A letter from a parent: teaching staff responsibility.

Providing new ways to get staff to think about and discuss roles, responsibilities, and job descriptions can be a challenge. You want them to consider parents' expectations and points of view and to appreciate the seriousness of the professional responsibilities involved when caring for the children of others.

The challenge is that abstract concepts are the hardest to communicate; staff often find presentations on this topic boring; and staff sometimes feel "preached" to, resulting in less effective learning. We can always use fresh, creative ways of presenting these ideas.

Try this in your next staff orientation or all staff meeting:

Set the stage

Begin silently. Bring two empty chairs to the front of the room and place them side by side, facing the group. Now say:

"There they are. Maybe two. Maybe only one. They might live together. (Now separate the chairs a bit.) Maybe apart. They're called parents. Even though we concentrate our efforts at camp on the children, we are also, of course, serving the parents. To serve others, we need to do our best to meet their expectations. First, we must know what those expectations are.

"So suppose for a moment that you are not a staff person here. Pretend you're a parent (indicate the chairs) of a child who will be coming here in a few days. What I'd like each of us to do is to take some time by ourselves to write a letter to our child's staff person. You can pretend that this staff person is the cabin or group counselor, the specialist in the child's favorite activity - make it someone who has the job you'll really be doing this summer. What should go in the letter? Forget the usual stuff about allergies, the child's favorite things, or other stuff about particular campers. Just write about some important things that you would want this staff person to know about what you are feeling as a parent, what you expect, what you wish, what you hope will happen at camp, how you want your child to be treated, what you may be worried or concerned about, and so on.

"There's absolutely no right answer to this. Some of the things you write might be the same as what other people write, and some will be different. Your goal is to write a message to a staff person expressing your personal and specific feelings. To help you think about what you want to write, I hope you'll include thoughts about how you would finish some or all of these sentences, though you don't have to actually write it in this form ... (You now write these on a flip chart pad and post it where everyone can see.)

I wish...

I want...

I don't want...

I expect...

I don't expect...

If only one positive thing would happen, I'd hope it would be...

Some things I worry most about

are...

I wonder...

I would love it if...

I would be very disappointed if...

"We're going to take about 10 minutes (you decide what time period will work best for your staff) to write our letters. Do not put your name on it. Please either print or write as neatly as you can. It's okay if you cross things out. We just want other people to be able to read it. It's important that you use the full 10 minutes. And if you don't finish, that's absolutely okay."

Discuss expectations and actions

After the writing period, you can lead a discussion about what they wrote, starting with stating and explaining just one of the feelings or expectations that they included, or you can break the staff into smaller groups of about four or five for the same sort of discussion.

The discussion should include how staff feel about the reasonableness and unreasonableness of some parental expectations. The most important focus of discussion is an action plan. Say:

"Now that we've put ourselves in the shoes of the parents of our campers and have a clearer picture of how they feel and what they expect, how are we going to try to meet these expectations? What specific things can we do in our work to make it happen?"

The discussion leader's job is to guide staff to generate a list of specific skills and choices. You might decide to post the letters on the walls so that throughout orientation staff members are surrounded by reminders of expectations and responsibilities.

The key to this activity, of course, is that it applies the most important rule of education: if the teacher says something, there is much less learning than if the students discover and say it themselves and to each other. When staff are the source of these statements of expected responsibility, other staff accept them more readily. This process also has a very strong team-building effect. When staff hear directors say that something is important, they listen to it but don't know if anyone else in the room "buys it." When they hear people on their right and left say it, staff quickly figure out that their peers understand that camp leadership is not just fun but also a serious and powerful responsibility.

Some fine-tuning tips

It's easy to underestimate the power of the empty chairs up front. You'll find they help staff do the visualizing required by this activity and are an important detail that you don't want to leave out.

You can write out in big print your "opening lines" ("There they are...") for this activity or an outline of what you want to say and then tape it to the seats of the chairs so you can read them while putting the chairs in position.

Additional options

Use real letters

You can and should use real letters from parents in your orientation. It's usually best, though, to have staff work on their own letters first. Every camp director has many drawers full of important letters from parents that talk about what camp means to them and their families. How many staff get to hear most of them? I've always thought this is an insufficiently used resource. Sprinkle these messages throughout your orientation and the entire season.

Letters from campers are equally important. In fact, after you've thought about this "letter from the parents" activity, you'll start to experiment and realize you can also produce great training results by having staff pretend they are campers writing a precamp letter to staff.

And why stop there? To train your middle management team, you could have them imagine they are staff writing to their supervisors, unit heads, and so on.

Reply to letters

A recent brainstorming session with my friend Bob Selverstone, of Westport, Conn., a brilliant teacher, camp staff trainer, and expert in experiential learning activities, produced the idea of following the writing of the letters from parents with an additional activity in which staff then write a reply letter, from themselves to the parent, pledging what they will do to help meet the expectations. Bob's idea is a great way of summing up with some specifics, especially after having the discussion suggested above about "How are we going to make this happen?" Staff could reply to their own parent letter or to someone else's.

Present your own letter

One method that works very well in raising the issues of responsibility and expectation is reading aloud and/or giving staff a parent letter that you have created yourself. Tell staff that this is your effort to do the same thing that you've asked them to do. It's best not to read yours until they have tried doing this on their own, for the same reason that you tell your crafts instructors not to hold up their finished version of a project in front of campers who haven't had the chance to try it themselves.

Be sure to point out that you had more than 10 minutes to put the letter together, so staff don't unfairly compare their quick effort with your more prepared one.

You will find that much of what you say in the "this is the philosophy of our camp" orientation speech that you give every year can be presented more creatively to a far more attentive audience in the form of a "letter from a parent."

Figure 1 on page 23 is an example of how this can be done. You can use this letter as a resource to present for discussion to your staff, or use it to stimulate your imagination about how you want to write or talk about these issues yourself.

Encouraging staff to think about their roles and responsibilities from the parents' point of view will be of great help in preparing them to meet the challenge of being a positive force in their campers' development.

Michael Brandwein is a national educator, speaker, and trainer based in Lincolnshire, Ill. This article is adapted and excerpted from Michael's forthcoming book on staff training to be published in 1997. [C] Michael Brandwein, 1996.