How challenges and peers contribute to social-emotional learning in outdoor adventure education programs.

INTRODUCTION: Many youth development programs view adolescents' process of grappling with challenges as a major driver of social-emotional learning. Our goal was to understand these processes as experienced and enacted by youth. We focused on the program Outward Bound in the United States because its students experience significant physical and social challenges and it has well-developed staff practices for facilitating learning from challenges. METHODS: Group interviews were conducted with 32 youth (ages 14-18; 50% female), immediately following their completion of Outward Bound expedition courses. Students were asked to provide a detailed narrative account of an episode on course in which they learned from challenges. Grounded theory analyses identified three processes that contributed to learning. RESULTS: First, students, described developing skills for persistence through successfully enduring distress and a process of experimenting with new mindsets that helped them rise above their anxiety and distress. Second, we found that peers provided skillful and responsive on-the-spot support that motivated youth, helped them succeed, and scaffolded students' learning strategies for dealing with physical, social, and emotional challenges. Third, we found that this peer support and scaffolding was animated by a culture of compassion and mutual commitment, which was cultivated by staff and embraced by youth. CONCLUSIONS: These findings from Outward Bound illuminate a learning model that may be useful to other youth programs. This model combines intense challenges with attuned peer support for adolescents' active processes of addressing and learning from challenges. We highlight program structures and staff practices that support these processes.

Experiencing Sampling Research from Its Beginnings into the Future.

Early experience sampling research sought to map the ecology of adolescents' lives. Its contributions include discovery of similar patterns in psychological states across diverse samples: positive emotions with friends, more negative states alone, high challenge but low motivation during schoolwork, and wider variability in teens' than adults' emotions, including more frequent extreme positive states. Recent ambulatory assessment research has expanded this mission and methods in valuable ways. Yet it still demands problem-solving (e.g., engaging participants, formulating analyses that represent teens' complex lives). A promising innovation is use of micro-longitudinal analyses to examine sequential processes (e.g., linkages between stress-coping-emotions; relationship episodes). Qualitative data can add "zones" for development of empirically-based theory about daily processes, such as adolescents' meaning-making and learning self-regulation.

The important (but neglected) developmental value of roles: Findings from youth programs.

Developmental theory historically viewed demanding roles (at home, job) as important developmental contexts. However, adolescents' participation in these roles has fallen. This qualitative research examined role experiences in United States youth development programs. A central question among others was, "How can youth experience internal motivation fulfilling externally imposed role obligations?" We interviewed 73 youth with substantive work roles (e.g., Leader, Reporter, and Teacher) in 13 arts, science-technology, and leadership programs. Youth (51% female) were 14- to 18-years-old and ethnically diverse. We used grounded-theory methods suited to understanding youth's active learning processes in context. Findings illuminated youth's experiences in 4 important transactions or "steps." Youth: (a) accepted roles based on personal goals, (b) encountered difficult challenges similar to adult roles (e.g., conflicting viewpoints, role strain), (c) drew on resources to overcome challenges and fulfill role demands, and (d) learned through these experiences. Across these steps, findings suggested 3 powerful development processes. First, youth experienced multiple sources of internal motivation (e.g., agency within roles, personal and social investment, and "good pressure"), which fostered high engagement in role performance and learning. Second, experiences grappling with and fulfilling difficult role demands helped youth build important competencies for action (e.g., strategic thinking, perseverance). Third, youth's experience of accountability to others served as a powerful driver of responsibility development: Because youth were invested, they took ownership of obligations to others and learned responsive modes of thinking and acting, which they transferred to family, school, and elsewhere. We propose that teens would benefit from more opportunities for role experiences like these. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Responsibility development transfers across contexts: Reciprocal pathways between home and afterschool programs.

We investigated adolescent responsibility across 2 developmental contexts, home and an afterschool program. Longitudinal data were collected from 355 ethnically diverse 11-20-year-old adolescents (M = 15.49; 55.9% female) in 14 project-based programs. Youth rated their responsibility in the program and at home at 4 time points; parents and leaders rated youth at Time 1. The first research objective was to evaluate 3 aspects of construct validity concerning scores of responsibility assessed through a new measure. Analyses provided evidence that program- and home-responsibility scores were distinct (i.e., evidence of the structural aspect of validity); that responsibility scores were invariant across age, gender, and ethnicity (i.e., generalizability evidence); and of external validity based on parent reports (i.e., convergent evidence). The second objective was to examine cross-context transfer of responsibility. A series of cross-lagged structural equation models (SEMs) revealed that higher responsibility in each context (home, program) predicted higher responsibility in the other context, even after controlling for the stability and within-time associations. At the last time interval, the program-to-home path was significantly stronger than the corresponding home-to-program path. The third objective was to assess whether these relations were moderated by adolescent ethnicity, gender, age, or years in the program. Multigroup SEMs revealed that pathways of influence did not differ across groups. Taken as a whole, results indicate that experiences in the 2 contexts of home and program lead to interindividual differences in the development of youth self-reported responsibility, but that affordances for responsibility development across contexts change over time. (PsycINFO Database Record

Why Trust Matters: How Confidence in Leaders Transforms What Adolescents Gain From Youth Programs.

Youth's trust in program leaders is considered a key to the positive impact of youth programs. We sought to understand how trust influences youth's program experiences from their perspective. We interviewed 108 ethnically diverse youth (ages 12-19) participating in 13 arts, leadership, and technology programs. Analysis of these accounts suggested five ways in which youth's trust in leaders amplified program benefits. Trust increased youth's (1) confidence in leaders' guidance in program activities, (2) motivation in the program, (3) use of leaders for mentoring, (4) use of leaders as a model of a well-functioning relationship, and (5) experience of program cohesiveness. Across benefits, trust allowed youth to draw on leaders' expertise, opened them to new experiences, and helped increase youth's agency.

The Art of Restraint: How Experienced Program Leaders Use Their Authority to Support Youth Agency.

The staff of youth development programs perform a delicate balancing act between supporting youth agency and exercising necessary authority. To understand this balancing in daily practice, we interviewed 25 experienced (M = 14 years) leaders of arts, leadership, and technology programs for high-school-aged youth. We obtained accounts of when, how, and why they gave advice, set limits, and "supported youth when disagreeing." Qualitative analysis found surprising similarities across leaders. They used authority to give advice and set limits, but did so with reasoned restraint. Maximizing youth's opportunities to learn from experience was central in their decision making. They described employing authority in intentional ways aimed at helping youth's work succeed, strengthening youth's agency, and building skills for agency (e.g., critical thinking, "clarifying intent").

Invited commentary: Positive youth development and human complexity.

The process of positive development for adolescents includes struggling to address a wide variety of complex, often unstated bio-psycho-social-cultural challenges. These include formulating workable values, learning self-regulation, preparation for adult work roles-and innumerable other un-tidy puzzles. Variable-based research can only scratch the surface of how youth go about these processes; nonetheless, systematic longitudinal research like this can provide valuable information about developmental pathways and directions of change. Highlights from these papers include the finding that older youth report more goals aimed at meaningful connection with others and contributing to society; yet also that moral character did not differ by age. The papers suggest that relationships adults, hope, school engagement, participation in out-of-school programs, and intentional self-regulation can serve as mediators of positive development. Yet, a striking finding was that comparatively few youth in the study manifest a pattern of change marked by the coupling of increases in positive youth development and decreases in risk/problem behavior. We believe there is much beneath the surface to be uncovered.

Adolescents' conscious processes of developing regulation: learning to appraise challenges.

To understand regulation and agency, it important to consider the nature of the regulatory challenges that adolescents must deal with. These include emotional, motivation, interpersonal, and other obstacles and problems. In this chapter, the author discusses the challenges reported by youth working on arts, technology, and social justice projects in organized programs and how they learn to address them. Adolescents' new higher-order cognitive capacities allow them to better understand the irregularities and complexity of real-world challenges. They also use these capacities to consciously develop skills to navigate these challenges.

Adolescents' development of skills for agency in youth programs: learning to think strategically.

This research examines how youth in arts and leadership programs develop skills for organizing actions over time to achieve goals. Ethnically diverse youth (ages 13-21) in 11 high-quality urban and rural programs were interviewed as they carried out projects. Qualitative analyses of 712 interviews with 108 youth yielded preliminary grounded theory about youth's development of strategic thinking, defined as use of dynamic systems reasoning to anticipate real-word scenarios and plan work. Strategic thinking appeared to develop through youth's creative engagement with tactical challenges in the work and feedback from the work's outcomes. Program advisors supported this development by giving youth control and by providing nondirective assistance when needed.

Intrinsic motivation and positive development.

Decades of scientific research shows that intrinsic motivation (IM) is a powerful "engine" of learning and positive development. This chapter synthesizes the research, first showing how the psychological state of IM is associated not only with enhanced engagement and perseverance in an activity, but also with greater use of meta-cognitive strategies and deeper processing of information. These features likely account for evidence that IM is related to greater and more effective learning. Second, we examine the determinants of this beneficial state. Evidence suggests that it results from the convergence of factors at multiple levels--from immediate conditions in the activity to longer-term personal goals, cultural values, and human dispositions. Drawing on these findings, we show that there is considerable potential for young people to develop their abilities to experience and regulate their IM within activities. In the third and final section, we then discuss how youth professionals can work with youth to help them cultivate the capacity for intrinsically motivated learning. We present ten guiding principles for cultivating IM derived from the research. We give particular attention to adolescence, because it is a period when youth become more able to engage in this deliberate cultivation--to be producers of their own development.

Dilemmas of practice: challenges to program quality encountered by youth program leaders.

To create and sustain high quality youth development programs it is important to understand the challenging situations and dilemmas that emerge in program leaders' daily work with youth. In this research the experiences of leaders in 12 programs were followed over a 2-9 month period, which led to the identification of 250 dilemma situations. Qualitative analyses identified 5 categories and 12 subcategories of dilemmas that reflected distinct types of considerations (e.g., youth's personalities, relationships with the community). The analyses also found that the experienced leaders in the study typically responded to these dilemmas in ways that were youth-centered and that balanced multiple considerations. It is argued that researchers need to go beyond identifying features of high quality programs, and more fully examine how effective leaders create and sustain high quality in response to the challenging situations of practice.

Practitioner expertise: creating quality within the daily tumble of events in youth settings.

Practitioners in youth settings experience life on the ground as a tumble of events, shaped by a confluence of youth needs, institutional expectations, and other inputs. The quality of the setting is determined in part by practitioners' expertise in shaping and responding to these events. The situations that arise in practice, and how staff respond, can be turning points, good or bad, in youths' experience of the setting. They can also be opportunities for youth development. This article examines the wide-ranging events, situations, or "dilemmas of practice" that occur in the daily life of youth development programs. Research shows that these varied situations are shaped by the ecology of diverse people and systems that influence the setting. They involve considerations that may entail everything from the psychology of different youth, to how parents from a cultural group think, to the dynamics of government systems. Expert youth practitioners, it is found, are able to identify more considerations than novices in these situations, and they possess a wider repertoire of responses. They also formulate more responses that are youth centered and address multiple considerations. Expertise involves being able to balance diverse concerns, including how to create and sustain conditions for the development of young people. Researchers can contribute by helping us better understand this array of situations and how experts respond. Improvement in the quality of youth settings can be achieved through greater knowledge of the tumble of events that occur and by helping train practitioners in skills for responding to it.

How adolescents come to see themselves as more responsible through participation in youth programs.

This qualitative study was aimed at developing theory about the process underlying the development of responsibility grounded in accounts of youth who reported experiencing this change. A total of 108 high-school-aged (M = 16.5) youth from 11 programs were interviewed about their experiences within the program, and 24 reported becoming more responsible through their participation. The youth's accounts suggested that this process was driven largely by successfully fulfilling program expectations. This process was driven by youth's adherence to their commitments and their consideration of the consequences of their actions on others. Youth mentioned changes in responsibility most frequently in three programs, which appeared to differ from the remaining programs in having more structure and placing greater ownership and accountability on youth.

Emotional development in adolescence: what can be learned from a high school theater program?

Grounded-theory analyses were used to formulate propositions regarding the processes of adolescent emotional development. Progress in understanding this difficult topic requires close examination of emotional experience in context, and to do this the authors drew on qualitative data collected over the course of a high school theater production. Participants' (ages 14-17) accounts of experiences in this setting demonstrated their capacity to actively extract emotional knowledge and to develop strategies for managing emotions. These accounts suggested that youth's repeated "hot" experience of unfolding emotional episodes in the setting provided material for this active process of learning. Youth also learned by drawing on and internalizing the emotion culture of the setting, which provided concepts, strategies, and tools for managing emotional episodes.

Differing profiles of developmental experiences across types of organized youth activities.

This study inventoried the types of developmental and negative experiences that youth encounter in different categories of extracurricular and community-based organized activities. A representative sample of 2,280 11th graders from 19 diverse high schools responded to a computer-administered protocol. Youth in faith-based activities reported higher rates of experiences related to identity, emotional regulation, and interpersonal development in comparison with other activities. Sports and arts programs stood out as providing more experiences related to development of initiative, although sports were also related to high stress. Service activities were associated with experiences related to development of teamwork, positive relationships, and social capital. Youth reported all of these positive developmental experiences to occur significantly more often in youth programs than during school classes.

Dilemmas of youth work: balancing the professional and personal.

Being an effective and intentional youth practitioner involves more than planning. It includes being able to react intelligently to the many difficult situations that arise. Practitioners in out-of-school and after-school settings regularly confront complex dilemmas that emerge in their daily work. They face situations where competing objectives, values, and warrants come into conflict, situations that can pit the developmental needs of youth, ethical concerns, administrative requirements, and other considerations against each other. Using examples from their research that weigh professional and personal judgments, the authors illustrate the complexity of these practice dilemmas and the considerations program staff included as they responded to these challenging situations.

Processes of adjustment in organized out-of-school activities: opportunities and risks.

Participation in organized out-of-school activities leads to long-term psychosocial and educational benefits for young people. Now we're learning which features of these activities best support individual children.