Have you ever stood in front a slightly unruly class and for a second got the feeling that it’s you vs. them? Do you ever feel like you alone are dragging along your 30 students? That normal sense of division is unavoidable in even the best classroom. But it never exists in adventure education.

In adventure education, and in the TSFires system, the teacher is the leader, the expert, but is also only part of the larger team. This is concept of interdependent leadership in a teaching role is exemplified in glacier crossing.

As a team of 2 – 5 people cross a glacier they are literally tied together. Glaciers, the massive ice fields that often are part of the approach or accent of major climbs, have a tendency to hide crevasses under thin snow bridges. If you cross alone and fall through a bridge, you’re just gone. You just vanish. If you fall as part of a team, your teammates drop to the snow, arrest the fall, and pull you out. You survive and move forward.

Guides may lead the team across, but every single person needs to know how to slow a fall, how to build a snow anchor, how to rescue the people closest to them. While the guide may know the most, have the most experience, be the expert that others can rely on, there’s no confusion that everyone must work together and trust one another.

Every glacier guide knows that even though they may be the surest footed and most experienced of the group, they may still be the one in need of rescue, and can only trust his students are ready. Would you trust your life to how well you’ve taught your students? Adventure educators do it every day.

This is interdependent leadership.

As a teacher we are the experts, the guides. No matter how surefooted we are on the glacier of education we can never drag a 30 person team across the ice. We can only teach them the dangers that exist and the skills needed to overcome, teach them to trust and work with one another, and then lead them on a worthwhile adventure. We will lead them, but we need them as well.

Next time you feel it’s you vs. them, stop. That is how you fall through the ice. That is how you vanish.

Move among them, imagine you are all tied together, one after the other, all dependent upon each other for your life. You need to be able to trust all of them. They need to trust you, and each other. How do your actions change?

Don’t just teach, inspire. Ignite the spark. Be a teacher starting fires.

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