We are currently in our winter 2022 session of Next Step. Things are going pretty well from week to week, but even in the ups and downs of our 16-week session, we have learned a lot!
In the winter/spring of 2021, we learned that our parent sessions were an invaluable piece to the puzzle of our program. The parents of our students are encouraged and supported during our monthly meetings. We as teachers are able to help them know that they are not alone on this journey and that there is hope for their son or daughter’s future! The change that we have made to our program is that we have parent sessions scheduled into the 16-week session from the very start!
In the fall of 2021, we learned that we need all of our students to have the desire to want to be in the program. They don’t even need to initially see the value of the program; they just need to want to be here. When a student doesn’t want to be in the program, he or she doesn’t put in the effort and drags the rest of the students down. The change that we made to our program is during the application interview with the student, we make sure that he or she knows that we expect our classes to be treated like a job and the staff like a boss. We expect that he or she will put in the effort to learn and gain as much as possible during the class time. It has made a HUGE difference in the dynamics of our current session in a very positive way. We made the difficult decision to deny a student entrance into this current session because he was unwilling to accept the authority of the staff, but we can see that it was a very wise decision.
In the winter of 2022, when I was working to onboard a former student onto a job, I realized that he was not naturally greeting customers who walked into the place of business. He immediately asked them for their ID rather than saying good morning or even hi first! He was not trying to be rude; he just didn’t see the point of the socially accepted behavior of greeting someone (he told us that he didn’t want to waste their time, LOL!). We learned that our students take a while to assimilate behaviors and have to learn some of the basic “niceties” before they can learn the new skills of a job. The change we made to our program is that we ask our students to greet each one of us as staff every time we start a new class period. This has become a wonderful part of our program and some of our students are even initiating the greeting!
During this current session (spring of 2022), we have learned that initiating the social events is very important to the parents of our students. We have always had the discussion of the aspect of the social piece of the puzzle, but we have not had the piece in place to be effective. The change we have made is that we have scheduled the first social activity for this group and will have another event scheduled by the end of the session. We plan to implement this change at the beginning of each and every session so that our students (and parents) will expect a couple of social events during every session to further the bond of the students!
So, the Lord keeps teaching us lessons while we are teaching lessons to our students! We love learning these lessons and implementing the changes so that we can be as effective as possible in the training we provide.
Can’t wait to see what the Lord teaches us next session!