This week our Monday session focused on team dynamics, in a wooded area of the campus grounds, through shelter building and a group competition. Each team, composed of a roughly even number of Norwegian to international students, was told to go and spend 15 minutes building a shelter with tarp, rope and other materials available. To me, splitting the group seemed to be a beneficial addition compared to the previous week, where there seemed to be only a small amount of talk between the two separate groups of students. This led to more interaction and allowed us to get to know the Norwegian students slightly better. After the shelter was built, we spent about half an hour going around in a group to look at the other shelters, where feedback was provided. Then, each group would return to its shelter and modify them, before another half hour of looking round at each group’s shelter. Personally, I noticed this to have a number of minor issues. For one, it did not feel like a teambuilding activity; we had plenty of time, the task was relatively straightforward and simple and did not seem to challenge the group adequately – many people had made similar shelters previously. Nor did the session appear to be focused on teaching new shelter building skills, as it didn’t feel as if most people had learnt anything new about this. Because of the long time spent going around to look at other shelters, not moving around, in the cold, people (myself included) were starting to get somewhat bored. Despite this, the session carried on as normal, rather than something more exciting being introduced, such as a short game. What I’ve learnt from this, is that when running a session, there should be some sort of clear purpose – ie, to learn something, to improve an aspect of team performance, or simply to do something fun – and that the tasks or games done in the session have to reflect that purpose. The task we did didn’t seem to have much of a purpose in mind, in my opinion. Also, it has reminded me of the need to be flexible with session plans; when a task isn’t working, when people aren’t particularly enjoying it, then the session should to change in order to reflect that reality.

The second part of the day was a challenge where we had to create the tallest structure out of the things we could find, in 5 minutes. This was a more interesting, fun part of the session, and I feel that if more of these sorts of tasks were used in the session, it would have improved it. Also, I had never come across that particular activity before, so I will be sure to use it as a filler game when instructing, at some stage. I am trying to improve my repertoire of games that I can use when instructing, and I can see it coming in handy for certain situations.