The Outdoor Education Program

The Outdoor Education Program was a student organization that trained other students to travel safely and respectfully in the wilderness.  To do this we taught a course in the Geology department at Stanford and also ran weekend long workshops.  I have volunteered as an instructor for the course for three years.  The combination of leadership and teaching in the Outdoor Education Program was been a central part of my experience as a graduate student. 

Every quarter we brought a maximum of twelve students through the course.  It was amazing to watch them go through this intense experience together.  You could watch the group form and normalize as people learned how to work with each other.  Much of being an instructor was facilitating this process.   One of the goals of the course was to have the students feel comfortable with leading a trip themselves.  Not only did students learn to work with one another, they came to better understand their own leadership style and how to modify their style for different situations.

We changed the course to match the interests of both the students and the instructors.  As a result, I was able to help design and teach lectures on how to travel at altitude, snow safety and leadership.  While there was formal classroom teaching, when you were on a trip the style of teaching changed.  It was both implicit and explicit.  While we taught them skills overtly through demonstrations during the trips, so much of the teaching was done through example. 

The Outdoor Education Program was a flat organization.  Everyone’s opinion was taken into account and after each lecture or trip you got feedback.  The feedback of other instructors helped me develop my teaching and my leadership.  For instance, I am most comfortable in the role of a facilitator, but leading trips has taught me how to be more assertive when situations call for faster decision-making.

So much of the time, limits are self-imposed.  What I loved most about OEP is how we were able to take people out of their comfort zone.  We helped make them push their limits, and learn to enjoy that push.

Conflict Management Lesson Plan

At the bottom of the page you can find materials from a lesson in conflict management.  This lesson was developed in collaboration with Mark Chin, another OEP instructor.  Many lessons taught in OEP are based off of a lesson plan created by a previous instructor.  The conflict management lesson was novel and we tested it out for the first time this quarter.  Feedback so far has been positive and we've received in-put on how to improve the lesson for the future.

Students were assigned roles in a scenario.  The lesson was designed so that the students did not know the topic was conflict management until after the scenario was run.  Each student's role was designed to give them a different perspective on a decision that the group had to make.  The students were three skiers trying to do a multi-day ski trip across the width of the Sierra.  They had different skill levels both with skiing and navigation.  They had different information about the scenario and each other.  The students were put in a situation where they needed to make a decision as to whether to go on or turn around.  Each character is framed so they want something different.  Their ability to make the decision of what do next, as well as there ability to make it effectively, are impacted by how much information they are able to learn from each other during the role-play.

After the scenario ran, we let them know the topic of the day.  We discussed what went well during the decision-making process and what was challenging. Next, we provided a framework for the conflict management process.  Our goal was to teach that positions and interests (what people want v. why they want it) are different.  Not only that, we wanted students to understand that during conflict management often the information you have is incomplete.  It was an interesting experience.  There was information the students wanted about their roles that Mark and I hadn't thought to put in it.  However, the scenario that Mark chose for the lesson turned out to be great in terms of helping the students think about the importance of gathering information during conflict management.  The groups were able to get different levels of information from each other, but a lot of them missed the fact that two people in the scenario had poor navigation skills.  The knowledge of the navigation skills would re-frame the decision making process. Sometimes when you teach leadership, group dynamics or conflict management it can seem like common sense.  However, it's really the implementation that is hard.  Hopefully, the realization there was missing information and that some groups felt like they spent a lot of time on positions helped make the framework more tangible.

The following are links to the materials for the lesson on conflict management: 1. Conflict management; 2. Robin’s scenario; 3. Terry’s scenario; and, 4. Ueli’s scenario.