Creating Sticky Walls of Support and Feedback for Students

Just in time for your spring break service trips, The Sticky Faith Service Guide offers practical and field-tested exercises on how to translate short-term work into long-term change. Whether it’s a half-day local service project or a two-week trip overseas this summer, this resource will benefit both your students and the communities you serve.

 

The following is an excerpt from Sticky Faith Service Guide by Kara Powell and Brad M. Griffin, used with permission. You can buy the book here.

 

Lev Vygotsky was a developmental theorist who studied the social processes of development in children and adolescents and came up with a very helpful term: scaffolding.[1]

 

Scaffolding serves as the safe structure around the emerging adolescent that supports growth and fosters colearning with adults and other kids. Adults become the steadying force that is carefully added (when young people are most in need of that support) and removed (when they need to be set free to try on their own).

 

Please don’t miss the imagery here: just as scaffolding is made up of many interlocking pieces in order to balance the weight and surround the building, no single adult can provide all the scaffolding a teenager needs. To truly thrive, every adolescent needs an interlocking network of caring adults. This is especially true when we ask them to serve others. In the midst of experiences that challenge and stretch them, young people need safe people and places where they can process the new experiences they face.

 

This developmental research echoed loudly throughout our Sticky Faith findings as we also observed the power of intergenerational relationships in helping faith stick long term. Based on research, we believe that each adolescent needs a team of at least five adults surrounding them with a web of support. Those adults aren’t all paid youth leaders nor are they five small-group leaders. These five “team members” include relatives, neighbors, teachers, mentors, other students’ parents, and the volunteers on your next mission trip.

 

Keeping this imagery in mind, we recommend the following four tips to help build webs of support around students during their service:

 

1. Maximize Support Channels

One mistake we often make when creating support structures around students is failing to capture the potential available to us. Support can take many shapes and sizes, and part of our role as leaders is to maximize this network for our students before, during, and after the trip.

 

Support can come from other people sharing in the experience—other students on the team, adults, local hosts—or it can come via the church family back home. Support comes in multiple forms, including finances and prayer as well as verbal and emotional footings. Knowing that their community has invested money, trust, and prayer into the ministry of their team is a compelling witness of God’s faithfulness to young people in the midst of their work. …

 

2. Create Opportunities for Risk

Whole books have been written about learning through our failures, so we probably don’t need to convince you that we do indeed learn through our failures. But as leaders we sometimes forget to give young people the chance to risk failure as part of the learning process.

Our role as adults who provide support and feedback includes creating space for risk. In order to be willing to step into a space of risk, students have to feel safe. One of my early mentors in leading wilderness trips trained me to assess continually where participants fall on the OSV scale as a way to gauge our environment for healthy risk-taking. OSV stands for oriented, safe, and valued. I encourage adult leaders to periodically ask (sometimes out loud but often internally) the following:

1. Is each person oriented? Does she understand where we are, where we’re headed, and what’s going on?
2. Does each person feel safe? Physically, emotionally, spiritually, and mentally, have we pushed too far beyond the bounds of comfort for anyone (or everyone)?
3. Does each person feel valued? Have we communicated in any way that anyone’s voice is not important or that his safety doesn’t matter? Have we devalued the image of God in anyone by our actions, words, or attitudes?

 

These three simple guidelines help us assess whether we are creating safe and supportive environments for students to take healthy risks as they interact cross-culturally and make efforts to serve others. …

 

3. Reflect Back What You See

As young people dive into cross-cultural experiences or take on near-heroic tasks (“Let’s build a house in a week!”), they need accurate information about not only what they’re seeing but also what they’re doing. Sometimes the most important insights you can share with a student are your observations about how that person is working, interacting with others, or exhibiting particular character traits.

 

When reflecting, it is important to be as specific as possible. It’s more valuable to hear, “Tim, your encouraging comment to Sandy about the way she led games with the kids showed real selflessness, especially since you had wanted to be the game leader,” than to hear, “Tim, you’re a really nice guy.”

 

4. Level the Playing Field

Feedback is best received when what Joplin calls an “equalization of power” exists between the participant and the leader. This doesn’t mean we should negate our leadership in the midst of stretching experiences, but it might mean revisiting how we lead during those moments.

 

Students will be more likely to hear and apply our feedback when we share power with them as much as possible. This might mean we bring a few students into the decision-making meetings about the work project at hand. It might also mean we spend as little time as possible during our trip doing “leader-type” things and way more time doing servant jobs. When young people see us digging the sewage drain, mixing the concrete, or washing the dishes after a meal, they gain a new perspective on what it means to lead. Such leveling of the playing field often renders students more likely to hear us when we offer the feedback they so desperately need.

 

Click here to buy the complete Sticky Faith Service Guide.

 

[1] Vygotsky’s work is well described and illustrated by Jack O. Balswick, Pamela E. King, and Kevin S. Reimer in The Reciprocating Self: Human Development in Theological Perspective (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2005), 90–97.

 

CLICK HERE for more information on serving with YouthWorks!

 

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We love the work Sticky Faith is doing to help youth leaders learn practical ways to support families and parents to help teenagers develop a faith that sticks.

 

In their newest resource, Sticky Faith Service Guide, Kara Powell and Brad M. Griffin explain how to turn short-term service into long-term change in students and families. Sticky Faith Service Guide dives into how to better prepare, process and integrate mission trips and other service experiences with teenagers.