Section 3: How to Facilitate Effectively

Section 3: How to Facilitate Effectively

Subtopics: Facilitate, Arrange, Communicate, Teach, Schedule

Materials needed: Roadmap,sticky notes, highlighter, pen

By now you are probably thinking to yourself that there’s a lot that a Team Manager does. There is also a lot that a Team Manager does NOT do. At every stage of the program, you need to repeat a mantra to yourself, “This is not my Challenge; this is not my Challenge.” But where your responsibilities lie can probably be summarized in an acronym, a word in which each letter of that word stands for something. In this case, the acronym is the word FACTS, and the FACTS about being a Team Manager are that your job is to F – Facilitate, A – Arrange, C – Communicate, T – Teach, and S – Schedule. F.A.C.T.S., facts, not S.O.L.V.E, solve.

Let’s talk about these areas more specifically, letter by letter. To assist you in note-taking, you may wish to download the handout called “Facing the F.A.C.T.S. About Being a Team Manager” following this audio recording.

Facilitate

First of all, F is for Facilitate. By going through this online training, and hopefully attending the Advanced Training Workshop being held in December, you are taking care of the F in FACTS, to facilitate. You are learning how to be an effective facilitator. Early in the season, you will want to facilitate a discussion with your team members about team goals. Never set your goals ahead of the team’s. Encourage the team to discuss more than just competitive goals; after all, only the top 3 teams in every Challenge at every Level at any Iowa tournament are recognized. Teams should discuss goals in terms of building experiences, skills or knowledge they want to gain, and social experiences they want to have.

Learn how to ask open-ended questions of your team members. Encourage them to look at the positive side of an option or situation, and encourage multiple responses, not one answer. Begin your questions with stems, or open-ended phrases like:

Wouldn’t it be nice if . . . WIBNI
How to . . . H2
In what ways might we . . . IWWMW?
How might we . . . ?
List ways to . . . ?
Think of ways to . . .
What if we . . . ?
Do you suppose we could . . . ?
I wonder if . . . ?

You’ll find this list of stems and phrases, by the way, following this audio recording in the handout called “The Effective Facilitator.”

Encourage team parents to answer a team member’s question with a question. For example:

Q. How can I get this propeller to stop sticking when it spins?

A. What can you do to find out why it is sticking?

You want your team members to do the thinking, imagining and solving, not you. Encourage your teams to ask questions about their Team Challenge, and also to research the answers. When you provide feedback to your teams about their Instant Challengepractice (which is not Interference, by the way), make sure you ask them to evaluate themselves. Evaluation is an important component of the creative problem solving process.

Arrange

Let’s move on to the letter A from our FACTS acronym, which stands for Arrange. As a Team Manager, your job is to arrange for a physically and emotionally safe problem-solving environment. It is a great idea, at the beginning of the season, to have your team draw up a code of conduct. There are lots of models they can use, from the Golden Rule to Character Counts to a commonsense approach of simply being kind and respectful of others. In your Roadmap on page 151 you’ll find suggestions for your team to write its own ground rules, and on page 157 the team can actually write its rules. These can be photocopied and added to a team notebook. When I managed a team, I provided team members with a 3-ring notebook where they kept a copy of the team’s calendar, Rules of the Road, the Team Challenge and any Published Clarifications that were issued, a copy of the team’s meeting agendas, and copies of the team’s brainstorming lists and sketches.

If you turn to your Roadmapand look at page 119, you’ll see a chart for Planning a Team Session. The suggested framework for a team agenda is to divide your meeting into 5 parts:

10 minutes for an ice breaker
15 minutes for an Instant Challenge
30 minutes for team building and/or discussion
30 minutes for Team Challenge development
5 minutes for reflection time

This is not the only way to arrange a meeting, but it’s typical of the length of time you might meet with middle schoolers, who have a longer attention span than Rising Stars!® or elementary teams. You might only spend 45 minutes to an hour with younger children. For a 2-hour meeting you might set aside:

20 minutes for a team building activity
20 minutes for an Instant Challenge
40 minutes for research and/or skills development
35 minutes for Team Challenge discussion and/or development
5 minutes for reflection and goal-setting

Arrange for your team to do some planning, too, since this is a great learning experience. For example, encourage the team to set short, medium and long-term goals, or to create a to-do chart with a short time frame of 24 hours, a medium time frame of one week, and a long time frame of one month.

Arrange for research opportunities, speakers, demonstrations and field trips at the request of the team. Arrange for Instant Challenge practice sessions and team building activities. To help you out with these activities, take a look at the handout called “Suggested Resources for Instant Challenges, Team Building Activities & Improvisation” following the Getting Started audio recording. When I used to manage a team, I would fill gallon-sized Ziplock® bags with Instant Challenge or team building materials, and then I’d hang them on skirt hangers in a closet, ready to go. It made my planning a lot easier.

Communicate

The letter C in FACTS stands for Communicate. Communicate clearly what you expect of team members and parents, and what they can expect from you. The best time to do this is not in the middle of the season in response to a crisis, but before the season begins. Just a reminder: The handout called “Expectations for Teams” following the 2nd audio recording, Overview of the Program, will help you know what to talk about with parents and team members. Make sure you let parents know in concrete terms where you need help: providing snacks, gatheringInstant Challenge materials, or lending tools for constructing props, devices, costumes and more. Maybe you need parents to shop for Team Challenge materials or fund shopping trips. You’ll likely need help in transporting team members and props to meetings or tournaments. You would probably appreciate having at least one chaperone for a field trip or the tournament. And you will probably have to communicate more than once (politely) to parents, adults in general, siblings and friends of team members about the rules of Interference.

Teach

T stands for Teach. Teach students teamwork skills so that they will learn to work together effectively. Instant Challenge practice provides the perfect setting for teaching these skills, since the constructive feedback you provide does not constitute Interference.

Familiarize yourself with the difference between creative and critical thinking so that you can teach your team about the Creative Problem Solving process. A process can be defined as a series of steps directed toward a goal, so your job is to help your team take those steps.

Creative problem solving actually consists of 2 parts, creative thinking and critical thinking.

Creative thinking is the process of developing ideas and options to solve the Challenge

Critical thinking is the process of selecting an option

A Team Manager can help team members be effective problem solvers by encouraging students to follow guidelines that will enable them to generate options (commonly known as brainstorming) in the most productive way. You can find these generating guidelines on page 114 of Roadmap:

Remain open - Don’t judge or evaluate ideas your group is producing; it will slow you down.
State and document all ideas - Wild ideas can point the way to promising and highly original possibilities, or can trigger an idea for someone else.
Volume counts - The more ideas you generate, the greater the likelihood that some of them will be unique or promising.
Hitchhike onto the ideas of others - When you combine two or more ideas, or one person hitchhikes onto another person’s idea and adds to it, the possibilities for new ideas become endless.

A Team Manager also needs to encourage team members to follow guidelines that will enable them to focus on options (commonly known as narrowing down the choices) in the most productive way. You can find these focusing guidelines on page 114 of Roadmap:

Stay positive - approach problem-solving constructively.
Be thoughtful - use strategies to focus on goals.
Consider uniqueness - evaluate the quality of ideas and choices.
Stay on the path - keep your goals and objectives in mind; have a clear task statement at the outset.

At the end of the season, continue your teaching lessons by asking students to assess what they have learned this season. Then celebrate that learning as a successful outcome. This places the focus on the process and life-long skills that have been gained, rather than on trophies and ribbons.

Schedule

The final letter in FACTS is S, which stands for Schedule. You may find the handout that follows this audio recording, “Time Management Tips,” helpful as you put a schedule together. Schedule team meetings around team members’ family and school commitments, in addition to DI program dates. Beware of planning meetings during vacations and holidays, when parents often take children out of town or make other family plans. Be respectful of students’ other activities to the extent that it is possible. Early in the season, send home a calendar with each student, and ask parents to add family and school commitments. There is a blank calendar on pages 153-156 of your Roadmap, in fact, that makes this process easy. Make sure you add rehearsal, tournament and workshop dates to the calendar so that parents are aware of team needs, too.

Schedule time for your team to learn new skills, and take advantage of skills workshops, both formal and informal. Did you know that some of the larger home improvement centers offer children’s workshops? Allow time for something like this so that students can learn about tools in an environment that is set up for this situation.

It is real important that you don’t cut short the time for brainstorming sessions, and that you schedule enough time for students to research and experiment, and to take a different path if the situation warrants doing so. Schedule enough time for students to create props, costumes and scripts, but allow your team to set its own priorities and assign its own tasks. This is part of the learning process. And finally, schedule enough time for the team to create its presentation, refine it and rehearse it. As you approach tournament, it is realistic to assume that meetings will be more frequent and longer; allow for that time and communicate honestly with parents ahead of time about this necessity.

Your scheduling job is not done at the end of the tournament. It is time to celebrate and debrief the team, so make sure that you schedule a specific time after the tournament to do this. Your discussion should be upbeat and constructive. Discuss what was accomplished, discuss the team’s future, and talk about how the team wants to celebrate its journey. And if your team doesn’t quite make it to the end by completing its solution and showcasing its solution at tournament, that team still needs to celebrate what they have accomplished.

Some possible types of celebrations could include:

board game night
pizza and movies
bowling
scavenger hunt
a trip to an amusement park
a baking party with mystery ingredients
a presentation of humorous award certificates forspecific skills and/or contributions.

In summary, the role of the Team Manager is to make sure thatthe DI experience reflects process, not just competition.

Enable your team members to define success in terms of what the team accomplishes, not how others, especially adults, define success.
Provide a supportive climate that is conduciveto creativity.
Maintain an atmosphere of collaboration andtrust.
Value change that leads to growth.
Recognize and respect differences.
Be willing and able to guide your team in learning and using CPS (or Creative Problem Solving) strategies.
Guide team members in locating and selectingresources for important tasks.
Offer encouragement.
Celebrate accomplishments and affirm theteam’s skills.
Let FUN happen. You’re not doing it right if the team isn’t having fun.
Unleash the creativity in your team members.