Team Building · Mon Jun 19, 23:09 by Eleri Straker
When I taught students with special needs I specialised in the older kids – the sixteen-year-olds that were disaffected and bored. I taught classes that were called “communication skills”. My lovely head of department (to whom I’ve dedicated an earlier blog) decided that, rather than tell me what to do, she’d let me do my own ‘thing’. This suited me down to the ground, as I reckoned that anything that enabled my ‘problem’ kids to communicate was valid.
One of the things I started to do with the older ones, just before they were due to leave, was teach lateral thinking. What this entailed was a series of lessons beginning with handing out: one Lego brick, one paper clip and one CD. The class was then asked to come up with a list of things they could do with each item. After the initial “You what?” reaction, they got into the spirit of the thing and began to think.
The obvious uses came first and the inevitable moans of, “You play the CD. That’s it.” They would be told that that idea was boring and to come up with something else. If that didn’t work, I’d pick up the CD and throw it, Frisbee style, across the classroom, and the penny would drop and the ideas would come: “Game. Mirror for make-up. Signalling device if you’re stranded on a desert island (though I don’t know why you’d have a CD on a desert island!) Etc. The ideas got more and more bizarre. But that’s the point of the exercise: to make the students think beyond the obvious – to climb up the walls of their boxes and look over the top.
The next lesson was a development of this. Using a team building exercise from the business and military world, I would give them a scenario: that they had been shipwrecked on a desert island. They had specific items (a list that I would then give them). In small groups, they would then have to decide which items were the most important and why. They would have to put them in order of importance then report back to the class, justifying their choices. The next stage was to argue it out with the rest of the class until there was a definitive list. Then the class would have to chose the ten most important (the original list was of about twenty items). Again they would have to justify each choice and persuade their classmates of the validity of their claims. When a list of ten had been agreed, the list had to be pared down to five. Then one.
After the exercise with the Lego brick and the CD, thinking ‘outside the box’ was becoming easier. The reasons for choices became imaginative. The Sainsbury’s carrier bag could be used draped over a hole in the sand to make a solar still, to collect condensation for drinking water. The insides of a mobile phone could be cannibalised to make small cutting tools for gutting the fish you could catch with the fishing net made from your tights, to cook over a fire made using the magnifying lens of a pair of binoculars, fuelled by the bottle of very expensive brandy you just happen to have with you…
By the time we got to watch Tom Hanks being “Castaway” on his own desert island, the kids were yelling at the screen, “Come on, that’s not going to work!” Poor old Tom couldn’t get anything right!
But the point is, they were right. They’d begun to learn to think differently and not to accept the obvious.
I’ve since used this series of lessons as an introduction to “Lord of the Flies” (there is a link honest!). It works well. And the more able the kids, the more bizarre their ideas. It’s a fun way to begin the work and it enables them to think more creatively when I tackle the more taxing ideas, like defining evil…
Oh yes, another highly entertaining variation on the desert island scenario is to get the kids to empty out their pockets (Yes, I know it’s disturbing, but its fun watching them try to hide their cigarettes!) You then tell them that they’ve been shipwrecked etc. etc. and that all that they have with them is the contents of their pockets. And they have to use that to help them survive…
It’s amazing how creative you can be with a tube of lip-gloss and an elastic band!
