Hillsong CityCare - Programs | Hillsong Youth Services | Strength

Conducted over 7 weeks the program is presented during one or two school periods each week. Each week the facilitator aims to speak to the boys on a personal level, helping them to create positive mindsets, learn effective life skills and reinforce the core value that is taught during that lesson.

This is not a word for word course, but rather a guide to help facilitate discussions with students around certain themes and topics. The level of relationship and trust built will determine the level of participation by young people in the course. Feel free to develop your own style and way of communicating to the students.

The students are presented with a certificate at the end of this course.

The first class is the most important of all classes because first impressions last.

STEP 1
Before the class arrives for the first time, set the room up with a list of rules on each table. As the students arrive, have them sit down promptly and without talking, acting like a true authoritarian leader. Read the rules out to them without letting them interrupt you. After the rules have been read, get every student to pick up the rules and rip them up and throw it away.

Throw every student a chocolate.

Explain to them that this is not the way they will be treated. They will be included in the rule making and will be treated with respect.

This is also the way that they are to treat others in this class.

STEP 2
Set the classroom up. This is crucial. The idea of the ‘strength’ program is to create an environment that encourages the students to open up and be honest about issues they have previously been embarrassed to talk about. As the facilitator you need to make the environment conducive to discussion. This may require small changes to the normal school environment. A ‘strength’ class needs to feel like the student is sitting in his room with his older brothers talking about the issues they need to talk about. The challenge is getting every student to this stage.

STEP 3
Write some rules together and explain consequences of breaking them (e.g. Be on time, if they aren’t, they have to stay back and clean the room; No swearing. If they do the student is up against the wall; No bagging fellow students out. If they do, the baggee gets to discipline the bagger.)

STEP 4
Introduce yourself. Get them to introduce themselves by telling everyone their favourite music, video game, class, sport, book, food, where they live, where they would like to live etc. (This is an interactive way of getting them to share about themselves.) I have found that if you sit in a circle, and start with the student on your right and finish with the student on your left, it gives you an idea as to what to talk about when it is your go.

STEP 5
Introduce ‘chocolate questions’. Chocolate will be handed to the students who ask questions that have been thought through and are appropriate to stimulate thinking within the group.