This week it was the turn of our group to run the Monday session, with team dynamics being the theme. There were nine of us who ran the activities, with everyone meeting up the previous day where we could plan. I found this surprisingly productive and easy to do, considering the reasonably large size of our group. In my experience, I have tended to find it harder to organise and make workable plans when in large groups. After a couple of hours, we had some rough timings that we would aim to stick to, with a list of activities that each pair of us would be running in addition to some energiser games thrown in to hopefully keep people engaged and warm.

The session had initially been planned to take place in Jegersberg, but given the heavy rain of that week we decided that we would make use of some of the grassy area outside Spicheren instead, if the planned area happened to be waterlogged (which it turned out to be). We started the session off with some energiser games, which we thought would get people ready for completing the upcoming tasks. I ran this part of the session and had to come up with a couple of other games on the spot to allow for additional time for my group to prepare the activities. The games I ran included snatch, a group version of cat and mouse, along with others involving ropes. The group seemed to enjoy these, although after 15 minutes or so it was clear that it was time to move on to the main session, and that people would become bored soon if it were to take longer for the main activities to be set up. We split up into pairs, with each pair running an activity. After 15 minutes, each group would move round to the next station where another pair would run a different activity. We allocated 15 minutes to run each activity, but this was shortened to 10 minutes when people found that they had run out of things to do. Following this we gave 30 minutes for lunch, with a 5-minute energiser game before starting with the next round of activities. We ran this round in the same manner as we did before, only with different activities. It was gone 2 o’clock when we finished the session; we were pleased that the challenges we ran had seemed to have kept everyone engaged for that amount of time, as well as the fact that we pretty much stuck to our original plan.

If I were to do this session again, I would have prepared the session better – most of us arrived either on time (at the same time as most of the class), if not later, meaning that the group had to wait for many of us. This meant that kit took longer to set up which wasn’t the best start to the session. Because of these delays, I ended up having to extend my energiser activities at the start – what was only supposed to be only 5 minutes or so ended up being dragged out considerably, however people still seemed to enjoy these. This reinforced several things to me; the need to be spontaneous and have some capacity to come up with ideas reasonably quickly when given a group, having a large repertoire of filler games to call upon when needed and most importantly, the importance of being on time, especially so when acting as a leader, facilitator etc.

A decision to put five people into each of the 4 groups seemed to me like a rather small number at the time; I thought the activities would have probably been more effective with a larger group size, as 3 groups of 7-8 seemed to make more sense to me. This was because activities such as the helium stick, spiders web and others become much easier to complete with a small group, reducing much of the challenge. I think decision making is also much easier in small groups, which to my mind reduced the value of the activities and could have made them more dull. Most of the activities were completed by the groups in well under 15 minutes, so some people running them ran out of things to do. I had previously looked up some short filler games the day before, so used this time as an opportunity to try out some of these and see how a group like this would respond to them. People seemed to enjoy these games and it lightened up the activity a bit more, so I now have a few more that I could run when I’m working and time needs to be filled.

I didn’t conduct a review after the activities. Personally, I thought it would feel a bit pretentious, as I am probably not much more knowledgeable than other members of the class about how teams work and my experience of reviewing is very minimal. Thus, I didn’t feel that an attempt at a review would be very worthwhile and could have come across as slightly sanctimonious, as if I somehow knew all the answers. However, doing a review certainly would have had its advantages, as it could have cemented what may have been learnt from the activity and given something for members of the group to take away with them. Although I am aware of the value of reviewing, I just didn’t have the confidence to deliver one to an older, experienced group and wasn’t sure I could do a particularly good job of one. It may have been worth doing some more reading on reviewing, as this would have been a very good practice opportunity, as reviewing is probably something I will likely have to do during my summer instructing work, depending on what I end up doing.

I enjoyed the day, it allowed me to practice delivering teambuilding activities and gave me an opportunity to test out some new filler activities I hadn’t previously ran, which may help when I come to working as an instructor again this season. If I could have changed anything else it would have been to have ran different activities in my pair. The two main activities we ran were ones which we had done before – thus it would have been useful to have learnt and practiced some more ones.