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Benefits of Youth Team Building | Case Study | Logistics

Deer Hill Ranch’s team building and high ropes programs provide youth with the opportunity to experience "learning through doing." We use proven techniques in an outdoor environment to stimulate the development of interpersonal and social skills that can enhance:

• Self esteem
• Trust
• Communication
• Team work
• Collaboration
• Cooperation
• Accountability

Empowerment Through Self-Awareness

Through activities that include a certain amount of challenge and risk, such as high ropes course events, participants become self-aware, build confidence and gain a sense of empowerment. High and low ropes challenges are designed to incrementally increase in difficulty, and to appear insurmountable. However, participants are soon led to discover that this is only perceived risk, and that tasks are very resolvable and safe.

High ropes course challenge events were first developed for Outward Bound, a wilderness challenge program founded by German educator, Kurt Hahn. Hahn was committed to creating experiences wherein students independently discovered a code of ethics, rather than having it taught to them "on faith." His model was not only experience-based, but value-centered. "Learning through doing" facilitates the development of character and maturity, rather than academic or intellectual skills emphasized in traditional education.

The challenges are designed so that the group must persevere, be creative, apply skills, and rely on each other by cooperatively making group decisions and carrying them out. With instruction from the leader and support from their peers, they slowly learn that they can accomplish more than they originally believed. Participants begin to develop a deeper understanding of their role in determining the outcomes of their endeavors.

Close to 100 studies have concluded that programs that practice outdoor education and experiential learning "stimulate the development of interpersonal competencies, enhance leadership skills, have positive effects on adolescents’ senses of empowerment, self-control, independence, self-understanding, assertiveness, and decision-making skills" (Hattie, Marsh, Neill, & Richards, 1997).

Cooperative vs. Competitive

Researchers have also found that cooperative situations, such as the exercises in Deer Hill Ranch programs, "tend to be friendly, intimate, and involving, whereas competitive situations are viewed as unfriendly, noninitimate, and uninvolving" (Graziano, Hair, & Finch, 1997). When learning experiences stress cooperation rather than individualism or competition, students "work harder, show greater academic gains, and display better psychological adjustment" (Johnson & Johnson, 1989). For instance, when a coach for a sports team instills a desire for the team‘s success rather than individual success, the team becomes more successful.