Guide to Professional Development of
Out-of-School Science Activity Leaders

From the National Partnership for After School Science (NPASS)

NPASS

Roles for Activity Leaders

The links on this page provide everything needed to present a 30-minute, adult-learning session exploring how the roles adopted by activity leaders can affect their interactions with youth.

This session includes three skits to be acted out and discussed by participants. Each skit takes place in the same informal learning setting, but the activity leader takes on a different role with the children. The first skit represents an activity leader who acts as a sage on the stage. This activity leader sees himself as the focus of attention and the provider of knowledge to the children or youth. The second skit represents a guide on the side approach. This skit helps show how a thoughtful facilitator can encourage thinking and investigating in children or youth. Participants then discuss the effectiveness and contrast between adopting these two approaches. The third skit features an activity leader who acts as an entertainer—still a sage on the stage, but more dramatic and engaging to children. This can be a very common role adopted by out-of-school activity leaders. The discussion after the third skit provides an opportunity for activity leaders to think about and discuss the merits and disadvantages of this approach, and to evaluate how roles they adopt, either consciously or unconsciously, may affect children or youth in their activity sessions. Although making these role distinctions is useful to illustrate the range of approaches seen in out-of-school settings, they are not mutually exclusive. The activity leaders in the skits represent stereotypical roles, but in actuality, activity-leading takes place along a continuum that incorporates and combines many different approaches, depending on the activity. The message emphasized in this session is that being a guide on the side as much as possible, will allow for youth to engage in making sense of their experiences and truly benefit from science activities in the out-of-school setting.

Note: This session can be effectively combined with the Questioning Strategies session to make an hour-long session on questioning strategies and the role of an activity leader. If you have already presented the Questioning Strategies session to your participants, the debrief discussion led with participants after each skit can be used as an example of the Discussion Map as introduced in the Questioning Strategies session. The skits can also be examined with a focus on usage of broad and focused questions.