By Kristopher Capello, City Year Los Angeles Training Manager
City Year Los Angeles’ 2010 Basic Training Academy, four weeks of day-long trainings preparing corps members to serve as tutors, mentors, and role models in schools across Los Angeles, kicked off on August 17th.
As training manager, this was a huge day for me.
Taking into account a year’s worth of input from the amazing 2009-2010 corps, we started planning for the 2010-2011 corps back in March. From this input, we knew that trainings with more than 150 people together would need to be reconsidered; material would have to be more focused; days would need to be more thematically organized; and at every level, we needed to incorporate City Year’s culture and values into content.
So we built BTA around small learning communities, with most sessions happening with no more than 35 participants, allowing for more discussion and engagement. This initially posed quite a few logistical questions, the most pressing being: With six sessions running simultaneously: where could we hold these trainings and who would facilitate them?
Fortunately, three of our middle school partners, John Liechty, Stevenson, Berendo, offered classrooms, while our staff and senior corps jumped at the opportunity to develop and lead trainings.
We held days dedicated to literacy, mathematics, behavior, and more of the information and skills that corps members need to be effective in supporting students stay in school and on track. With great literacy content supported by the Walmart foundation along with other materials from City Year’s Summer Academy (sponsored by Comcast), Corps Members were provided with a wide array of information that readied them for service.
Aside from practical skills, however, the most exciting for me was watching the corps begin the transition into being a community of education professionals, sharing ideas, questions, and experiences in passionate and profound discussions.
BTA was just the beginning of Corps Member development, both in terms of their service specific to working with youth in academic settings, but also the broader leadership development goals of City Year, and the Corps showed that they took both their development and their service to students and the city extremely seriously. It is exciting to realize that this is only the beginning of the year and we will all work together to continue these discussions, share best practices, and consistently increase our impact with students through our training days on Fridays. I look forward to using this time to innovate in our work and take on the charge of being a community of education professionals.
