Not So Much—Part 1

Eight powerful practices that directors don’t do

By Chris Thurber

As a psychologist, parent, and professional educator, I have had the privilege of working with camps, schools, and other youth programs on five continents over the past quarter-century. I say privilege because I learn as much as I teach during my one- to seven-day visits.

© Can Stock Photo / Zinkevych

In my inaugural year as a staff trainer, I naïvely (but sincerely) preached the practices that I had learned working on the leadership of Camp Belknap, where I have served in some capacity since 1983. However, I soon realized that different programs did the same things well using different techniques, based on their unique philosophy and traditions.

Over time, I also gained an appreciation for some universally valuable best practices—ways of promoting youth development that work for every camper. Some of these transcendent praxes, such as having campers participate on opening day in the establishment of group guidelines (for day camps) or cabin conduct (for overnight camps), are readily adopted by the owners and directors who hire me to facilitate workshops with their staff members. Other suggestions are reliably rejected, to the detriment of the camp and its patrons.

In this two-part series, I will share the eight most-powerful rejected suggestions I commonly make to the owners and directors of summer-youth programs. I don’t take it personally when a client demurs because I know all behavior makes sense to the actor. Owners and directors are bright and creative professionals who behave intentionally, in accord with their values. Yet we all have blind spots, we all can be stubborn, and we all can be tempted to choose quick fixes when a durable solution would take a sustained commitment.

I hope that by sharing these rejected suggestions, along with my rationale, readers will celebrate the suggestions they have implemented already, reconsider others with an open mind, and discuss with senior staff the value of adopting them. I could be mistaken, but I believe that youth-serving organizations are stronger when they do the following:

1. Include Camp Duties In The Daily Schedule
When all staff members and all campers participate in chores or work duties each day for 20-30 minutes, everyone feels a sense of pride in the physical property of camp. That’s a wonderful outcome, but the push-back goes like this: “Chris, parents don’t pay for their kids to clear dishes, clean toilets, stack wood, sweep courts, and pick up trash.” My rejoinder: “Actually, that’s exactly what parents are paying for. How else can you achieve the outcomes of a sense of responsibility and community interdependence other than by giving responsibility and contributing to the community?”

Think about camp duties from a perspective of a passive non-participant. If your campers watch your maintenance staff, international students, or custodians taking care of camp for them, they will likely develop classist attitudes and exclusionary behaviors. Camp should not be theirs to enjoy while others care for it. Camp should be a community where everyone enjoys contributing to others’ enjoyment.

You could also think about camp duties from an inclusion perspective. Inclusiveness, in the form of widespread participation in physical upkeep, dissolves discriminatory biases. When all members of a community share the work, the likelihood of social exclusion decreases.

The healthy pride that comes from daily camp duties also fuels five practical outcomes:

1. Your maintenance staff will have more time for the complex or dangerous tasks for which they are trained.

2. Campers will clean up after themselves at the end of meals and activities without being asked. (What could wow parents more and get them to re-enroll sooner?)

3. Campers will become genuinely invested in the conservation and sustainability practices that your program champions. (You do recycle and repurpose, right?)

4. With hundreds of helping hands working each day, the property will sparkle brighter than it ever could with only the maintenance or custodial staff doing the work. Consider that 100 campers and 20 staff, working 30 minutes each day, totals 420 hours of work. That’s more time than five full-time maintenance staff and five full-time custodial staff work in one week.

5. Both current and former campers will spontaneously sing your program’s praises in the off-season. That word-of-mouth gold generates new registrations faster than any slideshow, website, or print ad.

Bottom line: If you want to create a sense of community without a hokey, team-building game, and if you want young participants to feel responsible for one another, make camp duties part of everyone’s daily schedule.

© Can Stock Photo / serrnovik

2. Give The Other Team A Cheer After Every Game
There are plenty of non-competitive activities in every summer-youth program. For those players ending on a winning team or a losing team, congratulatory cheers from both teams are a must. Win or lose, it is great sportsmanship to congratulate the opposing team for the joy of competition and the opportunity to play and compete.

Giving the other team a cheer, regardless of the outcome, places emphasis on effort, which is the essential ingredient in perseverance. Plus, when campers immediately turn their attention to congratulating the other team, there is less opportunity for the winning team to gloat and for the losing team to sulk. Ultimately, we want young people to learn to win with humility and lose with grace. Post-game cheers help achieve these outcomes.

The push-back on this suggestion is that sometimes campers are so disappointed that they cannot be expected to unite for a cheer. A few directors have also confessed that their camp doesn’t have an established repertoire of cheers.

If that dearth of spirit describes your circumstances, now is the time to task some of the more creative staff members with the off-season project of writing four or five fresh camp cheers. Starting next season, with new cheers and the new practice of reciprocal cheering, is a simple way to emphasize striving over dominating and sportsmanship over trash talking.

3. Cultivate Staff Members From The Camper Ranks
Great staff can come from anywhere, at least in theory. But the best trained and most loyal staff members begin as campers and are promoted and culled through a multi-year apprenticeship known as Internal Leadership Development or ILD.

The tiers of ILD programs may have names like Senior Camper, Junior Leader, Leader-in-Training, and finally Cabin Leaders (at an overnight camp) or Group Leaders (at a day camp). Different youth programs use different labels, of course. (As Dr. Jon Malinowski and I wrote in The Summer Camp Handbook—a book for new camper families—we believe that leader is more accurate and flattering than counselor, which can also mean attorney or psychologist. Most directors would rather their staff lead, not counsel, campers. Being a transformative mentor is much more about setting a sterling example than offering advice.) Word choice notwithstanding, where you get your staff is far more important than what you call them.

Cultivating staff members from the camper ranks automatically enhances their quality. Rather than trying to put a few days of on-site training into practice, staff in ILD programs receive many weeks of on-the-job training, supervision, and coaching on top of the required on-site training. And if your staff members have been participants when younger, they know the customary games, songs, cheers, and schedules in addition to your mission, values, and traditions. For ILD staff, these bedrock elements are second nature. Therefore, you need not spend valuable on-site training time teaching fundamentals. Instead, you can use on-site training for in-depth discussions and intensive practice using advanced leadership skills.

As appealing as a safer program led by experienced staff may be, owners and directors push back when I suggest ILD because it can take a decade to fully implement. It takes time to design selection-criteria and rituals, plan training workshops, and hire a competent Leadership Director. In addition, even the best ILD designs yield a 10 percent annual increase in homegrown staff. That said, adopting a growth mindset and a long-term vision is something at which most camp owners and directors excel.

Another angle on the benefits of ILD comes from the saving of time and money that result from not having to pay staffing agencies or to travel extensively (even internationally) to conduct interviews. You still have to pay for a comprehensive, criminal-background check, call every reference, and conduct thorough face-to-face interviews, but none of these methods for winnowing candidates is as powerful and reliable as ILD. Rather than hope that a candidate will perform as advertised, ILD allows you to see how junior staff members perform for a season or two before you promote and re-hire them.

Ultimately, the outcome of ILD is the peace of mind you receive from knowing and trusting staff members. You and the senior staff have watched leaders grow up, have seen how they treat kids, have observed how they behave in emergencies, and have witnessed their work ethic and stamina over several full seasons. Moreover, when the front-line staff have grown and been trained at your camp, you know they can provide genuine empathy to campers in distress. You know they will behave in ways that support you and your program’s mission, whether they are on duty or enjoying time off. Moreover, you have confidence they will work hard all season for modest pay because they love their jobs.

4. Give Campers And Staff Members Real Responsibility
Allocating menial labor to junior staff is the downfall of many ILD programs. Who would not be disappointed to be promoted from participant to first-tier employee, only to discover that the leadership talent spotted by the senior staff is being put to use exclusively in performing manual labor? For junior staff members to learn, they must be allowed to co-lead activities, share supervisory duties, and participate in making important decisions. Yes, junior staff should join the rest of the staff (and campers, as I emphasized above) in completing chores. But, no, junior staff members should not be hired as lackeys or indentured servants.

When you give campers and young leaders a voice in significant discussions, when you give them opportunities to design and co-lead programs, and when you hold them accountable for the results, you get enhanced creativity and bolstered resilience. In fact, camp is uniquely suited for the kind of participation in healthy risk-taking that psychologists have been advocating for 150 years.

Not surprisingly, the push-back from owners and directors is that anything more than tokenistic responsibility is too risky to allow. Some argue it is fine to give choices, such as, “Would you rather go to soccer or swimming?” but inappropriate to allow a 15-year-old to help teach a swim lesson or let a 16-year-old help coach the archery team. In my experience, nothing could be further from the truth. Giving age-appropriate and skill-appropriate responsibilities to campers and young leaders, under the watchful eyes of wise staff members, always motivates engagement. Those campers and young leaders rise to the occasion because adults they trust and admire are entrusting them.

In Part 2 of “Not So Much,” I’ll share four more rejected suggestions and provide strong arguments for adopting these essential practices.

Dr. Chris Thurber is a psychologist and professional educator at Phillips Exeter Academy and enjoys training other leaders and teachers around the world. He is the co-author of The Summer Camp Handbook and the co-founder of ExpertOnlineTraining.com, a collection of video-training modules for youth leaders. To book a live training, enroll staff members in online learning, or read more about youth development, visit DrChrisThurber.com.