Conférencière/Conférencier

Description

There has been an expansion of programming designed to promote positive youth development through sport. However, the academic literature indicates professional development in such programs is often in-sufficient and limits program effectiveness. This presentation will describe the Belizean Youth Sport Coalition, a three-year training project designed to promote youth development and social change through sport in a small Central American nation. The emphasis has been systematic and intentional training for adults to implement an empowerment-based pedagogical model called Teaching Personal and Social Responsibility (TPSR; Hellison, 2011). Teachers, coaches and youth workers have been trained to integrate TPSR into their youth sport programs. Specific TPSR strategies, operationalized in the Tool for Assessing Responsibility-based Education (TARE; Wright & Craig, 2011), represent the core content of the training and provide a framework for giving feedback, prompting reflection, and assessing implementation. Evaluation data indicate this systematic and intentional approach to professional development has been effective in helping participants to learn the training material, develop their confidence in applying it, and trans-late it into practice. The application of TPSR in varied learning contexts and with different subject matters will be discussed as well as training principles that can be generalized to other professional development initiatives.