Team Building

Today my cohort, our advisers, and I spent the morning team building with a group called Outdoor Pursuits. This group highlights not only gaining skills, such as mountain climbing or kayaking, but also soft skills including problem-solving, leadership, and team work. Instead of going out to the woods for ten days, we went to the campus gym and spent three hours doing team building activities. Coming from a non-profit in which team building was heavily used to join a large group of individuals who would spend at least ten hours together daily, I had some idea of the place to put myself mentally and emotionally.

We started easy enough with some opening games in which the goal was simply to get us introducing ourselves (to fellow cohort members whom we had met earlier this summer) moving, talking, and playing. Then, came the more challenging activities which we were meant to draw deeper concepts from. Finally, we debriefed our day, our experiences, what we thought of it, and how we saw what we did today fitting into our personal and professional lives as teachers. Personally, my highly distractible mind always seeks connections between various experiences. Thus I relate the outline which I have just laid out for the today’s team building as a lesson plan or even expand it to relate to a school year. Both begin easy with some sort of introduction, next comes the content which the student is supposed to draw meaning from, finally the assessment to gage how much the student has gleaned. But that is just the broad strokes.

Starting out was easy enough. We played a “who did this in their life game” in which we had to get people to sign off on experiences they had had (examples: “has been to a national park” or “has lived in a foreign country”). This I didn’t put much effort into because I didn’t see the point of team building with classmates. In my opinion, these would be colleagues who would challenge thoughts I had regarding readings and graduate courses, not teammates whom I would need the benefits of team building to work with. I was called out, and rightly so, for not having many signatures. I had been too resigned in the first activity. How would my classroom function if my students didn’t put themselves in an uncomfortable place for them to grow?

In the next few exercises I tried to spark the J-factor from Doug Lemov's book, Teach Like a Champion in myself and, as much as I could, in those I would spend a year with. I wasn't to learn about the term until later when the cohort and our advisers debriefed, but I found this factor as one of the key reasons to teach or do anything else, the joy that it brings one. This is the source of the name of this blog. If you, my reader, would like to hear one teacher's journey through part of a year refining her teaching skills by reading this book and implementing its skills click these underlined words.

The day progressed and we finally got to the last lengthy activity I will refer to as Hazardous Materials. The object was to move a bucket full of balls and water through a gym, then a hallway, and finally down some stairs. There were three roles for this activity: Laborers (4) individuals who could manipulate the bucket who were blindfolded, Project Managers (2) directors of laborers, and a Safety Adviser (1) made sure rules were being followed but could not advise other than that. There were other constraints, aren't there always, which I won't go into. I was the Safety Adviser and only interacted in a very few times. However, just as we were advised in the beginning, I had a birds eye view of everyone else, an non-participatory observer; being non-participatory goes very much against my nature, which is why I choose this role. For me, these roles related very much to a school setting. The laborers, project managers, and safety adviser became students, teachers, and administrators or other observers.

I hated not being able to interact or give feedback. In much the same way, I want to grow as a teacher as quickly as possible. This being my third year in a classroom, but the first in which my role shifts much more towards the front of the room, I would like to skip those first years of a new teacher's life which are pretty awful. To help further this cause, please leave comments or give me feedback in as many ways as you can. Help me skip the mess of a teacher too green behind the ears and help me become the teacher I need to be for the students who need the most attention. Thank you for reading.