Breakfast Club Blog
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is a curated space where bloggers from around the world contribute content on a continual basis about a variety of topics relevant to in and out-of-school time. The BOOST Breakfast Club blog is at the heart of an ongoing dialogue where expanded learning and education professionals share their personal thoughts and stories from the in and out-of-school time field. They also tell us what they ate for breakfast!
The BOOST Breakfast Club Blog is Brain Food for In and Out-of-School Time Leaders!
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The Red Ribbon
We are going to start with a little game. I am going to quiz you to see how well you know social issue awareness colors. I will provide you with a single color and I would like you to identify all of the social issues that color represents. Here we go: Red. How many social issues were you able to identify? At this point you are probably asking yourself, “Why is he asking such a question?” or “How does this possibly relate to me and what I do?” The answer is: substance abu...Read More
STEM Anyone? Everyone?
STEM isn’t one of my areas of expertise. As a consultant, I’ve spent time with hundreds of programs. I’m clear that there really are fifth graders who know much more than I do about robotics, coding and engineering design and are better at algebra than I ever will be. I love my time with high school students who are excited about 3-D printers – especially when they make cases for my iPhone. But I really have no idea how this works. I’m probably in the top 10% of folks my ...Read More
Focusing on Wildly Important Goals
If you’re a mid-career professional like me, you’ve participated in a lot of strategic planning processes. I’ve found that the good ones are inspiring, create a shared sense of purpose and momentum, and result in measurable outcomes. The bad ones, well, don’t. After leading a department-wide reorganization process in 2014, I knew two things: we needed to do some strategic planning and execution, but staff were tired from the grueling months of meetings. I had to find some...Read More
Teaching Students How to ask Deep, Personal Questions
This blog is an additional follow-up resource from J. Branson Skinner and Liz Ricketts’ blog, Experience Inspires Love, originally posted on the Breakfast Club. This blog is a part of our ongoing partnership with Asia Society. The #Collectofus Global Leaders program, part of The OR Network, connects students in Accra, Ghana; Vaalwater, South Africa; Detroit, Michigan; Brooklyn, New York; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Washington, D.C. They create and exchange scarves and videos and then interact th...Read More
Your Voice Matters
You are after school, you are expanded learning, and your voice is more important than you know. Youth voice is critical to the success of an after school expanded learning program. Seeking youth voice helps to develop caring relationships between staff and students, and increases the program’s relevance and meaning for youth participants. While practitioners consistently seek the voice of their youth and other stakeholders (parents, teachers and principals, partners) they often underestim...Read More
Fun for the Zoo: Engineering Enrichment and Enhancement
Fun for the Zoo: Engineering Enrichment and Enhancement. In our Fun for the Zoo class, student “fungineers” are challenged to invent enrichment items that provide stimulation, challenge, and novelty to enhance the behavioral, physical, social, cognitive, and psychological well being of zoo animals. In the wild, animals must forage or hunt for food, and protect themselves against predators, but in the zoo, most of their needs are provided for by the keepers. So, enrichment must be pro...Read More
3 Ways Summer Meals Are Making A Difference
Summer is here! For some families, summer plans involve which parks they’ll visit or vacations they’ll take. But for other families, summer can be a time of great stress as they find themselves struggling to fill the food gap that’s created when schools close and children no longer have access to healthy meals at school. Fortunately, there is a solution: the Summer Nutrition Programs. These programs—the Summer Food Service Program (SFSP) and the National School Lunch Program (N...Read More
Experience Inspires Love
When we were the age of our students, neither of us thought that we would be teachers. Even in 2011, when we first entered a classroom to foster relationships between learners across borders, we didn’t consider the possibility that we would end up working in education. But today neither of us could imagine doing anything else. While our path toward becoming educators has not been a traditional one, our mission as co-founders of the not-for-profit organization The OR Network has grown organ...Read More
Design Thinking 101: Solving Problems In and Out of the Classroom
Our students have problems to solve. In school, it may be figuring out how many apples Susie has left after giving Jason four from her original ten. However, at home, it may be figuring out how to take care of younger sibling with a physical disability. Or, it may be figuring out how to transform their community from a “food desert” to one flourishing with fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables. Our students are always solving problems-large and small, spoken and unspoken. With this in...Read More
3 Ways to Infuse Global Learning into Summer Programs
Asia Society and BOOST Collaborative are partnering to create a series of blogs on global learning in out-of-school time. This blog entry was originally published on EdWeek’s Global Learning Blog. This entry is written by Monica Logan, vice president of program and systems quality at the National Summer Learning Association. Summer will soon be upon us. According to a report supported by The Wallace Foundation, an estimated 25 percent of our nation’s youth participate in summer learn...Read More
Engineering Challenges Promote 21st-Century Skills and Engage Youth
Asia Society and BOOST Collaborative are partnering to create a series of blogs on global learning in out-of-school time. This blog entry was originally published on EdWeek’s Global Learning Blog. This entry was written by guest bloggers Natacha Meyer, Senior Curriculum Developer, and Tania Tauer, Senior Curriculum Developer, from the Museum of Science Boston. STEM Training Today’s unprecedented push to train students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) has been pri...Read More
Strengthening the Oaks
I have three nephews who are the lights of my life. At six, three and one years old, they are going through the beautiful stages of discovering the world, imaginative play and pepperings of endless questions. Their energy, giggles and pretends are all gifts that I cherish each and every day. My one year old nephew is pretty much happy to climb inside his mom’s tomato pots, dirt notwithstanding; my three year old nephew is already expressively pragmatic, wanting to know how things work and ...Read More