Maximizing Summer Learning & Innovation Through Intentional Practice
The Forum’s Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality
As the Readiness Projects team engages communities across the country to Build Forward Together, many are embracing the goal of using summers to innovate toward longer term change. Summer provides potential and time to try new things as the lines between free choice, flexible, and formal learning have long been blurred in programs offered during the summer.
This was highlighted in the last two Making the Invisible Visible sessions — The Build Forward Together Summer Challenge and Investing in Adolescents: A Summer Perspective from Chicago. The panelists (representing BellXcel, Boston After School & Beyond, Thompson Island Outward-bound, After School Matters, Chicago Housing Authority, and Chicago Public Library) lifted up innovations in technology use, partnerships, curriculum design, educator development, and more. They highlighted not just what they tried last summer and are planning for this summer but how these new ways of working are reshaping their entire frame for working with young people.
The Readiness Projects’ Build Forward Together Summer Challenge calls on us to leverage summers (not just this summer) as springboards for longer term change — thinking about how summer can be a low-stakes testing ground for building equitable learning and development ecosystems. Coming out of the Making the Invisible Visible sessions we found ourselves considering two key questions related to fully leveraging summers:
Since summer is a time for innovation, how are we effectively capturing and learning from the new things we try including lessons learned from operating programs in virtual and hybrid formats over the past year?
How do we as practitioners focus on meaningful practices we can improve and grow in the moment during summer programs to create optimal learning experiences?
Meaningful Practice & Growth
Especially after a year of disrupted instruction, maximizing the potential of summer to support learning and development for young people is more important than ever. Overall, we know more now than we ever have before about the types of relationships, practices, and optimized learning environments that support young people’s development. The Forum’s Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality’s (Weikart Center) Summer Learning Program Quality Intervention study, showed that that creating optimized learning environments and executing science-informed practices (what we call high quality) in summer programming matters — we found that young people in high-quality programs made significant academic gains, and that the gains were largest for young people who were the farthest behind academically.
The promise of summer can be realized with an asset-based approach that promotes a balance of reinforcing foundational skills with interest-driven opportunities to engage, and a blend of trauma-informed practice with opportunities to build social-emotional learning skills. In fun, engaging, and supportive environments, academic and social/emotional goals reinforce one other, rather than compete against each other.
To create these environments, youth programs can focus on concrete skills and practices that staff can use to effectively support young people. The Weikart Center’s Youth Program Quality Assessment (PQA) can be used to describe and observe these concrete practices. Our analysis of program quality data suggests that a focus on creating interactive environments for young people should be priority as programs reopen and reengage with young people — whether in person, virtual, or hybrid.
This summer, consider how you can build summer program team members’ skills and abilities to support young people and create environments that foster:
Capturing & Learning from Innovation
The Weikart Centers’ work on Summer Learning Program Quality also showed us that leveraging summer as a time for innovation and growth is both possible and impactful for learning what works. In our study, we found that implementing a quality improvement system with fidelity in the summer timeframe is manageable. Measurable improvements can be made.
The flexibility of summer makes it a perfect time for rapid cycles of experimentation, immediate feedback, and incremental improvements instead of long cycles of elaborate planning and implementation. Over the course of the last year, we have worked with partners to leverage short cycle improvement and the applicability of improvement strategies and the YPQA for virtual and hybrid programming.
To support rapid cycle innovation this summer we encourage you to consider a few management practices1 that participants in the Summer Learning Program Quality Intervention study found impactful:
- Establish shared goals and common language for the summer. Especially in programs where schools and community programs are working together to support young people, work collaboratively to determine both your goals for young people and your learning goals for the summer. What innovations or new ideas will you be trying? How will you know if you are successful?
- Provide opportunity for frequent, immediate, low-stakes feedback. We like to use an observation-reflection protocol to coach staff and identify areas of strengths and opportunities for improvement on a few distinct practices (ideally aligned to the overarching goal).
- Capture your learning and take time to reflect. Just as young people need opportunities for reflection to help them make meaning of their learning experiences, we need to be intentional about taking time to reflect on our practices and goals. Consider an end of session reflection meeting that includes both school and community partner staff. Capture what worked, areas for future growth, and determine what you want to carry on beyond summer programming.
Whether you take the approach of focusing on staff practices or rapid cycle improvement, these science-informed strategies can help strengthen your efforts to fully leverage this summer and the opportunities ahead.
For more information contact Poonam Borah, Senior Research & Practice Specialist at poonam@cypq.org.
