Leadership camp suggestions for developing a more effective curriculum

Camping Magazine, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Noah Adam Doyle

Conversations with leadership camp directors, teenage participants, religious educators, and parents (including my own) suggest that today's leadership camps are no longer like the Boy Scout Jamborees my father attended as a teenager. While camp participants still drink bug juice in the dining hall and sing songs after dinner, today's high school leadership camps are highly structured, inclusive programs that hire professional training staff and engage teenagers in leadership exercises modeled after a page from General Electric's corporate management training manual. To compete with all the opportunities available to teenagers each summer, leadership camps must do no less than guarantee the transformation of the awkward high schooler into the 21st century.

With the support of Professor Tove Hammer, Professor Marty Wells, Jeffrey Hoffman, international director of Summer Programs for BBYO, Inc., and the staff of the Martin P. Catherwood Library, I investigated the impact leadership camps have on the skill development, motivation, and values of their teenage participants. By tracking 138 high school teenagers from across North America, Europe, Canada, and Israel who attended BBYO's International Leadership Training Conference (ILTC), a Jewish leadership camp located in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, the challenges involved in training adolescents became evident and some ideas that camp administrators could utilize to make their leadership programs more effective evolved.

Overall, the research project highlights that the ILTC program achieves many of the goals the camp seeks to accomplish (see "Methodology" sidebar on page 48). Teenage participants reported that they left the leadership camp feeling as though they had developed stronger leadership skills and could move from camp to the external world with confidence and effectiveness. Participating teenagers reported that they could now manage their peers more effectively and, as a result of enhanced leadership skills learned at camp, were appointed or elected to a greater number of positions in community and high school extracurricular activities. There were also some surprises in the findings. Teenagers' gender, age, and previous success in high school all played significant roles in determining the extent to which each teenager benefited from the camp experience. Surprising? Yes. But also an avenue for innovation. A careful analysis of our findings provides direction for developing a more effective leadership curriculum.

Recommendation 1

Create a gender-defined component of the leadership curriculum. Throughout the entire research project, female ILTC participants consistently scored higher than the male ILTC participants on all indicators of leadership skill strength. Yet, male ILTC participants exhibited a greater growth in leadership skills than the female ILTC participants following the camp experience. Why would gender play a role in determining how much a teenager gained from his or her leadership camp experience? Should we consider grouping high school participants by gender for some leadership classes?

Recommendation 2

Instructor preparation and classroom training is a necessity. A second surprising finding was that younger participants (under seventeen years of age) exhibited a greater growth in leadership skills than the older participants following their camp experience. Should leadership camps mix eighteen-year-old high school seniors with fifteen-year-old high school sophomores together in the same program? Probably not, but they can successfully mix high school juniors and high school seniors in the same program. However, to mix different ages and potentially different leadership skill levels, adequate instructor preparation and classroom management training is a necessity.

A small but vocal group of teenage participants continually voiced the concern that they were not being "challenged" enough during the leadership sessions I observed in this study. However, those leadership instructors who had a strong grasp of the training material were able to remain focused, creating games aligned with the lessons, which resulted in in-depth discussions among engaged participants. These instructors successfully challenged the more highly skilled teenage participants and ensured that all teenage participants' needs were met during the camp.

Ensuring that leadership instructors have an extensive understanding of their topic does not have to come at a high cost. Minor changes can result in a great enhancement to the leadership curriculum. Rather than being assigned eight different leadership sessions to teach, during the summer of 2003, each ILTC leadership instructor developed and taught only two specific leadership sessions. During camp, these instructors repeated their classes multiple times for different groups of participants. The result was that participants felt challenged, instructors had a better grasp of the leadership material, and the leadership sessions continually improved throughout the summer.