Tag: Session

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Competitive games to promote collaboration and teamwork

Competition is seen by some people in education, youth work and team building as a dirty word, but it definitely has its uses. With many groups and individuals it is a great motivating factor and can help you break down some people’s reluctance to join in. As long as you don’t dwell on the winners and losers and instead try to pull out the learning it can be very effective.

Many of the games I posted previously can also be used in this way if you just split the group into two or more teams, but these I feel work especially well with a competitive element.

Remember to get the most out of all of these activities …

Before the activity

  • Explain the rules as simply as possible.
  • Don’t give tips on how to complete the task.
  • Don’t explain what you want them to get out of it.

During the activity

  • Unless a judge is needed, you should take full part in the activity.
  • If everyone is struggling, pause the game and ask people what is going wrong; ask them what they could do to change it.
  • Stop the games while people are still excited, don’t wait for them to start dragging.

After the activity

  • Don’t make a big deal out of winners and losers – a quick cheer or round of applause is enough.
  • Draw out the learning through asking them to reflect on the activity, don’t tell them what you think the learning should be.
    • Ask those who succeeded: What worked well in your team? What did you do that allowed you to succeed?
    • Ask those who struggled: What would you differently next time?
    • Ask those who struggled but managed in the end: What do you change? Why? Did that work?
    • Finally, ask them what they learned through the activity – they may well come up with far more than you intended!

Shark infested water

Useful for

Co-ordination; helping each other out; playing to strengths; talking to one another; lateral thinking.

Method

  1. Split the groups into teams of at least 4.
  2. Give each team fewer pieces of paper than there are people (make it harder by giving fewer pieces of paper).
  3. Explain that this room is actually shark infested water. The paper is little moveable islands.
  4. They have to get their whole team from one side of the room to the other before the other team.
  5. If anyone steps in the water they have to start again.

Resources

  • Pieces of paper just big enough for two people to stand on
  • You can use chairs instead of paper, but be careful

Move the cups

Useful for

Co-ordination; taking things slowly; talking to one another; lateral thinking.

Method

  1. Place the hula hoops on the ground.
  2. Place three cups in the centre of each hula hoop.
  3. Place one elastic band/string contraption with each hula hoop.
  4. Split the groups into teams of three.
  5. Send each team to one of the hula hoops.
  6. Explain the rules:
    • Their hands can’t go into the hula hoop.
    • They can’t touch the cups.
    • They can only hold one piece of string each.
  7. Explain that they have to lift the three cups out of the hoop and stack them in a pyramid (two next to each other and one balancing on top).

Resources

  • Hula hoops
  • Plastic cups
  • Elastic bands with three pieces of 50cm long string tied to them.

See, run, do

Useful for

Communication; seeing things from others’ perspective; importance of everyone playing their role well.

Method

  1. Split the groups into teams of three.
  2. Get the teams to decide on one of them to be a ‘Seer’, one to be a ‘Runner’ and the other a ‘Doer’.
  3. Send all the ‘Doers’ to one end of the room and tell them each to grab a pen and piece of paper. They cannot move from there.
  4. Send all the ‘Seers’ to the other end of the room. They cannot move from there.
  5. The ‘Runners’ can go anywhere, but they can’t touch the pen or paper and they can’t see the picture.
  6. You are going to show a picture to the ‘Seer’.
  7. They have to get a copy of that picture across the room.
  8. After they’ve had a few minutes get them to stop and compare the picture to your original. Choose the one that’s most like a photocopy of your image. Concentrate on details like size, orientation, neatness, what’s coloured in, etc.
  9. Ask them what went well and what they could have done differently or better.
  10. Get them to stay in the same groups, but change roles.
  11. Repeat and then change roles one last time.
  12. Ask them which role was the hardest and which was most important.

Variation (without the ‘Runners’)

  • Try in pairs, with people sitting back to back – the one has to explain the picture to the other, who can’t see it.
  • In the first round show the picture very briefly.
  • In the second, give the ‘Seer’ the picture to study whilst she explains it.
  • In the third round allow the ‘Seer’ to see and comment on what the ‘Doer’ is drawing, but don’t allow the ‘Doer’ to see the original picture.

Resources

  • Blank paper
  • Pens
  • 3 simple pictures
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Fantastic school council meeting in Krnov

The noticeboard at the front entrance, showing what the school council is working on and what it has achieved.

Our first stop, at Krnov School, was a real treat. The first thing we saw when we came through the front door was a ‘School Parliament’ (school council) noticeboard laying out what the Parliament is working on now and what it has done recently. As we explored later we saw there were two more noticeboards for the Parliament, one outside the headteacher’s office and the other outside the music room where they meet. The locations of the these boards makes a clear statement about the status of the Parliament in the school. They have named their school council ‘Heart of the School’, which has the same connotations in Czech as it does in English.

The school council meeting we got to see was for the upper school (students aged 11-15). The school has students from age 6-15 and they split their school council in two, one for the lower school and one for the upper school. The meeting we saw was really impressive: decisions were made, action was decided upon and fun was had. I’ll try to give you a sense of what this looked like and how it was achieved.

The upper school council with their logo in the background.

The council arrived and seated themselves in a circle sitting on drums/stools students had decorated. One of the older students ran through each of the classes to check that all the representatives were there.

The chair, another of the older students, checked up that the actions agreed at the last meeting had been completed and they moved on to the first discussion. This was about taking photos of the school council to display in the school and use on a Christmas card. After listening to a few points of view it was clear that there was general agreement so the chair moved to a vote. This was carried and the chair asked for a volunteer to ensure that the action was carried out.

All of the above happened in the first two minutes of the meeting. It seemed very informal, but incredibly effective. We were told by the students that the meeting was pretty typical and later by their teachers that these students are a fair cross-section of the school in terms of academic ability and interests. I’m still trying to work out what enabled them to work so well together.

Working in small teams with mixed ages.

After discussions about the school council website, plans for the play space outside the school the meeting came to a discussion about a new rewards system. At this point the school council co-ordinator, who had so far taken a back seat, took over. She split the meeting into mixed groups fo 4 or five and asked each group to come up with five ideas for why people should be rewarded by the school council. After a few minutes of discussion she paired up groups and asked them to get their two sets of five ideas down to five between them. The groups then announced their ideas and the chair wrote them up on the whiteboard, omitting any duplicates. Whilst this was happening the teacher handed each school councillor three stickers. They were to use these to vote between the options on the whiteboard. In this way a complex decision was taking democratically and quickly.

Voting on options

After this the teacher reminded the students of a game they had played at the previous few meetings. She told them they had ten minutes to plan how to complete it this time – they’d failed on their previous attempts. When the ten minutes was up – and the students had failed again – the teacher got them to reflect on their planning and the way they had worked together. They came up with some useful ideas which she helped them apply to their school council. The student’s comment that I liked the most was, “we did discuss it and made a plan, but we all just talked to our friends, we didn’t make a plan all together.”

The aim of the game was to get people from being in age order to alphabetical order without any of them stepping outside the lines.

It was clear that although they weren’t successful at completing the challenge those kinds of discussions and games had a real impact on how they were able to work together as a school council. It was a real honour to see them work.

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Primary school council elections

I got a lovely email today from one of the schools we’ve been working with this year. They’re thinking about how their school council elections will run next year and wanted some advice. It reminded me that I’d written this resource a while ago but not posted it for some reason.

It contains:

  • A recommended timeline for setting up a school council election.
  • 2 lesson plans for how to prepare classes across the school for taking part.
  • A manifesto worksheet for pupils to use to recommend themselves.

Have a look and let us know if you find it useful and how you’ve improved on it.

[gview file=”http://involver.org.uk/dl/Primary-election-process.pdf” save=”0″]

You can download a PDF here (keeps all the formatting and fonts):  [download id=”248″]

Or a Word file here (if you want to  edit and adapt it): [download id=”249″]

I also gave the teacher who emailed some other tips:

  1. Get in touch with Haringey Democratic Services: http://www.haringey.gov.uk/index/council/voting.htm#contact – they should be able to lend you proper ballot boxes and booths, they may even send someone to talk to the school about how elections are run (of course you’d want to check that they were used to speaking to young children).
  2. Have children as the returning officers: counting votes and announcing the results – they need a little training, especially on confidentiality, but it tends to work very well – make sure they only announce the winner, not how many votes each person got as that can be embarrassing and upsetting. If you didn’t want to get children from the school to do it, members of Haringey Youth Council may be able to (if we could get them out of school), they are keen to develop relationships with primary schools.
  3. Make sure you do some prep with all the classes before the nominations, hustings and elections, so people know why they should stand, what they should put in their manifestos and why they should vote for someone (who isn’t their friend). The attached document has a suggested process and some sessions that teachers could run with their classes (of course please feel free to adapt them to your situation).

Obviously if you’re not in Haringey you’ll want to talk to your local Democratic Services and Youth Council, not ours, but you get the idea.

And just because it’s so great to get feedback like this, this is the email that prompted it:

Hi Asher,

Just wanted to say thank you for all your help with the School Council this year- it has really improved a lot! I now meet with my School Council members every week, and there are class council meetings every other week when children give their opinions on a range of important issues. They’ve seen lots of changes take place and are beginning to understand the power of pupil voice. Every classroom has a display and space for children to make suggestions.

Now everyone wants to be in School Council next year! We are going to have manifestos, speeches, and a proper election with ballot boxes voting cards in September. If you can give any advice on how to develop this idea further, that would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again,

Laura
Alexandra Primary

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Who decides? Student voice boundaries and possibilities

This is a great little session to do at the beginning of the year when you’re trying to figure out what you want your school council (or student voice more broadly) to get involved with.

I think it works particularly well when you have groups of staff and students in the same room and then get them to look at one another’s lists at the end.

  1. Download these cards and cut them up (each group needs one set): [download id=”238″]
  2. Split people into small groups. If working with pupils and staff together have separate staff and pupil groups.
  3. Get them to sort the cards as a group, discussing each one briefly as they go.
  4. You can ask different groups to do:
    • As it is now
    • How they think it should be
    • How they think pupils/staff want it to be (whichever they aren’t)
  5. Get the groups to look at one another’s cards and discuss any differences or surprises.

You can do this is a short session (15 minutes) but if often provokes quite a lot of debate, so it can easily stretch to 45 (15 minutes sorting and 30 discusing).

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‘How to’ guide on student voice

Here’s the first part of our findings from a brilliant research project that we worked on for the Children’s Commissioner.

It’s all about best practice in student voice, and here’s a short ‘How to’ guide with as much advice as we could possibly fit onto two pages. Feel free to download and share.

You can download here: [download id=”237″]

The research came from in-depth research in 16 schools across England who have great student voice, and looking at the values, principles and practices that underpin their success. Great to see so many and varied benefits that schools are seeing. There’s a full report to be issued in a few weeks.

Thank you to the schools that took part, and for the Children’s Commissioner for getting us in to do such a great project!

Greg

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A fun day at the Speaker’s School Council Awards

Asher and I had a great day at Parliament last week.

It was the Speaker’s School Council Awards Ceremony, that we’ve helped Parliament out on for the second year running. It’s been a brilliant project for us to work on.

The five winning schools came from across the UK to get a tour of Parliament, a sharing session in one of the committee rooms, and the awards ceremony with the Speaker. The winning schools are:

  • Radyr Comprehensive School, Cardiff
  • Shuttleworth College, Burnley
  • Welling School, Kent
  • New Earswick Primary School, York
  • Rice Lane Infant and Nursery School, Liverpool

You can read more about them here.

Took a few terrible snaps (I’ll try to add some proper ones soon). Here’s Asher setting up in the Committee Room:

 

Here’s Asher having a go on the big chair:

 

Also lovely to see Millicent from ACT, Laura Hoke, Laura from Changemakers, and Andy from Citizenship Foundation there.

And here’s an exciting project that Parliament are working on. Worth a look.