Team Building – Week 9
I love collaboration and competition. It reminds me of curling… (but that’s for another blog). We’re working together, we have a common goal, and we’re motivated to WIN. This week’s warm-up activity changed momentum and we’re team building. The challenge… teams of 5, 20 pieces of paper, 7 minutes… make the tallest tower. GO!
OK… I thought our team did pretty awesome… but we did not “win.” That said, we were very satisfied with our teamwork, our ideas, and our collaborative approach to building our tower. I noticed that my team members drifted off to other teams to help out. What the? How super cool is that? We’re helping others to do OUR best.
There is nothing I like more than a warm-up activity that nourishes, exercises, and develops all 3 Core Competencies are in action: Thinking, Communication, and Personal/Social. We were problem solving. There was no extrinsic motivation… no prizes, no marks, no stickers… just the sheer pleasure of competition.
Although we declared a “winner”… a measurable outcome (seriously, with a measuring tape)… none of us felt like “losers.” We were more in awe of how tall the paper towers got. We could have continued the activity thinking about our thinking, communicating about teamwork and tactics, and how we could do better next time.
It was a beautiful and easy activity to facilitate… brought to us by one of the students in class. Using our hands, building, and creating. It reminds me of MAKER SPACES and how learning from making things can lend itself perfectly with BC’s New Curriculum. I can see inquiry. I can see personalization. I can see student engagement.
As we approach the end of our course… I would like to mention that we had two students collaborate and co-present their reading reflection in class, we had an inspirational and humorous video as our wild-card activity, and the third round of IGNITE presentations were wonder-full. I would definitely agree that to make space for student inquiry, there must be less content, much like BC’s New Curriculum.
It was a great day… even though our class right in the middle of the US Election. That was a little distracting, but we managed to stay on task. Good job everyone!