So This Counselor Walks Into A Cabin …

Six simulations to give staff members realistic leadership practice

By Chris Thurber

Want to know the biggest secret about staff training? Most of the learning will not occur in formal workshops but on the job, after campers arrive. As a parent, that’s a scary thought, at first. You want to take care of my child before you know everything there is to know about taking care of children? Of course, that’s not only how camp leadership works, but also how parenting works. Therefore, as a parent and a professional staff trainer who has spent decades preparing staff for opening day and beyond, I know on-the-job training makes sense. If a director has hired staff thoughtfully and assembled expert training for them, the season will go smoothly, despite all staff members not knowing everything they need to know by opening day.

© Can Stock Photo / Maridav

The Recipe For Success

The fact that youth leaders refine their skills on the job is not an argument for careless hiring or paltry pre-season training. On the contrary, such neglect is a recipe for accidents and liability lawsuits. The ingredients for summer success are always high standards for eligibility, challenging interviews, thorough background checks, detailed reference checks, and engaging pre-season training. And it should always include pre-arrival online training, such as ExpertOnlineTraining.com, to supplement the intensive on-site training. (There’s just too much to know for any youth-serving organization to pack it all in during on-site workshops.)

Excellent articles on all the ingredients above can be found in back issues of Camp Business, in the Week-ender blog, and elsewhere online. Once you are up to speed on these foundational practices, turn your attention to leveling up your on-site training. One of the best ways to do this is to decrease lecturing about skills and increase practice doing skills.

Learning By Doing

Whether you’re working at a day camp, overnight camp, or parks and rec department, staff training probably includes some team-building exercises, plus workshops on safety and risk-management, leadership, youth development, behavior management, and institutional policies. Some of this content is most efficiently introduced with online learning. (Note that quiz results on key topics help document compliance with accreditation standards and separate any slackers from the staff members who are truly invested in professional development.) Once all staff members arrive at camp, essential leadership skills are best mastered through live, on-site, interactive scenarios.

The American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer, John Dewey (1859-1952), championed the idea of learning by doing. In his seminal work on education, The Child and the Curriculum, Dewey also asserted that formal education was instrumental in creating social change and reform. He wrote, “Education is a regulation of the process of coming to share in the social consciousness; and…the adjustment of individual activity on the basis of this social consciousness is the only sure method of social reconstruction.”

In the context of the last few years of amplified social-justice activism, Dewey’s philosophy of education seems prescient. However, the idea of learning by doing was championed much earlier by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who wrote, “For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.” Both Aristotle and Dewey—as well as many other distinguished educators in the intervening millennia—also emphasized the importance of content relevance. Learning, they asserted, is even more powerful when students can connect new “doing” experiences with their own past experiences, and thereby feel meaningful connections to their goals and values.

Interactive Scenarios

My favorite way to blend experiential learning, social responsibility, and content relevance for camp staff is with interactive scenarios. Below is an outline of step-by-step instructions you and the camp’s senior staff can customize to suit your needs.

1. Assemble all staff members, including those who work in facilities, commissary, and administration. They all come in contact with campers, so they will all benefit from these interactive scenarios. Moreover, their individual expertise will lend a beneficial diversity of perspectives to each scenario’s debrief.

2. Identify the 12 most-experienced counselors or cabin leaders and buddy them up in pairs. These staff members will play campers in the scenarios. One or two might play a parent or another adult. These are the “actor pairs.”

3. Divide the rest of the group into six teams of approximately equal size. One helpful way to create teams is according to the age of the campers with whom they’ll spend the most time. These are the “learner groups.”

4. Choose a location with six distinct places where scenarios can be acted out. At an overnight camp, this might be a cluster of cabins; at a day camp, six spots can be evenly spaced around the perimeter of a large field or gymnasium. To promote focus, have enough distance among the groups so they cannot easily hear one another.

5. Give each of the actor pairs a 3” x 5” index card on which you’ve written a brief, realistic scenario. Because you want the learner groups to walk in without any foreknowledge or preparation to each of the six scenarios, do not share what’s written on the cards with the rest of the staff members.

Below are six solid examples for inspiration. You can use these, modify them, or write your own:

• One camper is missing a favorite T-shirt or a cherished personal item. The camper has accused another camper of stealing, but the second camper denies even seeing the missing item. Fairly quickly, the contentious discussion becomes a heated argument and is on the verge of getting physical.

• One camper attacks some aspect of another camper’s identity by making a wise crack or slur about race, ethnicity, sexuality, socio-economic status, gender identity, or accent. The targeted camper is silent at first, then asks, “What did you just say?” to which the first camper replies, “You heard me.”

• One camper sees another camper sitting with his head in his hands, approaches, and puts a hand on a shoulder, asking, “You OK?” The seated camper tearfully replies, “I can’t stand it here. I have to find a way to get home. Will you help me sneak out tonight?”

• One camper spots another camper with some type of forbidden object, such as a cell phone or a vape pen. The first camper says, “Hey, you’re not allowed to have that here.” The second camper replies, “I can have whatever I want, and if you tell any of the staff members, I’ll just say you gave it to me, so keep quiet.”

• One camper, accompanied by a parent or primary caregiver, walks up to a staff member on opening day. The staff member greets the pair politely, with a smile, firm handshake, warm greeting, and good eye contact (no sunglasses). The parent says, “I know Robin was assigned to the Blue Group, but we’d rather be in the Green group, so here we are.” When the staff member explains that reassignments are not possible, the parent digs in, saying, “Maybe for most families, but you’ll need to make an exception.”

• One camper asks another camper if he can participate in the Ultimate Frisbee game that’s about to start. The second camper replies, “Um … I don’t think so. We’ve got, like, eight people, so that’s four on a side. Maybe next time.” The first camper looks down, silent and dejected.

6. Advise the actor pairs to distribute themselves among the six different spots you’ve chosen. Each pair brings the scenario card you’ve given and spends a couple minutes rehearsing while awaiting the arrival of the first learner group.

7. Orient the learner groups, while they are all together, with these instructions:

• “The goal here is to give you practice responding skillfully to a demanding leadership situation that you come upon, without any preparation.”

• “On your way to the starting location, decide which member of the group will play the counselor or cabin leader who walks into the scenario. The other members of the group will silently observe.”

• “As soon as you arrive, the two actors will start role-playing their characters. They won’t read what’s written on the card; they’ll just start doing something. Your job is to handle the situation the best you can in five minutes.”

• “One of the silently observing members of each group should keep time and let everyone know when there’s one minute left, and when the five-minute time limit is over.”

• “Then, spend five minutes debriefing what happened. Share what you thought went well and what you might have done differently.”

• “At the end of this second, five-minute block, you’ll still have more to discuss. However, you’ll need to rotate clockwise to the next location, where you’ll find a new scenario. On the way, choose a different person, or perhaps two people, to be the staff member(s) who walk in cold to the next challenging situation.”

8. Answer any questions about the directions above, then send each of the six learner groups to one of the six spots. You and the other director (if there is one) can spend the next 75 minutes meandering from location to location to observe the staff members learning by doing. It’s awesome.

This fun and engaging activity is a formative learning experience for most staff and a perfect complement to the online and classroom-style preparation you’ll provide. It’s also edifying for directors, who will be able  to obtain a clear sense of different staff members’ strengths and training targets. 

To be maximally successful, it’s important that the six scenarios are all different and all representative of the types of leadership challenges staff members are likely to encounter in the program. It’s also essential that each learner group has a strict time keeper, so each group will rotate through all six scenarios. (Including the directions at the start, this activity takes about 90 minutes.)

I love facilitating this type of experiential workshop right before lunch or dinner because mealtime provides a perfect opportunity for staff to discuss what was learned. As a bonus, you won’t need to ask the staff to do so. The activity itself is sufficiently stimulating to prompt plenty of spontaneous dialogue. And that, more than anything, is the mark of a great staff-training workshop.

 Christopher Thurber, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and faculty member at Phillips Exeter Academy. He created Prep4Camp.com, the only evidence-based homesickness prevention program, and co-authored the best-selling Summer Camp Handbook with Dr. Jon Malinowski. His newest book, The Unlikely Art of Parental Pressure, includes eight ways adults can transform harmful pressure to healthy pressure. Learn more about the work that Thurber does with schools, camps, and companies on DrChrisThurber.com.