Transferring Crew Fun to Life Lessons
“This is a deeper kind of question: How would you relate this game to life?” Zeke Lipson asked two Crews of freshmen and juniors.
Zeke, a Crew Advisor at Validus Preparatory, facilitated this Crew lesson with a colleague, Gina Brito. The two are engaged in a mentorship through the NYC Outward Bound Schools Crew Initiative improvement network. Much like they value debriefs in their own coaching sessions, they believe in the power of the debrief for students to transfer the “fun” activities in Crew to life lessons.
“You’re never going to go through life without someone trying to help you,” junior Alex answered. “So we can compare us trying to help each other with the numbers [in the Crew game] with us helping each other with issues in real life.”Crew activities at Validus and in the 52 schools engaged with Crew Initiative range from discussion-based to academic to physically active.
The debrief at the close of each activity is where the deeper learning occurs.
Merelyn, a junior, said, “I feel like the purpose of the debrief at the end is just to see what we learned and to show that just because you do something small and it might look like it’s unnecessary in the moment, there’s a bigger life lesson.”
I feel like it does transfer over. Academically, we hold each other accountable.
“After we have the debrief, we know what we’re going to do next time; what we’re going to try to fix. So next time is going to be a lot better,” said Ismael, another junior. “These games, they teach us qualities we have to learn later on in life. Like helping a teammate out also correlates with academics, because if I see one of my friends not doing so well in the class, I’m helping them out and trying to explain what to do.
I feel like it does transfer over. Academically, we hold each other accountable.”
Validus Preparatory partners with NYC Outward Bound Schools through the Crew Initiative. Learn more about this work and how to get involved.