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 What skills are necessary for being a field guide at Open Sky?
Field guides must be dynamic and enthusiastic people with expertise in both wilderness and inter-personal skills. Traditional outdoor skills such as map reading, primitive skills, and wilderness safety are required. Field guides must role model positive communication and offer on-going instruction to students about how to deal with their emotions in a more appropriate, effective way. Field guides are central to emphasizing the day-to-day skills that will transfer to a healthier lifestyle for our students in the future.
What are field guides responsible for on a day-to-day basis?
The role of a guide is multi-dimensional and demanding. Some of the daily responsibilities of guides include: developing therapeutic alliances with students, facilitating process groups, mediating conflict between group members, role modeling healthy behaviors, teaching educational curriculum, attending to immediate physical and emotional needs of students, record keeping, and navigation.
How would you describe the field guides’ approach to working with students?
Field guides balance compassion, patience, and gentleness with setting firm and clear boundaries. They provide students with appropriate choices and learning opportunities related to natural and logical consequences. Guides encourage listening, participation, responsibility, and accountability. Perhaps most importantly, each of our field guides has a big heart and is deeply committed to helping troubled teens. The ultimate goal of the guides is to set students up to experience success.
What is “setting students up for success?”
Setting students up for success, in short, involves providing students with the instruction and tools they need to be successful. Many Open Sky students are uncertain about how to do routine things like having polite conversations, developing friendships, budgeting time wisely, or asking for help when they don’t understand something. They are often sensitive to not succeeding in these areas and defend against being further hurt. Guides are attuned to these dynamics, and work with students to ensure they have the skills to accomplish give tasks.
What training is required to be a field guide at Open Sky?
In order to work as a field guide for Open Sky, one must successfully complete a 9-day training course and then be closely evaluated for an initial hire period. Once hired, field guide performance evaluation continues on a structured and ongoing basis. They receive regular training in specialty areas such as drug/alcohol treatment, natural first aid, reality/choice theory, de-escalation, and Motivational Interviewing. Many of our guides have advanced wilderness medical training including wilderness first responder (WFR) or EMT credentials.
What is the schedule of an Open Sky Field Guide?
Field guides work an eight-days-on, six-days-off schedule. This means that they spend every other week in the field, generally returning to the same group of students.
For more about the background and experiences of Open Sky’s Field Guides, see the Field Guide Bios . |
