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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What the COVID-19 Crisis Has Taught Us
I just finished my spinach smoothie for breakfast and am reflecting on how we all work hard these days to stay healthy and sane. My wife makes me spinach smoothies to start the day, and I drink them, though I don’t like them, because they are promising—hopeful for good health and energy. We need both, especially in these trying times of global pandemic, social distancing, and online learning. Friday, March 13, 2020 (yep, Friday the 13th) will be remembered by many folks in the education world fo...Read More
The Relationship Between Physical Activity and Learning
We may not be able to gather in groups right now, but we can make the best of a difficult situation by planning for the day when we can resume our regular activities. While we have this time outside of the usual routine, we can use it to learn new ideas that will come in handy later. As the saying goes, when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. We can use this time to our advantage, so we return even stronger and better prepared. Making Lemonade This is an excellent time to practice what you te...Read More
How to cheat at Zoom!
With the transition to online learning, meetings, and trainings, platforms like Zoom have been getting a lot of attention. The definition of Zooming has been expanded beyond just moving quickly, to also mean that state of participation in web-based video calls. Zoom Bombing and Zoom Fatigue have become things we are aware of – things that were not on our radar at all just 4 months ago. So how do you Zoom all day? Really, this was a big question that came up in our household. My daughter wa...Read More
Using Voice and Choice in Afterschool Programs
As afterschool professionals, we give a lot of lip service to the phrase “voice and choice.” Theoretically, we understand that students feel more ownership of their afterschool programs when they are able to voice their opinions and provide input into the program. Sounds easy, right? Like most good ideas, however, implementation is much more difficult than it sounds. Students are most likely not going to gather and discuss collaboratively what they want the program to be. There is al...Read More
10 Tips on How Parents Can Step Into Leadership
What does it mean, as a parent, to “step into your leadership”? Beyond the stereotypical “because I’m the parent and I said so” form of leadership, how am I most effectively leading my children? What does it even mean to lead our children? Is it teaching them right from wrong? Is it telling them what to do? Is it pushing them to get good grades and achieve great things? Of course that’s part of it. But the problem with limiting our definition of parent leaders...Read More
Full Participation: A Guide to Being Present
By today’s parenting standards, I did something incomprehensible – I did not take any pictures of my kids during an awesome outing on a beautiful Southern California day! I held it together for a full 1.5 hours and did not pull out my iPhone 6 to “capture the moment” so that my kids could later say how great their dad was. Oh, who am I kidding? I wanted great pics so that all my friends on Facebook could gawk at the status update I would post later on. The critical moment in t...Read More
Student Interest Leads to Engagement
Let’s talk about how getting to know the children we work with can help us build engagement and excitement about learning. Seems easy but can be forgotten and can make such a difference. It is the same way we think about who is coming for dinner…we wouldn’t make something they didn’t like! Explore Existing Interests Poll your children to learn what they are interested in, and consider ways to use academic enrichment to focus on these areas. For example, if children show a...Read More
When the Disconnections Run Deep, Youth Need Deeply Connected Systems
For my first post on the BOOST Breakfast Club Blog, I had planned to play it safe. Stick to a topic like youth program quality or youth outcomes measurement that I know well and have already written about, and pose a provocative, though largely, intellectual question or two about it. But this week, I’ve been distracted by the most devastating, and difficult to process, news I’ve heard about a young person I’ve known personally in my twenty years in the field. I was shaking when I received the p...Read More
The Power of PICOUP – Are We Facilitators of Learning?
This time of year always brings with it a sense of reflection. As we enter the holiday season, beginning with Thanksgiving, I always feel a strong pull to reflect on all that I have to be grateful for; food, shelter, a loving and healthy family, and the other important people in my life who have help me to become who I am. One such person in my life was my late dear friend, longtime work partner and co-author Mike Gessford, who coined an acronym that he thought accurately described what our job ...Read More
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