Team Building Cards

I follow a few educational blogs that often include visually enticing infographics - "visual representations of information, data, or knowledge intended to present complex information quickly and clearly" (Wikipedia). Recently one of these infographics created by Mia MacMeekin was included in an Edudemic post (no longer online) entitled Teamwork in Schools - it inspired the idea for Team Building Cards. 

With Mia's permission (thanks Mia!!) I took the information from the inforgraphic and created a set of 24 printable/usable cards for face-to-face group work (find them at the FUNdoing Resources page). Below is a working list of ideas for how we could use the cards. Since I just printed out my first set on card stock paper I haven't tested them out yet. If more ideas surface I'll share them later. If you find additional uses, please share and I will pass them along through another post. 

Each card has a "team building" term along with a suggestion as to it's meaning (other meanings can be used as well). Here are the 24 terms in the set: Set Rules, Try, Scrap, Offer, Open, Suggest, Help, Relax, Team Build, Contact, Listen, Engage, Acknowledge, Ask, Discuss, Share, Party, Complement, Forgive, Appoint, Cooperate, Privacy, Dispute, Feedback. There are some interesting terms here with a wide variety of meanings - check out the cards for more. 

POSSIBILITIES:

Spread out the cards on the floor or a table and provide one of the following prompts:

• Find a card/term that represents something important to you about team building.
  
• What card/term might help us through our current situation? 
  
• Use a term in a sentence that will help us to be a better team. 
  
• Choose a card/term that represents something we do well as a team.
  
• Together let's choose three cards we can agree to work on for the next week.
  

Activity Idea: 
As the group facilitator, choose ten cards/terms from the deck that you believe/feel the group can benefit from and lay them out on the floor or table. Now ask the group to rank the cards in order of importance to them. This might be a challenging process so be flexible with the outcome. 

Activity Idea: 
Lay all the cards face down on the floor or table and have participants choose one at random and then talk about why they think this card was meant to be picked up (like a Fortune Cookie). 

Let me know how it goes! Leave me a comment. 

All the best, 

Chris 

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