I agree with Jessica - the MPower materials are a great resource for training your officers. Remember to mix fun/recreation in with the work. Here are some other ideas we use during our CFFA officer training retreat...
Find a way to limit cell-phone distractions. If you can't get the students to limit their cellphone use voluntarily, try to find a remote spot where service is limited. We take our officers to a cabin up in the mountains in a National Forest. We don't tell them beforehand, but one of the first things they discover when we get there is that they don't have cell phone service! Hooray - no distractions of someone calling or texting them- or me for that matter!
Take last year's POA and spend some time evaluating the results. It is an immense help in getting them to think about the upcoming POA.
Make sure you have a school calendar with all the holidays, inservice days, and other important things like homecoming, athletic events, picture days, prom and other things that, whether you like it or not, you need to plan around.
Devote some time to learning opening/closing ceremony. Let the officers come up with a way to make this fun. An idea we have used with some officer teams is that pool/lake time became ceremony time. They started by tossing a ball to each other just to get the order right: (Pres, VP, Sent, VP, Sent, VP, Rep, VP, Rep, VP, Treas...) then proceed to memorizing and reciting parts in the midst of playing in the water. For some reason, it seems less like work if they are in the water?!?!
Include lots of team-building. Depending on how well your students know each other already, you may need to start at very basic levels of "getting to know each other". Talk to them about the four stages of team formation (forming, storming, norming, performing) Here again, include activity to make it fun. Now that the statute of limitations has expired, I can tell you that one thing my chapter officers looked most forward to was going down to a spot on a river near where we stayed and playing in quicksand. We knew where there was a small patch and we would let one student tromp hard enough to break through the top and begin sinking. The others would stand nearby to help pull the sinker out. We always had a backup plan with a rope tied to a tree or a truck bumper; we never had to use it. (I'm not advocating you stick students into quicksand - this accidently became an officer retreat tradition that coincidentally was also a great team building activity and with the safety precautions in place we were able to talk about the risk factor and relate it back to taking qualified risks as an individual and as a team).
The Source is a website built by a guy who does Youth Ministry. Under
Free Resources and Ideas you will find Games and Icebreakers, Team Builders, and Discussion Starters, to name a few. Some of the team building ideas are things your students will have seen before if they have been to WLC, state leadership camps or you've had state FFA officers come put on workshops at your school. But there are likely others they have never been through. There are also some good discussion starters based on the music and movies kids are listening to/watching - many of these can easily be adapted to team-building discussions about morals, ethics, respect, etc.
