Creating a Meaningful Retreat Program: Energizing Campus Leaders

 

While there are many different ways to schedule a late August leadership retreat, we have found that spreading it out over three days and working with the athletic department to ensure the least amount of conflict with practices and games ensures that more students will be able to attend.  

 

The retreat begins with a welcome dinner followed by a presentation laying out the theme of the retreat and the schedule for the upcoming days. I then offer 90 minutes for students to diagnose the strengths and challenges of the community. Allowing students to take stock of what is working and what needs fixing gives them a sense of ownership and empowerment. We encourage this. The thought is that we spend more time with each other on a daily basis than the kids spend with their respective families.  Therefore, we want them to work with each other and with faculty to make the community as strong as it possibly can be. After students report out their findings and we process them, we break for the evening.

 

During the following morning, students rotate through a series of seminars designed to improve communication and organizational skills. The seminars typically last for 45 minutes each and all are interactive. Most are based on faculty suggestions during our spring faculty meeting. We eat a quick lunch and we break for practices and games.

 

Finally, on the third day students return to their assessments of the community’s strengths and weaknesses and they engage in the process of selecting an adaptive challenge for the year that is based on those early conversations. Think of an adaptive challenge as a lofty goal that is not necessarily attainable. An example of one may be “respect”. However, as the community makes conscious efforts to move toward realizing the adaptive challenge, the health and wellbeing of the upper school improves. The process of selecting the adaptive challenge takes as much as an hour and includes much back and forth between students. Adults merely facilitate the conversation. The adaptive challenge, however, becomes the focal point of much of the work that students pursue over the course of the year.

After the selection of an adaptive challenge, students break off into their respective clubs and they begin to plan activities for the fall that will support the attainment of the adaptive challenge. During this hour to two-hour period of time students formulate their goals and use school calendars to construct agendas for the fall. They will refer back to their goals and agendas often throughout September and October to ensure that they are meeting them. Finally, we schedule two follow-up retreats, one in late October and one in early January, to offer kids a three-hour block of time on a Saturday morning to evaluate their progress and to formulate new goals for the intervening periods of time.

When we first rolled out the notion of an August retreat, 60 students attended. Last year, 110 students came. Severn students look forward to the camaraderie of the event, they take it seriously, and they engage fully in it. Moreover, we have seen an increase in participation in clubs and in their ability to set and attain goals. Our clubs now sponsor events during the year that are well attended and well planned. Most importantly, our kids feel empowered to make decisions with feedback from their faculty facilitators. Some of their ideas are fantastic and some fail and they are learning from both experiences and are gaining wisdom in the process. Our students feel as though they have a large stake in the health and vitality of our community. Respect for the institution and for each other have increased measurably as a result.