A WELL-KEPT SECRET: HOW TO MAKE LEARNING GAMES WORK WONDERS IN THE CLASSROOM
“IS THE LEARNER A DEFICIT OR AN ASSET?”
Hetal Jani, the Founder and Executive Director of SPEAK Mentorship, works with immigrant high school students across the northeast with a distinct goal in mind: to empower young minds and to build stronger communities. She says, “My calling is to enable people to learn how to access and activate knowledge, identify opportunities, and develop skills and connections to pursue those opportunities”.
The non-profit organization, created in 2013 and formally established in 2015, has successfully conducted over 420 Mentoring sessions in the last year alone. Focused on raising the social and cultural capital of immigrant girls, they are actively looking to grow their footprint and expand across the country. The need to do so is urgent and apparent: the National Skills Coalition (2014) says “without immigrants, the workforce will be insufficient to replace retirees” by 2030.
Additionally, immigrant children make up a fourth of the population of America’s public-school system, thereby further underlining the value of the investment being made by SPEAK. However, barriers and challenges remain, with research reiterating that “immigrant youth face higher risks than non-immigrants for lower school engagement,” (Mossi-Stefanidi et al., 2015). Research shows immigrants and first-generation youth in America often struggle to find their ethnic identity as they try to assimilate and integrate within a novel, mainstream culture, dealing with issues that include acculturative and integrative stress, language acquisition, internal and inter-generational conflicts, and lack of social capital and access to professional internships. But, community connection moderates relations between school engagement and stress from adapting to new cultures (Ahmed, 2018). Through the development of community of visible role models and peers who may be bearing a similar challenge albeit in isolation from each other, SPEAK Mentorship envisions a more diverse future workforce with more women from all backgrounds in positions of power across all fields.
How does SPEAK do this?
SPEAK helps schools become more inclusive by bringing culturally responsive career professionals directly into the school day using virtual platforms while simultaneously developing an in-school peer community that share experiences and provide the social- emotional support necessary to increase school engagement and belonging. This develops the self-efficacy and confidence of students, better preparing them as qualified candidates for college and career. SPEAK does this through their Foundational Mentoring Program and their Speaker Series Leadership Empowerment Course.
Foundational Mentoring Program
The Foundational Mentoring Program harnesses the power of culturally responsive professional mentorship and the development of an immigrant peer community to cultivate the self-awareness and self-development of young people. This in turn enables the target demographic to successfully pursue personal and professional goals and join the workforce as capable leaders. Through the multi-faceted approach of developing 1) peer leaders, called Ambassadors, who create and support an in-school peer community by establishing a Chapter Club, and 2) an e-mentoring program where girls meet virtually with three culturally responsive professionals in careers of interest to the girls, SPEAK increases student use of technology, communication skills with various audiences, familiarity of college and career culture and pathways, access to internships, and school engagement and belonging. This combination of multiple visible role models for these girls, increases their self-assuredness, provides access to information and opportunities, and finally leads to successful and healthy post-secondary pathways.
Students can apply to be mentees in the program either through a partner school or independently. Students applies for SPEAK’s Foundational Mentoring Program and goes through an orientation to understand the model and expectations. A Mentor Connector, a college student, is assigned to a group of mentees at a school and works closely with the Ambassador to ensure the group is supported every step of the way. Each mentoring round, mentees are also paired with other mentees, who serve as accountability partners during the round of 9 mentoring sessions, to ensure further peer to peer relationship development within the school.
The program matches each mentee to three different mentors with diverse backgrounds and skills. Each mentee will go through 9 mentoring sessions with each of the mentors and cover areas such as skills development, career ecosystems and civic engagement. Each of the mentors works with the mentees while embracing their unique experiences and puts together a plan to achieve a foundational level of understanding in each mentorship area. Through this approach of skill building and sharing of relevant experiences, mentor and mentees get to know each other through a series of sessions that incrementally build on top of each other. Meanwhile, Ambassadors go through an additional leadership curriculum, and are expected to lead a SPEAK Chapter Club, where students partake in relevant community building and college access activities. This program has been intentionally designed to provide multiple visible role models and develop peer, near peer, and multiple mentor relationships through all of the individuals that support one mentee during the program year.
Speaker Series
In addition to the career and culture mentoring, mentees have access to SPEAK’s Speaker Series which targets areas like financial health, self-management and leadership skills. The Speaker Series provides a platform for industry subject matter experts to share their narratives and best practices. The goal is to provide an added layer of visible role models sharing their own narratives of struggles and successes and to ensure the mentees can successfully transition from high school to universities with the tools to excel in their field.
With this wealth of content, Hetal Jani developed a Leadership and Empowerment course from these talks. Each session of this 10-workshop based course combines related highlights from a number of events into a compiled video and has a group of up to 30 students work through an associated case study that presents background context, introduces a problem related to the topic addressed in the videos, and facilitates questions for discussion. Students go through SPEAK’s ART process: analyze, reflect, task. Students analyze the case through the lens and advice of the speakers’ talks. They then reflect on their own situations, and whether they can use that advice to put together plans of actions to overcome obstacles and pursue goals — the task. Topics in this course include ‘Balancing Commitments’, ‘Conflict Management’, ‘Non-Positional Leadership’ and more.
~Shainu George, SPEAK Ambassador ‘16 of Queens, New York, meets with her mentor, Susan, an ER Physician virtually to discuss a career in emergency medicine.
What differentiates SPEAK Mentorship
What is unique about the program is their intentional focus to empower immigrant girls to target diversity in the workforce by facilitating access to multiple visible role models who open doors to opportunities. Mentorship in all shapes and sizes is the principle of the program that helps each mentee reach their potential in high school, align their college majors, identify best-fit universities, and successfully pursue careers. It is not a destination, as Jani puts it, it is a life-long journey.
The current changing times require unconventional methods of mentorship that transcend the traditional face to face discussions. As such, SPEAK Mentorship provides young mentees the ability to virtually connect with individuals across the globe. This boundary-less model provides the mentees an opportunity to unleash their talent, navigate the unwritten corporate rules, and be ready for the future.
So, what do the mentees who have graduated feel about the program?
94% of mentees have reported they feel more prepared for college and more engaged in school while learning new skills. An astounding 92% have learnt of new careers while 65% have reported an improvement in their family relations. All students reported feeling more engaged in their classroom and that SPEAK helped them feel like they belong in the school. Review after review has highlighted how the program has helped crystallize the young immigrants’ path forward and opened doors that were unknown to them before.
What comes next
Although the program today is focused in the New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania area, Jani has a vision to take this national and ensure she is able to make this form of critical multi-layered programming available to all immigrants. In addition to actively building partnerships with local schools, Jani’s team is working to expand to multiple cohorts of 150 mentees each across various geographic regions as part of their expansion plan and roadmap. As SPEAK grows, they are developing a social network of professionals, college students, and adolescents who can continue to learn and share their experiences and available opportunities.
As part of this effort, they are hosting their second SPEAK Summit on April 13th, 2019 in New York. The Summit is a convening of SPEAK students and professionals and an opportunity for them to network with visible role models in different career fields. This year’s theme ‘Diversity Is Your Asset’, builds upon last year’s theme of ‘Perspectives: Equity Across Contexts’. The panelists include Alpa Rajai of Barclays, Gabrielle Lyse-Brown of Morgan Stanley, and Stefan A. Kloss of ZS Associates. The key note speaker for this year is Nisha Agarwal, former Commissioner of the NYC Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and current Senior Advisor to the NYC Deputy Mayor of Strategic Policy Initiatives. Every speaker and presenter comes from an immigrant background, meeting our goal of providing future leaders with the visible role models they need. You can find more information about the second SPEAK Summit at https://www.speakmentorship.org/second-speak-summit. Through this type of direct programming and the social support network, students gain access to multiple opportunities and turn into reality SPEAK’s vision of a more diverse future workforce across careers with leaders who are representative of today’s society.
“SPEAK has given me great opportunities and so much knowledge that I never thought I would have gotten, and I’m very grateful. When I first moved to Brooklyn from Guyana in 2017, I remember how alone I felt. I was feeling like I don’t belong here because of where I came from and how I was brought up. In school, I never wanted to talk nor participate in any class activity because I thought that the other children would laugh at me. But, then, I got involved in the SPEAK Mentorship program, and had my first session with my mentor. I had found a safe space to share what I was going through and it changed the way I operated and so much more!”
~Monique Lawrence (left), SPEAK Ambassador ‘18 of Brooklyn, New York, taking a tour of Harvard College with fellow Ambassadors from New Jersey and Philadelphia after their presentation at the Harvard Graduate School of Education Alumni of Color Conference
~Lylia Belbegra, SPEAK Ambassador ‘18 of Philadelphia, leads her SPEAK Chapter Club, developing a safe space community for girls of immigrant backgrounds to share their experiences.
“I came to the United States of America from Algeria in August of 2014, and I was really afraid because it was a new beginning. I didn’t know anybody and one of my struggles was that I didn’t speak English. In my second year of high school I decided to transfer to George Washington high school. There, my teacher introduced me to a program that helps immigrants girls like me. Joining SPEAK Mentorship was the best decision that I ever made. I felt like I belonged there. I met many immigrant girls not only in my school but also in other cities. I started to become less shy and made friends who I now consider my sisters. I also had the opportunity to be the president for the SPEAK Chapter Club and the Ambassador for the 10th grade girls in SPEAK. It was amazing because it helped me become more confident and bold; I became more responsible, self-aware, and comfortable with who I was. Since joining SPEAK, I increased my school average and feel more engaged during school, developed social emotional skills that help me make more friends, and feel confident in myself. It’s incredible how far I’ve come in just a few short years, and I realize how important social support is for a girl like me to become a confident woman who can reach all her goals.”
Lylia
RESOURCES
SPEAK Impact video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3g9S8RB-dk
Website: www.speakmentorship.org