I believe the best professional development happens out in the open. After returning from the NOEC 2026 conference, I wrote a debrief for my own team of outdoor instructors. It was meant to be an internal provocation—asking hard questions about our environmental footprint, how we manage student behavior, and the legacy we are building. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized these aren't just our team's challenges; they are industry-wide hypocrisies. I decided to publish that internal memo here. If you lead outdoor programs or school trips, I invite you to chew on these same questions.

Dear Team,

Below are a few thoughts from my recent time at the NOEC conference. I’m sharing them not as directives, but as provocations for us to chew on together regarding our footprint, our pedagogy, and our legacy..

I walked into the Welcome to Country ceremony at NOEC expecting a standard conference greeting. Instead, I was met with profound, uncomfortable truth-telling. The Indigenous speakers shared the visceral history of their land and the atrocities their people endured (you can read more on this background here and here).

But what struck me most was the philosophy behind the welcome itself. As an Amnesty International piece frames it: “Being welcomed to Country means that you are talking to your spiritual ancestors... We trust that they’re not going to do any harm on this Country.”

We trust you will do no harm.

That phrase forces me to take a hard look in the mirror.

Are we visitors, or are we consumers?

We love to tell ourselves we are visitors. We have a sustainability matrix that guides where we go to ensure alignment with our school mission. We teach local culture and preach environmental respect. But let's look at the math: we send an entire grade to the same location over a six-week period (roughly 75 to 100 students and staff weekly), year after year. Are we being extractive?

Just last month, Tioman Island faced a severe water shortage. It is easy for us to point fingers at the hotels on the island for overconsumption, but the reality is our massive group adds pressure to the island’s fragile resources. I do not believe this means we should stop using the location. Rather, how do we find a balance? How do we frame our thinking to ensure our actions actually align with our ethos?

Most importantly, how do we ensure our students don’t learn to view travel purely as an act of extraction? I would love to hear your perspective!

Making Ice vs. Breaking It

This disconnect between our intentions and our impact extends directly to how we manage our students in the field. I joined Mark Collard’s workshop at NOEC, and he framed resistance perfectly: If you face resistance, it means you have not provided comfort.

When you run an activity, are you breaking ice, or are you making it thicker?

I hope the short activity we ran together on Monday morning gave you a practical taste of this. We kept things moving. We created low-stakes ways to find a partner. Crucially, the activity was designed so participants were looking at an object in their hands, rather than staring awkwardly into each other's eyes. By removing the social friction of direct eye contact, the ice broke without anyone realizing it.

Look at the activities you are running this week. Are you setting up interactions that make students feel safe, or are you unintentionally creating social friction? I invite you to use the resources provided to try a couple of new activities every week to grow your bag of tricks. We can send you to workshops and provide training, but we cannot force you to try something new. I hope you choose to be part of the team that creates a culture of always improving our craft.

The Unofficial Start

This brings me to a separate, but equally critical concept from Mark: the unofficial start.

Think about the classic camp dining hall bottleneck. We all know the frustration of waiting on those last one or two straggling students while the schedule slips. Instead of relying on a lecture about discipline, Mark shared an example of engineering engagement—a trivia quiz available for only two minutes before dinner, which a group could only answer if every single member was present.

The students ended up ensuring their own mates were on time.

While I find this a great trick, it is easy to argue that dangling a carrot fails to build "real" discipline. But is the alternative working? How much time do we spend lecturing kids into forced compliance, only for the behavior to return the second the adults look away?

Where are we demanding compliance when we could be engineering engagement? How do we create environments where students want to be on time, rather than where they need to be? If you have something that works, please share!

Planting the Tree

Watching veteran educators get recognized for their lifelong contributions at NOEC left me with a final, lingering thought.

There is no better act of service than planting a tree whose shade you know you will never get to sit under. I think about this often regarding Mauritius, where I grew up, and whether I am doing enough to give back.

But I also think about it for us, right here.

When you run your next session, when you brief your next group, what legacy are you leaving for the team and its culture? Are we just passing through, or are we planting something that will outlast us?