Rite Of Passage
The Rite of Passage is a multi-day experience at the beginning of each school year to ground new students into the community. This symbolic journey challenges students' beliefs in their skills and capabilities to evoke new understandings of holistic health, self-awareness, effective communication, environmental stewardship, and social responsibility.
Description of the program
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During Rite of Passage, students gained a variety of skills, including the development of reflective and self-awareness skills, learning to value failure, and giving/receiving effective feedback. They also worked on building resilience and adaptability and honing their abilities to work collaboratively. Finally, they focused on location-specific resilience and adaptability, mentoring and leadership, and non-violent communication and conflict resolution skills.
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The additional skills that we aimed for students to gain included leadership and wilderness skills. Students had the opportunity to serve in different leadership roles and demonstrate good expedition behavior, competence, effective communication, sound decision-making, tolerance for adversity and uncertainty, self-awareness, and initiative. In addition, students developed wilderness skills such as selecting a campsite, setting up a shelter, organizing and maintaining gear, cooking, managing nutrition, and using clothing for protection from the elements.
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The Rite of Passage (ROP) experience for new students at TGS can be broken down into several phases.
The first phase was the initiation and introduction to the community process. During this phase, new students were separated from their homes and began to establish themselves as individuals within the TGS community. They engaged in trust-building exercises such as falling into a fellow student's outstretched arms and navigating a field of mousetraps without shoes. This phase helped students challenge their beliefs about their own capabilities and begin to understand their place within the TGS community.
The second phase was the experiential learning process, which included mentored learning, enacted rituals, and community celebrations. Through carefully designed activities, students gained new understandings of topics such as holistic health, self-awareness, effective communication, environmental stewardship, and social responsibility. They also learned about TGS's core values and rituals, such as the Full Value Contract, Circle & Closing, and the Facilitator/Mirror Of The Week System.
The third and final phase was the group challenge, a two-day, one-night experience in the wilderness, during which students demonstrated their individual capabilities and understood their collective power as a school community to overcome any challenge. This phase helped students develop their resilience, adaptability, and leadership skills. They learned to serve as self-leaders, peer leaders, designated leaders, and active followers, and to demonstrate good expedition behavior by taking initiative, balancing group and personal goals, and remaining respectful and inclusive of their team members.
