As part of their PSHE programme, Ellesmere College put a large chunk of a day aside to focus on team building and team dynamics with their Year 7 pupils. For about 6 years now, this has been run by Huw Gilbert, a fellow outdoor instructor that also acts as my Technical Advisor for all things mountainous. Unfortunately for Huw, by the time Ellesmere College tried to book him this year, he was already committed to a week’s work elsewhere, and he asked me to run the day for him.
Communications with Ellesmere College soon made clear that they wanted the same tried and tested package that Huw has delivered and perfected over the last half a dozen years. In many ways, this made my life easier as many of the activities were already prepared. However, everyone has their different styles and trying to reproduce someone else’s brain child is not as straight forward as it sounds.
The morning started off by looking at team work and different characteristics that teams need in order to function effectively before breaking off into 6 teams of 8 or 9 pupils to have a go at various team tasks. With only 20 minutes on each activity, it was fairly fast paced and the teams had to be quite switched on if they were to succeed. Huw had designed all of the tasks to have mountaineering and exploration as their common theme and the pupils seemed quite keen to enter into the spirit of the scenarios.
To break the tasks up, and to help explore the power of teamwork, I took the opportunity to tell them about different true stories of explorers having to pull together to face the challenge of survival. The classic story of Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition (that in some ways never even made it to the start line) is such a powerful example of people pulling together, determination and using individual skills to help everyone return home in one piece.
All 6 tasks were completed in the morning, giving us an hour after lunch for the teams to review their performance. These sorts of events generally work better when there is an element of competition involved but, at the end of the day, it’s really about exploring the theories and starting to work out what individual skills and attributes you have as an individual that can help the overall performance of your team. We can’t all be leaders, or be the rock of strength that takes the glory, but teams often quietly depend on others such as the quick mind with the bright ideas or the person that can spot a flaw in a plan before it becomes a problem.
I hope that I managed to reproduce Huw’s programme sufficiently well and that the pupils were able to take something away from it. They certainly seemed to enjoy it as much as I did.
