Field Day

Today, I'm doing something I've never done before.  I'm going to talk to the offices of two senators.  I'm taking two youth to our local senator's offices for IJM and we're going to have a little chatty-chat about human trafficking.

I'm doing this for a couple of reasons.  First, human trafficking is one of my hot-button issues and tends to be pretty important to the young people that I teach.  Second, this is a wonderful opportunity for the leadership team to actually do something that can make a difference in so many lives.  Our leadership students need this kind of experience. 

In this case, it was one of our leadership students that became aware of this opportunity because of her past dealings with IJM.  There's a bill that's going through the Senate concerning human trafficking, and of course, senators need prompting and briefing about these sort of things, so we volunteered.

Participating in these kinds of activities now can very well wet your student's appetites for their entire lives.  I doubt that the students will forget what happens today, one way or the other.  It will mean even more to them because the idea didn't originate with me, but with them.

Now, some of you might not want to involve your students in politics like this, but I assure you there are lots of ways different activities that your students can do that will increase their leadership skills without visiting the offices of the local politicians.  Here's a couple of things I've found about these sort of trips that really help cement them into the minds of students:

1.  Make it important.  If your students feel that what they are doing isn't important, the activity isn't likely to have much impact.  Even if your students can't see the importance of what you are doing, it is our responsiblity to show them how important what we're doing is.  Students want to do important things.  They want to be involved.  Give them that opportunity.

2.  Give them ownership.  This opportunity didn't come from one of my sources, it came from a student's source.  It means more to them that way.  As much as I'd like to talk a lot today, I'm not going to.  My students are taking the lead.  They are coming up with the agenda and the talking points.  They will lead the meeting.

3.  Debrief.  Luckily, we have time between our two visits to talk about how the first one went and what we can do to improve the second meeting.  Make sure you are thoroughly debriefing your activities.  I've found that the real learning takes place after the activity as we all sit down and digest what we did.

4.  Make it Fun.  After we're done, we're going to go have coffee at one of our favorite coffee shops and just chill out for a while.  These kind of activities can be wonderful times to strengthen your relationships with your students.

Training Tomorrow's Leaders Today,
Matt