When High Trails was approached by Amanda Martin last spring with the offer to have the AEOE (Association of Environmental and Outdoor Education) Southern Fall Conference at our site, we thought “Why Not? It might be kind of fun.” Little did we know just how fun it would be.

80 outdoor educators + a crisp fall weekend = a whole lot of learning and laughter.

Having a conference at our outdoor school was akin to having all of our relatives over for Thanksgiving dinner…prep, clean, cook. You know the drill. Our entire staff was on board to make sure we could receive the registrants on Friday night in a well lit parking lot and fire-warmed dining hall. But that’s pretty normal around here; there are always many hands that lend themselves to get the jobs done.

Friday evening set the tone as the AEOE Board Members welcomed participants, including many of our High Trails instructors. The registration included a list of workshops and activities that were to come over the busy weekend. After an eventful week with students, most of our staff checked in and then opted for a quiet evening at home resting up for the weekend ahead. But those that traveled from ‘down the hill’ to our little mountain retreat, took a short hike to look at the stars and ended their evening with a variety of board games next to the fire.

Bright and early Saturday morning, our amphitheater packed with educators, Amanda kicked off the conference with a Welcome to All. Participants from Pathfinder Ranch, YMCA Camp Surf, Arrowhead Ranch, Thousand Pines, and many others perused the schedule to make plans and prioritize workshops.  Choices, choices. No matter what the decision, everyone took home some new idea or bit of information.

“Should I attend the Initatives workshop and play a few games or the Micro-slides workshop and look into the world of Marine Biology?”

There was a good balance of workshops throughout the weekend from Saturday morning through Sunday noon. Each session offered three choices ranging from games to teaching techniques to administrative discussion. Workshops were presented by the people attending, so many people went from being teachers to students and back again. High Trails instructors particularly enjoyed Pockets of Creativity, a workshop on art and nature, and Solar Robot Racing, which incorporated the spirit of competition.

I felt especially proud of High Trails when three of our Administrators hosted their own workshops on Sunday.

Shane’s Workshop

Our Program Coordinator, Shane, addressed the digital age and outdoor education. He had a group of administrators from other outdoor education centers brainstorming the future of mobile devices in our programs. Shun them? Embrace them? All we know is THEY ARE COMING (cue ominous music)…

We have them, we use them, and when it comes down to it, we kind of fear them. Mobile devices are part of our world and we must acknowledge how we will manage their future use in our industry.

Art’s Workshop

At the same time, Art, another High Trails Program Coordinator, took a large group of instructors into the forest to talk about and model Conversational Discipline. This is a topic Art truly believes in and had the group quickly taking notes on strategies. As for the role playing? Well, outdoor educators can often be goofier than the students they teach!

Learn how to use logic through conversation when disciplining adolescents, and add some tools to your toolbox to proactively avoid discipline to begin with!

Leslie’s Workshop

A final workshop, led by Leslie, our Site Director, shed some light on our professional development program. Stewardship, blog posts, peer evaluations, the list goes on. There was barely enough time to touch on the idea of professional growth in outdoor education, but Leslie had her group engaged in her topic and left them all wondering how they could implement similar programs at their centers.

One thing that makes High Trails unique is its Level Up System: a professional and personal development program that supplements our teaching, but is completely optional to staff. This system combines a variety of elements to make you a better teacher, staff member, and person on this planet.

Saturday Dinner

Learning aside, the best part of the weekend was the only officially provided meal, dinner on Saturday night. Our Kitchen Coordinators, Joanna and Meagan, worked many hours to prepare a fiesta: chicken and beef fajitas, jalapeno poppers, fresh salsa, and stir fry veggies. Oh, I can’t forget homemade horchata and ice cream with churros for dessert. Yum!

The food was amazing, but the real enjoyment was the outrageous number of High Trails staff buzzing around the kitchen–assisting, serving, singing, smiling; what a great atmosphere our instructors created. This meal set the ‘stage’ for Saturday night’s Open Mic event, hosted by our very own Mark and Shane!

Non-stop busy, that’s the only way to describe this event. We showcased our program, our site, the beautiful forest, Jenks Lake, but most importantly the amazing people that make High Trails the best community in Outdoor Education. Would we host the conference again? In a heartbeat. As long as our staff continues to bring the energy, fun, and willingness to pitch in…we can do just about anything.

AEOE stands for the Association for Environmental and Outdoor Education, the first association of environmental educators in this nation. We are state-wide organization that has been created for and by the outdoor and environmental educators of our state. Working as the state affiliate for the North American Association of Environmental Educators (or NAAEE) our volunteer run organization is charged with providing a diverse pool of trained educators that is knowledgeable and skilled at educating today’s youth about the natural world.

At High Trails Outdoor Science School, we literally force our instructors to write about elementary outdoor education, teaching outside, learning outside, our dirty classroom (the forest…gosh), environmental science, outdoor science, and all other tree hugging student and kid loving things that keep us engaged, passionate, driven, loving our job, digging our life, and spreading the word to anyone whose attention we can hold for long enough to actually make it through reading this entire sentence. Whew…. www.dirtyclassroom.com