Designing Flexible Afterschool Programming to Support Educators and Children Alike
By Maggie Deagon
Rockman et al Cooperative (REA) is excited to be partnering with Twin Cities Public Television (TPT) on a multiyear project funded by a Ready to Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Skillsvilleᵀᴹ is a suite of media resources for young children that promote executive function skills and self-regulation strategies and aim to build children’s awareness and excitement around a wide variety of career paths. This blog post is part of a series on what we have learned from our recent pilot study of the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ curriculum in afterschool programs.
On Wednesday afternoons, Mariah¹ loads up a cart that she keeps in the trunk of her car with materials for an afterschool program. The night before, she prepares lesson plans under the watchful eye of her four-year-old son, who curiously engages with the activities as his mom runs through them. Although he is a year shy of the target Kindergarten–second-grade audience, Mariah adeptly modifies the activities on the fly for different ages, from her four-year-old son to the third graders she teaches. She was initially scheduled to only lead one classroom, but when her organization struggled to hire another educator, Mariah obliged to lead both rooms. She’s used to planning for the unexpected, and besides, she welcomed the opportunity to spend time with her younger sister, who coincidentally was part of the third grade class.
Mariah also cannot guarantee how many students will show up for afterschool programming or how the planned activities will land. Given the dynamic nature of afterschool settings and the multiple priorities they serve, it is important to design programs that can be implemented flexibly, minimizing the burden on educators while ensuring that children benefit from content. Ideally, programming will be an aid to educators rather than an additional burden, enabling them to incorporate activities into afterschool schedules seamlessly.
Through a combination of surveys, interviews, and observations, researchers at Rockman et al Cooperative (REA) were able to better understand the needs of afterschool spaces to inform the design and implementation of Twin Cities PBS’s Skillsvilleᵀᴹ Children’s Program. This program was piloted in Fall 2022 through Spring 2023 by afterschool educators around the United States. Based on their expert feedback, we offer three considerations and recommendations for designing flexible and successful afterschool programs below:
Consideration 1: Afterschool educators often have minimal time to prepare activities in advance, if any time at all.
Often, learning and implementing a new program requires time that afterschool educators simply do not have to spare. Generally, educators’ schedules did not include paid time to prepare for lessons. Some educators reported preparing for program activities on their own time, at home or before they clock in for work.
Recommendation: Design clear and consistent instructions for activities that educators can implement on the go.
Educators generally felt that 30 minutes was a reasonable amount of time to expect of them to prepare for each lesson. Keeping activity formatting consistent across a program can make it easier to navigate and prepare for activities, such as by providing succinct goals and instructions at the top of each lesson.
In addition to Mariah’s roles as an outreach facilitator and parent to a young child, she also works as a research assistant for a different organization and recently started a nonprofit to empower young Black women like herself. Certainly ambitious, Mariah’s busy schedule is not uncharacteristic of other afterschool educators, who often juggle multiple demanding roles. When possible, content creators should aim to save educators time through straightforward and consistent program instructions.²
Consideration 2: The day-to-day cadence and demands of afterschool programs are variable, and the number of participating students can be inconsistent.
Compared with a regular school day, afterschool programs experience many more interruptions, from the comings and goings of children on different schedules to having to change locations due to limited available space. Educators must fulfill various needs beyond programming for the children in their care, as they also juggle everyday priorities, such as providing meals or allotting time for homework help. A group’s size and age composition for a given activity might also change from one day to the next, or even within the span of a single afterschool session.
Recommendation: Provide estimates of the time needed for activities as well as suggestions and/or adaptations for implementing with different group sizes.
Programs designed to be implemented in afterschool spaces should take care to make activities flexible based on the in-moment needs of educators. Afterschool programs can support educators to plan activities by providing time estimates and optional adaptations for different group sizes. When Mariah noticed her younger students needing more support with individual activities in the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ program, she was able to adapt them to a small group format, allowing her to help multiple students simultaneously and thus more efficiently.
Programs should allow educators to incorporate their activities flexibly into the existing afterschool schedule, while also allowing educators to stretch out content if interested. Some educators implementing the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ Children’s Program extended content beyond the provided time guidelines because children were highly engaged. For example, one educator had children check out books from the library that related to careers that they had learned about in Skillsvilleᵀᴹ. Additionally, educators appreciated individual activities that children could return to over multiple sessions because this made it easier to manage groups with multiple needs, such as when some students, but not all, needed to complete homework.
Consideration 3: Afterschool educators are at risk of burnout, and programs experience high levels of staff turnover, especially since the pandemic.²
When discussing ways to mitigate burnout, it is common to overemphasize the role of the person at risk, focusing on the importance of setting boundaries at work and finding balance. Effectively, educators are additionally burdened with managing their own exhaustion and others’ expectations of them without seeing material changes in the circumstances that contribute to burnout in the first place.
Recommendation: Design elements into a program that invite feedback and encourage community throughout implementation.
It is impossible to overlook the irony that many afterschool programs address and support children’s social-emotional development and needs, while the educators in these spaces are often emotionally exhausted themselves. Afterschool programs should, at least, not add to educators’ burden and, at best, aim to benefit educators in addition to children.
One educator reflected on how Skillsvilleᵀᴹ saved them time to come up with lesson plans, saying, “As long as it’s fun and the kids like it, I am good with it…Ultimately, you need something to do, and you helped me out because I didn’t have to think of something off the top of my head. I just knew I could pull from [the curriculum] and work from there.” Afterschool programs have the potential to reduce educators’ mental load by ensuring that activities effectively engage children without demanding exorbitant time and energy to prepare or facilitate. Other educators, including Mariah, expressed interest in creating a community with others implementing the Skillsvilleᵀᴹ program or sharing best practices with each other for the afterschool space.
Ideally, afterschool programs should be designed with educators in mind, balancing learning goals for children while considering the burdens that educators may bear. It is possible for programs to provide activities that enrich children’s and educators’ experiences by tending to the challenges of an afterschool context, prioritizing ease of implementation, and providing options to adapt content to educators’ specific needs.
The contents of this program were developed under the Ready to Learn grant from the U.S. Department of Education (PR S295A200002) awarded to Twin Cities PBS. However, those contents do not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.
To learn more about Rockman et al Cooperative visit: rockman.com.
(1) All names are pseudonyms.
(2) Afterschool Alliance. (2022, January). Where did all the afterschool staff go? Retrieved February 26, 2023, from https://afterschoolalliance.org/documents/Afterschool-COVID-19-Wave-6-Brief.pdf
