reflecting on the hike

a few weeks ago i wrote about how i used the junior hike as a lesson for my advisory group which was met with mixed reviews. unfortunately we didn't have time to reflect on the experience until two weeks later. i didn't want to belabor my point of trying to get them to work together but i knew we needed to get some thoughts out in the open.

so i asked them to write down their thoughts on the hike in terms of 4 categories...positive things they experienced, positive things they saw others experiencing, frustrations they experienced, and frustrations they saw other people experiencing. i asked them to go write these things down in a private place and not to put their name on it. when they returned to the group we put our notes in the bowls you see in the photo below.

then we passed the bowls around, reading one slip at a time aloud to the group. my hope was that we were able to hear everyone's voices while at the same time experiencing everyone's happiness and frustrations by reading other people's thoughts.  here are some of the responses (if you click on the pictures you should be able to enlarge them to see the writing better):



i can't be sure how long the effect of this activity lasted on the girls but in the moment it felt powerful to hear them reading one another's thoughts, especially when it came to the frustrations. i didn't do a lot of talking after we read the slips of paper. i wanted to let the voices continue to be heard rather than my omnipotent summary.