Team Building Activities
“Good teams incorporate teamwork into their culture, creating the building blocks for success.” - Ted Sundquist
Building a sense of community and team unity with your staff is important. This will allow staff to form relationships, trust and solid collaboration and cooperation skills. The five activities in this article are simple, fun, and engaging ways to get your staff to work together!
Scavenger Hunt
This is a fun activity that can be tailored to any topic. Create a scavenger hunt and have teams of staff members complete tasks around your building. The teams can be grade levels, departments or randomly selected so that staff work with people they are not typically with. It’s fun to see how competitive educators will get!
Six Degrees of Separation
This starts as a partner activity where educators pair up and make a list of five things they have in common with one another. Once the list is compiled, each person must find a new partner who shares a commonality with at least one of the items on their list. Then they make a new list of things they have in common with their new partner. This continues until all the players have at least one thing in common with everyone in the room. This activity allows everyone on staff to make connections with each other, and they might just learn something new about someone they work with everyday!
Silent Line Up Challenge
Divide your staff into 2 lines and explain that they have two minutes (longer or shorter depending on group size) to line up alphabetically by last name — silently. The first group to finish wins! This can also be done with birthday months, age, or by first name alphabetically. In addition to the friendly competition and teamwork, this activity might help staff come up with effective strategies for working together!
Building Challenge
Divide your group into eleven teams of 2-4 people. Give each group 40 balloons, 20 straws and a roll of masking tape. Challenge each team to create a free standing tower in only 10 minutes. When the timer goes off, all groups share their tower and strategies they used that worked as well as ones that didn’t. The winning team is the team with the tallest free standing tower!
Note Card Compliments
Have every staff member at a meeting write their name on a note card. Throughout the meeting hand the notecards to different people and each time someone receives a new card, they have to write a compliment on the card about that staff member. At the end of the meeting each person gets their card back and can read the compliments about themself. This is a good reflection activity as staff write compliments about their coworkers, and it's a morale booster for staff to read what others say about them. Who doesn’t like a good compliment!
Creating a culture around teamwork, respect and collaboration is vital in a school setting. We can’t do this alone, and the more we depend on and learn from each other, the more effective we become. Not to mention, all these things are skills we want our students to learn and master, if we model them then they will see we truly value them! School should feel like a family, for everyone who walks through the doors. Getting to know each other and working together facilitate that feeling!
