Lions Quest

Skills for Action

Skills for Action (SFC) students learn to communicate effectively, analyze and solve problems, set and achieve goals, work successfully as part of a team, and resolve conflict peacefully. Students also develop the means to resist negative peer pressure, make healthy choices, and understand and appreciate diversity in the classroom, school, and broader community. Re-designed in 2009, curriculum changes include updated research, resources and rationale. The SFC kit has new photos and graphics, and is organized into four books - Teacher Resource Guide, Curriculum Manual, Advisory Team Handbook, and Skills Bank. The Skills Bank opens with a chapter describing how it can be used as a stand-alone social and emotional learning and life skills program. A one-day workshop - Social, Emotional and Workplace Skills for Success in School and Life - supports stand-alone Skills Bank implementation.

Lions Quest Exploring the Issues: Teens-Alcohol and Other Drugs is a 15-session mini- curriculum designed to help students gain the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to be healthy and drug-free individuals. Students research the issues and carry out service projects in their schools and communities, sharing with others what they have learned.

To best serve a broad range of school settings, SFC may be implemented as a one semester course, a one year course, or a multi-year course that is repeated as a service-learning educational methodology for subsequent classes incorporating service-learning into their content areas. It can be integrated into academic or other subject areas such as language arts, health and personal development, social studies, career preparation and family and consumer sciences. As a separate course, the one semester to one year option entails daily implementation with 33 sessions (equal to 70 class periods), appropriate skills from the Skills Bank, and activities from the Making a Difference student magazine. Visit Program Resources to view a variety of curriculum maps.

SFC Skills Bank

A highly flexible component of the program, the Skills Bank contains four broad categories of essential skills for life: Cultural Awareness, Interpersonal Communication, Personal Management and Responsibility, and Study and Writing Skills. Each category is comprised of five to nine skills for a total of 26 skill sets. Skill lessons are divided into an introductory rationale, guidelines, and multiple application options:

Teach options which introduce students to the new skills

Reinforce options deepen the students understanding of the skills

Enrich options help students integrate the skills into their lives

In Tooele, UT, Communities That Care (CTC) provides Lions Quest programs to area schools, with funding for CTC remaining a line item in the city's budget despite budget cuts. Police resources have been disinvested from another program to fund Skills for Adolescence (SFA), due to SFA's research evidence and curriculum integration. Students who had received both programs were very clear about their preference for Lions Quest, as highlighted by one student's "light bulb moment" when he realized that the very peer-pressure he felt to try alcohol could be turned the other way to get his peers not to do these things since the non-drinkers were actually the majority. From Prevention Action, Dec. 4, 2009.