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Marine Corps hosts character development summer camp for future leaders

May 18, 2019December 12, 2017 by The CultureFeed Team

Some kids go to summer camp to learn how to water ski or ride horses.

Others spend a week immersed in a variety of physical, mental, and ethical challenges to learn how to become community leaders.

Each summer, the U.S. Marine Corps Recruiting Command hosts a week-long Summer Leadership and Character Development Academy in Quantico, VA, where high school sophomores and juniors learn valuable life lessons from officers, notable leaders, entrepreneurs, Holocaust survivors, and others.

The academy is designed to introduce students to the Marine Corps’ core values of honor, courage, and commitment through ethical decision-making scenarios that Marines face in the real world, as well as daily physical and mental challenges aimed at developing strong character.

“The program is a leadership program that will teach young high school students how to be an integral part of their community,” Lt. Col. Sara McGrath said in a recent Marine Corps feature. “That could be their high school, town or city, or the college they attend. We will give students the opportunity to listen to Marines and community leaders, experience physical and mental challenges, and then form their own leadership style from these challenges.”

“This program allows students to experience a break from their normal life,” added Capt. Paul C. Shipley, acting platoon commander for the program. “It’s an acculturation process and the enthusiasm the students embrace the challenge with really helps them get through the week.”

The academy invites about 200 students each year through a competitive application process that rates applications based on academics, community service work, leadership traits, moral and ethical standards, and performance on an “Initial Strength Test.”

“I believe the students most enjoy the physical aspects of the program,” said Staff Sgt. Cathleen Barsallo, a platoon sergeant. “The students seem to be most active during the obstacle courses, confidence course, morning physical training and leadership reaction course.”

The camp culminates with a graduation for those who complete all the events successfully, “but this is just the beginning,” according to the SLCDA website.

“The goal of the SLCDA is to return students back to their communities more confident, selfless and better equipped to improve the lives of those around them.”

It certainly seems like a recipe for success.

University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter noted in The Death of Character : “It is precisely these kinds of social worlds, defined by a clear and intelligible understanding of public and private good mediated consistently through integrated social networks of adult authority, that moral instruction has its most enduring effects on young people.”

Students long for the kind of structured social world the SLCDA provides.

In a 2017 Tedx talk, high schooler Virginia Cobbs questioned why her school doesn’t focus on character like summer camp does. She knows that organizations tasked with forming youth must focus on character, and the best schools are creating structured social worlds for their students.

Principal uses own failure to improve school climate

May 19, 2019December 6, 2017 by The CultureFeed Team

Chicago charter school principal Isaac Castelaz is capitalizing on his failures to create a roadmap for success, a process that’s setting an example of strong character for his students and staff.

In a recent editorial for Education Week, Castelaz detailed how his first year as principal of National Teachers Academy, a public charter school, ended with a 5Essentials survey that showed his leadership left a lot to be desired.

Despite poor academic data, declining attendance rates, and increasing student suspensions, the results of the survey came as a shock, Castelaz said, and it sparked his commitment to design a plan of action that’s since changed the dynamic at the school.

“Dark red. Every essential was in the lowest category. The words hit me like a blow to the stomach: ‘Not Organized for Improvement,’” Castelaz recalled from his first year survey results. “The survey data, once I unpacked it, not only put lyrics to the sad song, but as any really great melancholy tune ought to, it helped me find hope: a roadmap to improvement.”

Castelaz spent the two months before the next school year changing how he approached his leadership position, spending 80 hour weeks working on professional development and creating a vision for the school year.

The principal worked to improve relationships with teachers in the building by listening, eating lunch together, hiring new staff, and designing new systems.

“I visited with staff before and after school to hear how the day went, or if they had anything on their minds. We monitored processes and systems consistently: Everything from attendance to whether lunch started and ended on time,” Castelaz wrote. “By establishing an organized culture, my staff felt less distracted and more comfortable focusing on teaching. In turn, the climate at the school was transformed. Staff felt valued, enhancing commitment and the quality of instruction. And students learned.

“We had a better year. Every data point said so. And when the results were released, the 5Essentials said so too.”

Castelaz demonstrated humility and courage in facing the failures of his leadership, and in doing so changed the singularly important dynamic of school climate in forming character in students.

University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter explained that the moral culture of a school “is not merely the environment within which identity plays out.

“It is, even more, a reality that frames the categories of identity, structures the identity, and even indelibly stamps identity,” Hunter wrote in The Death of Character. “Without the authoritative presence of a moral culture, internalized into subjective consciousness, there can be no character or ‘character development.’”

A video on Vimeo provides more information about the 5Essentials survey and reporting tools that sparked Castelaz to take action.

The University of Chicago also hosts a Leadership Collaborative Series that helps school leaders “engage school staff in collective learning around leadership and targeted areas of the 5Essentials Framework, as well as combine knowledge and resources to create the conditions for school improvement.”