One of the chief concerns for parents of teens is how to find or to create a community of positive peers. Kim’s new book, Coaching a Club, just released by Monument Publishing, offers seven secrets for creating such a community and unleashing teens’ longing to achieve something extraordinary.

Coaching a Club: Seven Secrets for Forming a Successful Speech & Debate Club teaches principles of mentoring, networking, facilitating public service and preparing the next generation to change the world through the lens of developing a forensics club.  Kim has gathered the collective wisdom of her positive peers in the Christian speech and debate community over ten years of service to teens across the nation.  Even if you don’t think your students need speech and debate, you need this book!

Excerpts

Commitment to Character

We can readily see that studying speech and debate will improve intelligence in these more traditionally academic categories. But if that is all we see, we miss the most important possibilities in forensics training.  Forensics offers young people the opportunity to exercise those academic skills in an emotionally-charged social setting very much like the real world. It offers coaches a nearly unparalleled opportunity to train students in interpersonal and intra-personal intelligence.  Taken together, these two are called “emotional intelligence” or EQ[1], and they encompass the ability to understand one’s own and others’ feelings and to use that information to make fine distinctions and to guide actions. Maturity in emotional intelligence is characterized by altruism and empathy. In Biblical parlance, we are talking about developing wisdom and character.

Commitment to Community

Collaboration is the concept of the moment.  From Linux to “Wikinomics”, it is becoming ever clearer that the future belongs to those who successfully create communities of interest and influence by exploiting the networking opportunities at hand.  So when you are trying to decide which of the many possible activities your teen will pursue during those swift, precious high school years, you’ll want to choose those that give your teen maximum connectivity for the long term.  Homeschool forensics has to be among the top 3 choices. We are not just training young people; we are helping to establish the grassroots network that will energize and support the next generation of power brokers.

Commitment to Continuity

Continuity. As we look ahead, we don’t actually have the continued existence of the particular club in view.  We are considering instead the continuing relevance of the vision, the continuity of relationships and the long-range usefulness of the skills developed here and now.  Sono Harris of Oregon’s Rainmakers admits that the longevity of the speech club was not a part of the planning. “We just jumped in and took it a year at a time.” The Harrises were looking for a challenge that would be a good fit for their children’s gifts and callings. Their passion as they built Rainmakers was to help the students “learn to use words well” (John Piper) for active service in the world. Competitive forensics in the NCFCA not only gave them skills with words, but many of the auxiliary resources they would need to launch out on their own as well: visionary peers, intergenerational networks, resume development and business connections, even scholarship opportunities.  We may develop our skills inside the Christian homeschool bubble, but they are emphatically not meant to stay there!