Positive Youth Development

When doing the Ideology quiz, I first looked at it are thought that my results were definitely going to be Positive Youth Development just based on my life experiences and the work I already do in youth spaces such as coaching. What I never thought was going to happen was that I was going to put a one next to just about every Positive Youth Development statement and made me realize how much that type of work resonates within me. But what defines Positive Youth Development? It is a combination of positive experiences + positive relationships + positive environments = positive youth development. So based on the key questions in my "horoscope" which was "How can we build on the strengths and assets of youth towards helping them develop into healthy adults?" I noticed that it is something I do everyday. Everyday we allow students to choose the things that want to work on and positively encourage them through positive and constructive feedback to build confidence skills in the things they really love to do. We in the end want all of our students to be social and be leaders within their community through the things they like to do. I also did a little reflecting and thought about how well of a job I am doing and maybe what I need to work on out of the three aspects of Positive Youth Development and it is definitively positive experiences. over the summer students were forced to take certain classes each day and really did not have the option of doing what they wanted which was pretty discouraging to begin with. But, as a facilitator I needed to make sure they at least had the best time possible and sometimes with certain groups the day would just go bad because I did not know how to handle the environment in which they were bringing to the classroom such as lack of participation or even discrepancies between students that had happened prior to entering the room. If I noticed that the game plan for the day wasn't working and my backup plan was also not working where would I go from there? At times it became a difficult obstacle to overcome but over time I think i just need to be able to expand my toolbox of skills.