Dilemmas - a practical training activity for more effective meeting processes By: Mike Amos Simpson Published by: Young Movers Price: 15
This resource is produced by Young Movers, an initiative of the National Communities Resource Centre, and contains some useful exercises. It doesn't make any great promises about providing solutions to working with young people in committees, but what it does do, rather effectively, is use two different scenarios and character cards to get a team working together.
The scenarios introduce different styles of decision-making to young people, who may not be used to the way in which committees work.
The pamphlet guides the facilitator through monitoring the role play and gives instructions on how to give feedback to a group of budding committee members. It could contain some more exercises for both facilitators and young people that describe the process of decision-making in a more structured way but, on the whole, this style of informal learning plus a structured formal debriefing works well for many young people.
The debriefing is rightly focused on as the most important part of the exercise because learning can be completely wasted if it is not conduced correctly. The reader is guided through setting up the activities and how to try to handle things if they seem to be getting out of hand or going off course. One of the main messages is that if thing do go awry, a good debriefing can make the situation a great learning tool.
If you are getting young people involved in committees for the first time and would like some short but helpful guidance then this guide is for you. It will be something that I adapt in the future for working with young people and adults, who sometimes need just as much guidance in committee work as young people do.
- Reviewed by Lloyd Russell-Moyle, young trainer with The National Youth Agency's Active Involvement Team.
