Team Facilitation Exercise
To complete this project, your team plays the role of a facilitator in an organization. Your team will develop and administer an exercise to illustrate some aspect of group dynamics to the other teams in class. YOU CAN NOT DO AN EXERCISE THAT IS PRIMARY DESIGNED TO BE AN ICEBREAKER. Examples of issues that your exercise could address are team development, conflict management, role clarification, evaluation of team members, team formation, etc. You can find exercises on the web, in books on teams and team development in the library, and reuse exercises that you may have used in church, leadership conferences, or a work (see last paragraph). Your team will have approximately 20 minutes to hand out the appropriate materials, conduct the exercise, and allow for feedback from and to the participants. If you select an exercise that takes longer, and most will, you have a couple of options. You can make the exercise shorter to fit in the time frame by changing the materials, by stopping the exercise after people to get a feel for what would occur, and/or distributing the materials to illustrate the exercise, and by describing what would occur as participants work through the materials.
Regardless of which approach you use, you must tell (explain) or based on class discussion illustrate the key learning points. Usually this is done by having the participants talk about their experiences and/by describing what you expected/observed during the exercise. To be able to run the exercise effectively, you need to pilot this exercise first with a group other than your team.
In addition to conducting the team exercise, you need to complete a written report that contains the following sections with each section titled:
1. Objectives for the exercise and why you picked this exercise.
2. A description of the steps of the activity and a timeline for each part of the exercise.
3. A description of how you plan to introduce the exercise. What do you plan to say?
4. A description of the rules of the game. (A copy to hand out to the participants if appropriate before the exercise).
5. A description of what you need to monitor and how you will do this as the exercise unfolds.
6. (A) A description of the key learning points (purpose) that the exercise was designed to illustrate. (B) An explanation of how you plan to illustrate these points to the teams completing the exercise.
7. A detailed description of your experiences running the pilot including the participants, how the exercise went, and changes that were made after completing the pilot.
8. In an appendix describe or hand in a copy of materials that were used to conduct the exercise.
The library has a number of books dealing with “group dynamics,” “teams,” and “team development” (key word topics) that are helpful in locating a facilitation exercise. I also have some books in my office that you can borrow. Examples of simulations completed in class are the survival exercise (ranking items), the shared information exercise, the 10,000 mile checkup, the Case of Ginger, or the group charter at the beginning of the semester. The slides on the first unit titled “Icebreakers” has a section on Designing a Team Facilitation which raises points you should consider when designing facilitation.