The module: ‘YOUTH WORK IN PROGRESS’ presents six following exercises. They are designed to inspire youth workers and give them new ideas, as well as to help them to gain experience and enrich their practical knowledge at challenging everyday work with young people. It contains exercises for self presentation, recognition of own competences and identifies needs for further improvement of these competences which are necessary for youth workers to do successful youth work. Detailed description of each exercise provides youth workers with practical tools which can be used in the youth workers training.

Exercise 1: ID card
ID-Card is an exercise, that introduces people, who are to work together in a group, to each other. The participants are asked to prepare their own “ID card� – a small sheet of paper or cartoon with their name, picture, finger print and some of their interests on it. They are also asked to prepare a plasticine figure representing them selves.

Exercise 2: Meet yourself
The exercise makes the participants reflect on how they appear to young people and why. It also can help to realize “how is it to meet me� and “which competences do I really have�. This exercise is done through observation and different questionnaires.

This exercise make the participants think about, what impression, they leave on young people and where their competences come from.

Exercise 3: Challenges and problems in youth work
Challenges and problems in youth work consist of two exercises.

The first one, called “Hats� and is a warm up exercise aims to make the participants familiar with role play as a method.

The purpose of second one, called “Challenges and problems� is to let the participants describe the challenges and problems, they face in their work with young people and try to find solutions through role plays.

Exercise 4: Modalities
“Modalities� is designed to test our own learning styles, to get an understanding of how we learn ourselves and to get some methods to optimize our communication with young people.

Three various exercises within this exercise make the participants test and discuss their own learning styles and it makes the participants aware of how to communicate with youths in a way, that uses at least three learning styles: visual – through seeing, auditory – through hearing, kinaesthetic – through touch or physical involvement.

Exercise 5: The past and future of youth work
This exercise is the main part of the module and it consists of six activities: youth club of yesterday, best practice and good examples, youth club of tomorrow, competencies and skills, how good you are, improvement of competencies and skills.

The participants give the answers to the questions. In the end, they analyze how close they are to live up to their own answers and what it takes to be better at it.

Exercise 6: Friendship letter
This exercise is chosen to finish the training with something positive. Participants write positive statements about each member of the group. At the end everyone will receive a positive picture about himself/herself written by the colleague.