Building Partnerships for Youth
E-Bulletin - Issue 03

Promoting Adolescent Health Through Cross-Age Teaching
January 23, 2004

National Training Opportunity: February 13, 2004, 1-2:15 pm ET
“An Interactive Virtual Conference on Promoting Adolescent Health Through Cross-Age Teaching"

In this Issue

Promoting Adolescent Health Through Cross-Age Teaching

Cross-age teaching engages teens as teachers for pre-teens or younger children, typically in nonformal educational settings. In many communities, cross-age teaching has been a useful strategy to influence and educate younger youth. Preadolescents and young children look up to and want to emulate teenagers. At the same time, research shows that teenagers can have a positive impact on the knowledge, attitudes and behaviors of children as well as their same-age peers (Meyer, Nicholson, Danish, Fries, & Polk 2000) by taking an active role in program implementation and leadership. This idea of peer influence is not a new one – “social learning theory” suggests that our attitudes and behaviors are reflective of the people that we come into contact with on a regular basis (Bandura, 1977). Parents, teachers, siblings and peers all have strong influences on our behavior through modeling. Adolescence marks a time when peers become a strong influence in the development of behavior and values (Meyer, et al. 2000). Consequently, peer leaders have the potential to take an active role in influencing their peers to participate in healthy behaviors. Cross-age teaching by teens can play a unique role in influencing younger youth to develop healthy behaviors, including sexual abstinence.

More information on cross-age teaching can be found on the Building Partnerships for Youth Web site.

  • Bandura A. 1977. Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
  • Meyer, A., Nicholson, R., Danish, S., Fries, E., & Polk, V. (2000). A model to measure program integrity of peer-led health promotion programs in rural middle schools: Assessing the implementation of the sixth grade goals for health program. Journal of Educational and Psychological Consultation, 11(2), p. 223-252.

Other Resources Related to Cross-Age Teaching include:

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Featured Curriculum: DARE to Be You

Since it’s creation in 1979, the DARE to be You (DTBY) program has been based on a strong scientific base and has been proven to work with multiple populations. It is designed to build the competencies of both youth and the people who work with them. Its success is based on working not only with the individual child, but also with multiple systems that affect the child. These systems include families, peers (and older peers), and community groups. DTBY has age-appropriate curricula and adapted its overall approach to account for changing developmental needs. The initials in the acronym "DARE" provide a simple way to remember key content areas:

  • Decision-making, reasoning skills and problem solving.
  • Assertive communication and social skills.
  • Responsibility (internal locus of control/attributions), role models.
  • Esteem for self and others, efficacy, empathy.

The DTBY philosophy is that teens, especially in late adolescence, are resources in their community. This also fits with the social and cognitive developmental stages of older adolescents. Therefore the curriculum for teens takes a capacity-building approach. They are introduced to the theoretical foundation of DTBY, experience activities to increase personal efficacy, learn interpersonal helping skills and learn to lead activities and workshops in the key content areas. They can use this information in peer-helper relationships; in mentoring, cross-age teaching, leadership for school, community and educational projects.

Teens trained in DTBY have applied the training and curriculum effectively in multiple areas. A few examples are peer-counseling, cross-age teaching in both school and after school programs, teen educators in the DARE to be You family program, camp counselors, and summer youth program educators.

For more information about the selection of the Featured Program, please see the footnote.

National Training Opportunity: February 13, 1-2:15 pm ET
"An Interactive Virtual Conference on Promoting Adolescent Health Through Cross-Age Teaching”

Join Building Partnerships for Youth, The CYFERnet Teen Editorial Board, and Healthy People, Healthy Communities on February 13, 2004 from 1-2:15 pm ET for a live, interactive, virtual conference featuring experts in the fields of youth development, cross-age teaching, and the DARE to be You program. Registration information is available online at http://cyfernet.org/interactrain/adolhealth.html.

Presenters will include Faye C.H. Lee, Ed.D., University of California Cooperative Extension, Jan Miller-Heyl, Colorado State University, and David Gordanier, DARE to be You Peer Leader

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What’s New

  • The Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's latest after school publication, entitled Out-of-School-Time Program Evaluation, has just arrived. How do you know if your after-school program is working and if it's meeting the expectations of students, staff, parents, and community partners? Through surveys, focus groups, and other data sources, administrators are able to gain valuable information that not only influences program direction but also helps in fulfilling grant reporting requirements.

  • The After School Summit Summary Report is now available to view in pdf format, click here to download the report. The After School Summit was held in Washington, DC, June 5-6, 2003. This historical event brought together after-school providers, parents, students, educators, researchers, law enforcement officials and administration officials to discuss how they can all work together to help young people after the school day ends. The After School Summit was held by the U.S. Department of Education and sponsored by Bill White and the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation.

  • Across all demographic and party lines, Americans see afterschool programs as a necessity. Summary of Findings from the 2003 National Voters Poll indicate that Americans want children to be safe, supervised, and provided with opportunities to learn after school. According to respondents, afterschool programs are key to keeping students out of trouble, and they want governments at all levels to provide more funds for these programs. They are willing to pay more taxes if they are certain those monies will support afterschool programs. Those are among the findings of a telephone survey of registered voters age 18 and older conducted for the Afterschool Alliance in September by Lake Snell Perry & Associates and The Tarrance Group. Click here to read poll summary results.

  • The National Youth Development Research Response Initiative Report examines the extent to which the field of youth development and structured out-of-school time programs are suffering from the inadequate integration of research, education, and practice functions. This report creates both a research agenda based on critical needs of practitioners, as well as recommendations for addressing particular barriers and increasing intentionality around integrating these functions.

  • Plans have been announced for the third annual National Mentoring Month (NMM) campaign scheduled for January 2004. This initiative is a nationwide effort to recruit volunteer mentors for young people who are at risk of not achieving their full potential. The Harvard Mentoring Project of the Harvard School of Public Health and MENTOR/National Mentoring Partnership spearheaded the development of National Mentoring Month and are leading the NMM 2004 effort. Click here for more information.

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http://bpy.n4h.org/

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Edited by: Karen Hoffman Tepper, Ph.D.
Designed by: James Roebuck M.A.

This e-Bulletin was supported by a Grant/Cooperative Agreement Number U87/CCU318437-01 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The purpose of this e-Bulletin is to provide professionals in the education, health, and voluntary youth sectors with information about programs, curricula, strategies, and other resources relating to youth development, as well as new developments and highlights from within the fields of youth development and prevention.

The Featured Curriculum included in this e-Bulletin was selected by Building Partnerships for Youth (BPY) reviewers from the BPY interactive menu of programming options for helping youth ages 9-13 to develop the motivation to make healthy choices. The contents of this e-Bulletin are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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