TSCS PODCAST 8: Practice Camp
8 | Staff Training: Practice Camp
In this podcast we are talking big ideas, actual and actionable takeaways, and lots of fun with the camp community and professionals!
This episode brings together Jack, Scott Arizala, Nelson Strickland & Paige Moffett to take a deeper dive into staff training. They discuss different ways to artificially create the “second session feeling”, strength based approaches to training sessions and more.
The ideas start to form and are dissected to cover all different types of camps and training set ups. How do you create training opportunities that don’t add to the “staff crunch”? If you’re looking for close to a million ways to think through staff training, this is the pod for you.
Producer EmJ’s takeaways:
If your campers learn differently, why wouldn’t your staff? Consider a Personal Learning Plan for staff members!
The concept of “needing 80% of you” seems much more realistic and digestible as an expectation as opposed to 100% all the time.
Asking returning staff to role play as “campers” that have complexity to them throughout the week is a great way for staff to learn different personalities and isn’t just a one-off scenario. (I will play a camper for your staff training, just let me know.)
ITS THE RETURN OF THE RESTORATIVE
Our Restorative Justice seminar is back! Laura Kriegel & Allison Klee are ready to help more camps heal harm, mitigate future harm, and build community. — Restorative Justice Training
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Scott Arizala
Scott Arizala is a leading expert and premier trainer on kids, staff and the experience of summer camp. He has been involved with camps and youth development for over thirty years as a camper, counselor, administrator, teacher and consultant.Scott grew up at Camp Al-Gon-Quian in Northern Michigan where he spent 18 summers going from the youngest camper to the director.
He went on to direct traditional resident camps, day camps, single gender camps, and camps for kids with special needs. Currently, he is the Founder & Chairman of Chasing Summer (an organization dedicated to creating access for people with autism in summer camp), founder of Camp Stomping Ground (a camp focusing on radical empathy and child freedom), CEO of The Camp Counselor, and an award-winning author.
To get in contact, email Scott
NELSON STRICKLAND
Nelson Strickland is a camp director, consultant, envelope pusher, and song singer from Camden, New Jersey. Nelson started going to camp at DragonFly Forest at the age of 11 and hasn't missed a summer of camp since. Aiding in the advancement of over 40+ camps, he now uses his diverse background to encourage others to ask themselves “How can we make this more awesome?”. Nelson never aims to give folks “the right answer” and is consistently attempting to engineer innovative ideas from other industries to work in the camp space. He is currently the Director of Operations for TIC Summer Camps in the DC area and Lead Content Creator for an amateur esports organization.
To get in contact, email Nelson
PAIGE MOFFET
Prior to joining The Summer Camp Society Team as the Director of Continuous Improvement, I helped open a Spanish immersion camp in Tennessee. That experience felt like I was in a cocoon of growth, and allowed me to begin to form my identity as a camp leader.
Jack said it well in an email to me once: “I am seeing more and more how writing this stuff down is not only an act of organizational efficiency, but also illuminating the hidden curriculum and inclusion.”
I see so much space for this in the industry, and I’d like to be a part of making it happen. The question on my mind is: How can we use clear, collaborative processes to make it easier for camp teams to focus their time on creating life changing moments for campers at our camps? And that is the question I’ll be answering in my work moving forward with the various organizations I work with: TSCS, Change Summer, S’more Melanin, OAAARS, and counting!
To get in contact, email Paige
Jack Schott
Host Jack Schott struggles with bureaucracy, loves fun, and secretly stays up late obsessing over businessy stuff. His unique perspectives come from his varied background. An engineer, Jack took the first few years post-college to travel the country visiting over 200 camps in 47 states. Building on what he saw, he co-founded Stomping Ground, a non-profit sleepaway camp inspiring radical empathy and co-founded The Summer Camp Society. In 2022, Jack trained more than 2000 camp staff at 20+ camps.
To get in contact, email Jack
The Summer Camp Society Podcast is edited and produced by EmJ Juszczyk.
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