Start with the goal, not the activity.

This is lesson planning 101 – always start with your objectives. What do you want participants to learn, contribute, feel, or do during the session? What do YOU hope to learn?  Write this down and make sure you’re clear on it before you plan your activities. It’s tempting to start with an activity first (“ooh, I loved that fishbowl thing I did at that training… let’s do that!”) but it’s important to think first about the why, and then move to the how.  If you’re having trouble figuring it out, ask yourself, “How will I know if the session has been a success?” This can give you some insight into your goals.

Prioritize a sense of belonging.

As you’re planning, it can be easy to dive right into the activities that will “get to the meat” of what you want to learn. However, it’s important to start by designing moments to help each participant feel valued and validated so that they know their presence and perspective matters. This can go a long way in helping them feel engaged and able to share honestly (Master & Meltzoff, 2020). There are lots of possible ways to do this, like planning intentional icebreakers to create points of connection between the participants in your group, or simply introducing yourself directly to each student as they show up and telling them why you’re so glad they came. Check out the Resources section at the end of this chapter for practical examples, and read chapter 6 for more on how to set group norms and kick off your session effectively.

Plan, but keep it only semi-structured.

Make a plan for how you want to use your time together, but leave room for flexibility and improvisation (Lee et al., 2021). You should come prepared with a plan for the activities you plan to facilitate, how you’ll guide people through them, and approximately how long you’ll want to spend on each one – as well as which ones you can cut if you run out of time! The session will likely go differently than you imagined, and it’s important to be responsive to what’s actually happening in the room. Ironically, we’ve found that when we have clear goals and a specific plan, we can actually pivot more easily and successfully, because our priorities are clear to the team.

Example from Center for Digital Thriving

Our basic structure when we have multiple sessions with the same group is “Open Up, Build On, Dive In, Stand Back.” It works like this:

• Open up

  Similar to an extended icebreaker, we spend ~15-20 minutes checking in and connecting at the beginning of the time together.

• Build on

  We share a design invitation based on ideas that surfaced during the prior session and invite their reactions/feedback (or, if it’s the first session, we share context on what prior work we’ve done that we’re inviting the group to help build on).

• Dive in

  We carve out time for digging into creative work, finding points of connection, and doing our planned activities.

• Stand back

  We take a step back to consider where we are heading, assess our feelings about the direction of our design work, and take stock of whether we’re still in line with our project’s broader aims.

Example from Hopelab

When we only have a single session and limited time with the group we’re working with, we tend to use the following structure:

• Set a fun and friendly tone and save time by designing an icebreaker that also teaches participants how to use a collaboration board. Here’s one activity we’ve used to do this.
• Open with a low-stakes question that gives everyone a chance to practice talking within the group early in the session. For example, we often ask each young person to introductive themselves, share their preferred pronouns, and answer an easy question like “Where are you calling in from?” or something more fun like “What’s a song that’s been stuck in your head this week?”
• Start broad and light and get more specific and into heavier topics later once more trust/rapport is built. For example, a relatively light and broad question might be “Tell us what social media platform you like the most and why you like it.” A heavier question might be something like “How do you cope with negative or hateful content you encounter on social media?”
• Zoom back out at the end to let participants know where the research team plans to head next, and ask for participants’ perspective on important future directions. For example, you might ask more expansive questions that allow youth input on the project as a whole, such as “Is there anything important that we didn’t touch upon that you want us to keep in mind?” or “Who do you think most needs to hear the results of this survey and how should we share them?”

“Measure twice, cut down on error.”

Everyone knows that old proverb, right? 😉 Here’s what we take this nerdy version to mean: you should test out your ideas, protocols, prototypes, and items before you use them to make sure they actually make sense. This is called cognitive pretesting: “a structured approach for learning how respondents interpret items” (Gehlbach & Brickworth, 2011, p. 14). For example, if you are hoping to eventually use a survey with young people, it’s wise to test the questions in it ahead of time with a sample of similar young people to make sure they are clear, relevant, and not easily misinterpreted. This can result in much higher quality data once you actually begin data collection. The principle also applies to planning your activities – sometimes it’s worth it to run through your planned activities with a couple of young people before the full group arrives, to make sure that your instructions are clear, time estimates are realistic, and activities seem engaging.

Example from Center for Digital Thriving

In collaboration with social psychologist Sara Konrath, our team developed a set of items to create and validate a measure of mindful and prosocial technology use for adolescents. A critical step in our process was conducting cognitive interviews with teens ahead of conducting a study with a larger sample of teens ages 13-17. For these interviews, we intentionally recruited five teens of different gender and racial identities and on the younger and older ends of the target age band of our larger study. We used a “think-aloud protocol” where the teen would read each item (e.g., “I get distracted by my phone and it takes me out of the moment”) and share their thinking about it – how they interpreted the question, whether any aspects of the question were confusing or unclear, and how they would answer given the response options provided. This process helped us adjust the wording of individual survey items so they were clearer and more effectively capturing what we wanted to study. It also helped us identify items to remove because they were confusing or redundant.

Make it easy to participate.

Try to set a “low floor” — create accessible entry points, describe the project in an easy-to-grasp way; limit any reading or pre-work to the essential. This doesn’t mean “dumbing down” complex concepts, but it does mean thinking about how to make them approachable for young people who might not really know what this project is about, or who are nervous about being involved. You want to make people feel comfortable, like “I get what this is about, and I definitely have some thoughts on this.”

Share the right details.

It’s okay to make editorial choices to focus people on the parts you really want them to dig into. For example, let’s say you want to discuss your findings from a recent survey. You might be tempted to share the whole survey and a detailed table of your findings. Resist this urge! It’s often TMI and can bog down the discussion. Instead, focus on just pulling a few essential questions from the survey, or giving details about the key measurements and indicators you used. If your study is about mental health, you might want to share exactly how you asked about symptoms of depression, but you don’t need to have your group spend the entire session reading through every question of the full survey. One similar consideration for sharing findings: consider using headlines or graphics, rather than tables of findings that can be harder to interpret.

Don’t try to be too cool.

Avoid anything that could be viewed as adults trying to cater to the stereotypical “Gen-Z” crowd. Yes, make your activities fun and engaging and personable, but just be your normal grown-up self!

Include an activity that helps people test their tech beforehand.

This sounds dull, but we cannot overstate its importance. It’s tempting to skip this step because it takes more time and resources, and because we often assume that young people are digital natives and therefore know all the things about digital tools. But everyone needs a minute to orient themselves to how you’re using tech in a particular setting, so you should build in that orientation time.

There are lots of fun ways to onboard people live to tech platforms like virtual whiteboards (eg. Whimsical, Mural, Miro), learning environments (eg. Nearpod, Google Classroom), or collaborative docs (eg. Google Slides, Docs, or Jamboard). A few examples are included in the Resources section of this chapter. You can also send video instructions via Loom, Zoom recordings, or other screen sharing platforms to give a video tutorial on how you will use your interactive platforms.

Example from Character Lab

Our youth voice program kicks off each year with a week-long virtual summer training on Zoom. The week before the training, we host multiple short onboarding sessions where students can practice logging on to Zoom and opening the collaborative tools we’ll use during the training. This lets us address some of those tech bugs (“I can’t hear anything…”) ahead of time in a smaller group setting, so we can hit the ground running during the training itself. It also helps relieve student nerves about showing up in a Zoom meeting with 150 other students, since the tech calls are smaller. And, it lets us give personalized attention to students who are struggling with the tech to ensure that they don’t miss important content during the actual training. We always include some fun icebreakers in these sessions too, which helps students feel like they have some friendly faces when they actually show up for the training itself the following week.

Keep it interactive and use multiple modes for participation and engagement.

Try to remember what you were like when you were fourteen. Would you have wanted to have participated in a 1:1 interview or focus group with a researcher? Answers to this question probably vary from an enthusiastic ‘yes!’ to a ‘heck no!’ The reality is that different youth have very different comfort levels participating in youth voice activities. Some are more comfortable in a small group, others prefer 1:1, and others actually find large groups most welcoming. Because young people have different preferences and we want all of the youth in our group to feel as comfortable as possible, we recommend offering young people a range of ways to provide their perspective: direct conversations, small- and full-group activities, real-time contributions in the chat, asynchronous and even anonymous feedback.

This advice also applies to live sessions where you’re gathering young people into one virtual space. Often it’s helpful to provide instructions and methods for response in multiple modalities. For example, you might have instructions displayed on the screen and ask for a volunteer to read them out loud. Or you might give people the option to either type their answer to a question in the chat, unmute and share their thought out loud, or simply reflect quietly and submit a video recording of their ideas later. Using multiple modalities – both written and audio, for example – also helps ensure that even if a student’s audio cuts out, or their Zoom connection freezes for a bit, they can catch up more easily with the activity.

Whatever you do, don’t talk for more than 10 minutes straight, and plan to utilize a handful of interactive elements that can mix it up!

Upgrade from a ‘one and done’ working model.

We have found that the single session model has drawbacks that can be addressed by having repeated sessions with the same group. Repeated sessions let you build rapport and give you more time to engage in content and feedback.

We’ve found 60 to 75 minutes is a sweet spot for us in terms of length; longer creates risk of fatigue, and less time can feel “rushed” or crowd out time for rapport-building. Planning 15 extra minutes also gives you more flexibility if the session goes by faster than you anticipated – it’s ok to end early!