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Facing Change: Growing in Digital Youth Work
Facing Change: Growing in Digital Youth Work
Content
Change is not just about adopting something new, it’s about navigating the inner and outer shifts that come with professional growth.
In digital youth work, change often challenges our routines, assumptions, and comfort zones. This activity supports youth workers in understanding their own process of change, recognising resistance, and identifying personal growth strategies in response to digital transformation.
By completing this activity, you will:
- Understand key models of personal and professional change
- Reflect on where you are in your own growth journey within digital youth work
- Identify emotional responses and resistance patterns to change
- Design an intentional next step to grow your digital competences
Get inspired
Watch the video "The Process of Change" while reflecting on your growth and potential in digital youth work.
Source: This video as part of the #YOCOMO Attitudes and Behaviours – an #ETS online course on competence-based development for youth workers.
Other resources:
- Explore: Kurt Lewin’s Change Model and the Personal Change Cycle
- Watch: TED Talk about what helps in the process of change
Take action
Task 1: Map where you are in the change process
Think of a change you are experiencing (or wish to initiate) in your digital youth work practice, this might involve trying new digital tools, leading a digital activity, or addressing media and technology as a topic.
Use Lewin’s 3 stages (Unfreezing, Change, Refreezing) to describe where you are and what’s helping or blocking your growth by filling in a printed worksheet. You can also create a digital visual or record a short reflection illustrating Lewin’s 3 stages.
Task 2: Explore resistance
Identify what makes change difficult for you. Reflect on emotions, thoughts, or habits that create resistance and how they affect your digital youth work.
Write a journal entry or record a video or audio reflection and share it with a trusted peers or forums.
Task 3: Take one step to grow
Using the Personal Change Cycle, clarify your motivation (“why”) and describe one small action you’ll take toward developing your digital competences.
Draft a growth step plan using a printed template or in a preferred digital format.
Claim Open Badge recognition
Upon completing this activity, participants can earn a badge that recognises:
- Understanding of how change happens in professional life;
- Awareness of resistance and growth potential in digital youth work;
- Willingness to take intentional steps in developing digital youth work competences.
Who created this resource?
This activity is based on the video “The Process of Change” from the YOCOMO MOOC, adapted by the Cities of Learning Network. It incorporates Kurt Lewin’s Change Model and the Personal Change Cycle, linked to the Digital Competences in Youth Work (DYW SNAC) framework to support personal growth and digital innovation in youth work.
Next steps
Return to your action plan after a few weeks to track your progress. Build on your reflections continue to the next activity: Where Are You Now? Understanding Your Digital Competencies, where you'll explore how to assess your digital competences based on real-life experiences.
Collaborate with others going through change, growth is stronger when shared.
Get activity badge
Growing in Digital Youth Work Get this badge
This badge is awarded to youth workers who have explored their personal and professional responses to change, with a specific focus on digital youth work contexts. Through this activity, they reflected on change processes, recognised internal and external resistance, and identified concrete next steps to support their growth and competence development.
To earn this badge, youth worker needed to:
- Map their own process of change using a provided model
- Identify personal resistance to change and its impact on digital practice
- Define one concrete step for continued growth in digital youth work
Skills and experiences gained
This badge is aligned to following Digital Competences in Youth Work (DYW SNAC) areas:
- Self-reflection and lifelong learning – being aware of one’s own learning process and actively planning and engaging in lifelong and life-wide learning.
- Learning and creativity with digital tools – experimenting with and reflecting on the use of digital tools in creative ways for own learning and professional development.
- Shared guidelines and peer learning – engaging in shared understanding and co-creating learning environments with others.
- Ethical and values-based digital youth work – acting in accordance with ethical standards and youth work values during times of professional transition.
This badge shows the earner’s awareness of how change affects personal learning and professional practice, and their ability to engage with change constructively in digital youth work. Cities of Learning Network partners value badge earners’ reflections and issue this badge after reviewing the provided evidence.
Tasks
Task no.1
Evidence verified by: one activity organiser
Complete at least two of the following tasks by providing evidence to earn the "Growing in Digital Youth Work" badge:
- Task 1: Map your current stage in a real-life change process using Lewin’s Change Model
- Evidence 1: Upload a written, visual, or recorded reflection showing how you identify with the stages (Unfreezing, Change, Refreezing) in the context of digital youth work
- Task 2: Identify one or more forms of resistance you experience in the change process, especially toward digital youth work
- Evidence 2: Submit a short journal entry, video, audio note, or creative reflection explaining how resistance shows up and what might be causing it
- Task 3: Define one small, concrete step you will take to support your personal or professional growth in digital youth work
- Evidence 3: Share a written or visual action plan that links your identified change process to an area of digital competence you want to develop
Skills
#Using digital tools to share ideas and experience with peers
#Critically reflecting the impact of digital transformation
#Identity growth of the youth worker
Organisers
Digital Youth Work Resource Hub
Awero not-for-profit organisation manages this platform and develops it together with leading educational organisations. The European Union's programme Erasmus+ granted co-funding for building the first version of this platform. Contact support@awero.org.
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