INTERNSHIP IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT FOR THE MONTEVERDE CLOUD FOREST PRESERVE DEPT. OF ENVIRONMENTAL EDUCATION

The Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve is a world-renowned, private nature reserve spanning 5,000+ hectares of biodiverse tropical forest. Through their Environmental Education Program, the Preserve creates awareness and fosters environmental sensitivity in the community, particularly among local school children.  This year the EE Program added a new goal to its curriculum, which is to foster leadership qualities among young people.  Two CIEE interns, Megan Casper (George Washington University) and Elena Lopez (Occidental College) labored alongside supervisor Marcela Morales to help the Preserve develop a leadership assessment and training program. 

Elena (left) and Megan (center) work with local school children to assess potential leadership tendencies. Megan scores test results.

Megan Casper (George Washington University)

For my internship, I worked with the Environmental Education Department within the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. The E.E. Department conducts yearly workshops within the surrounding elementary schools in order to teach the children about subjects related to the environment, e.g., climate change, deforestation, or animal biology. However, this year, the E.E. Department decided to try out a new, leadership-based curriculum in their workshops. As an intern, I was able to review the curriculum and help present it to students in the schools, grades 1 through 6. During the workshops, I had the opportunities to interact with almost all the students of the Santa Elena Elementary School, talking with them in Spanish and helping them navigate the different tasks and activities of the workshops.

Beyond simply teaching the students about leadership, I was also able to develop methods for identifying student leaders. After the workshops, a small group of student leaders from each class will get to attend a more comprehensive workshop series held in the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve. The E.E. Department wanted the selection of students for these additional workshops to be based on their leadership aptitude. So, as an intern, I was tasked with developing a method or tool for identifying leaders amounts their peers. I chose to develop a short personality test that measured the extroversion, social efficacy, and critical thinking skills of the students—all qualities desirable in a leader. The week before the workshops, I was able to go to all the classes and administer these tests personally! Using the data collected from these tests and also from the workshops, I was able to help my fellow intern, Elena, make recommendations to the E.E. Department on which students should be invited to the future workshops at the Reserve. 

Elena Lopez (Occidental College)

As an intern with the Environmental Education Department at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, I worked on a project that sought to foster leadership values in the youth of the community. This is a challenge to sustainability because without community leaders, projects related to sustainability and conservation will not reach fruition. The EE Department planned on doing this by holding leadership workshops in the near by elementary schools.  For the first phase of the project I researched leadership values determined from research developmental psychology. Additionally, since the main part of the project involved determining what school children already have innate leadership characteristics, I pulled from education research to determine means of assessing these values. I then created an assessment tool called “Assessment on Observed Behaviors in Leadership Workshops” which was going to be used to observe students as they participated in the workshops.

In the third week of the project we were in the schools assisting on the workshops and making our observations. In addition to the observational method, the other intern and I administered a Personality Assessment and a Student-to-Student Assessment in which children determined leaders in their own class. Through out the workshops we amended our methods learning as we went along. It was a fun week! The last part of my internship was all data entry. There was a lot to work with and analyze. As we entered the data into our excel document some interesting patterns began to emerge. It is my hope that from this data will be able to determine two things. The first is which assessment methods are most effective in identifying leaders, and the second is that will can successfully determine which students possess the most innate leadership qualities, even at the their young age. From our week in the school and data analysis I am hopeful that the Monteverde community has many future leaders, in environmental stewardship and other fields.