that, while the reported learning and outcome agendas of the providers were similar across the board, a dichotomy in approach to PD emerged according to the type of institution. This dichotomy between ISI and IHE was persistent across thematic categories: (1) language use
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Tasmin Astor-JackEllen McCalliePhyllis Balcerzak