JA Community Service

     Junior Achievements (JA) is an organization about teaching K-12 students skills about real life such as financial literacy, work readiness, and enterprenuership. Recently, I have participated in a JA program for my WBL community service hours called High School Heroes. In this program high school students teach elementary school students about business, with specific categories such as the role business plays in a neighborhood or how to start one. Before actually teaching anyone we were first given training. We were put in groups of 5-6 (groups we would present as on the day of actual teaching) and learned how we should behave, what we should wear, how to interact with the young students, what the lesson we were teaching was, and many other things. This is also where we got feedback from our peers based on how we introduced ourselves and how we presented our lesson and planned who would teach what in our groups.

I am in the center

     On the day of actual teaching our group had to improvise for much of the day. The plan my group devised was largely based off the guide JA had given us but a major flaw with it was it didn't cater to young minds well. Within the first 10 minutes of teaching my group noticed the students were bored and didn't understand what we were teaching because of that. The lesson plan wasn't stimulating enough and we quickly needed to think of ways to engage the students. I had taught within the first 10 minutes before lunch break was called for the students and found out the way I explained things was not the best for young people. I was just too used to writing and speaking in complex terms to simplify my rhetoric in such short amount of time but 3 of my teammates were great at talking to young people so in the time we were in break we decided those 3 members would be the ones to engage the students. However, not all 3 were familiar with all the lessons so I decided to coordinate their actions for the rest of the day. I took on the role of understanding all the lessons myself during break and while my teammates were teaching. Then I would brief my teammates on what they were supposed to do. I was also good at thinking of ways to make activities more engaging even though I wasn't the most engaging speaker to these students so I also suggested to my teammates the ways they can keep the students going. I made split second decisions for how to carry on the lesson and I managed the time of each lesson so all the activities can award ceremony could be finished by the end of the day. Though we had to throw out our entire plan, the rest of the day continued successfully as the students were enjoying what was being taught to them and everything was finished on time.
     This experience showed me how different audiences require different needs. I saw how young learners needed stimulating and simplified content in order to be engaged and how much different that was from what attracts the audience I'm used to targeting, teens. Had I tried to target the elderly I'm certain from my experience that they would require different things to be attracted as well. I also learned that coordinating and fast decision making is a string skill of mine. I was able to help my team get through the day by briefly telling them and making them understand what they should do in order to best teach the students. My fast decisions helped keep the lesson on track and I was able to manage time by reducing the amount of time spent deciding what to do and putting more time to actually executing the lesson.