Camp Leadership

Missouri’s Outdoor Leadership Experience invites administrators to hone their skills in an interactive retreat.

Topics: Professional Development, School Culture and Climate

Educational leaders in Missouri can take advantage of a one-of-a-kind professional development opportunity as part of the state’s yearlong Leadership Academy—the final segment in its three-year leadership development program. Held each fall, the Outdoor Leadership Experience (OLE) is an outdoor experiential learning retreat that helps principals hone their leadership skills, make better decisions, and build effective teams.

“This is a unique opportunity for principals to do this in an environment that takes them away from their buildings completely—where they can just focus on their growth and learning,” says Jenni Hayes, principal of Grandview Elementary in
Higginsville, a former OLE participant and now a regional facilitator. “It was one of those things that was just life-changing for me.”

Hosting up to 120 participants each year, OLE splits educators into teams and asks them to tackle a variety of personal and team-building challenges. Along the way, they learn more about themselves, their leadership styles, and how to work with others who might not make decisions in the same way.

Cooperative Problem-Solving: Danielle Westmoreland, a principal from Jefferson City, Missouri, assembles a puzzle blindfolded as team members coach from the sidelines.
To the Summit: Hayes ascends a climbing wall in an exercise designed to help principals push their limits. “Rock climbing and rappelling are really transformational for a lot of people,” she says. “I’ve had people [say] they learned that if they could climb the rock wall, they could do anything as a leader.”
Sticking Together: In OLE’s Electric Grid challenge, teams must stay connected as they navigate through a net assembly equipped with tiny bells. “If you touch the netting and you ring a bell, you have to start over,” Hayes says. “There’s a variety of ways people choose to solve this problem.”
Orienteering Day: A challenging team-building exercise asks participants to work together to locate landmarks on a nighttime hike.
Encouraging Togetherness: In the Islands exercise, teams arrange planks to move all members to a single square platform without touching the ground.
Once there, they must to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat three times in order to be successful. “This one takes a long time,” Hayes says. “It’s a really difficult problem-solving initiative.”

The response is overwhelmingly positive, Hayes says. “I interviewed 33 people for my dissertation [on OLE], and I never heard anybody say they hated it. Even the people who said they didn’t love it saw the value. This is about working together as a team; it’s about learning how to lead. There’s no other outdoor initiative like this for educators in the nation.”