Five Great Ways To Play Together and Stay Together

Every director is concerned about assisting their teaching professionals in growing professionally and growing together as a team. It can be an especially challenging task for the first time director who is just learning how to handle a center’s fire alarm system or for the experienced director who is faced with a long-established, and perhaps hesitant staff.

The goal is not to be concerned about getting a great motivational speaker or trying to increase their professional knowledge. The goal is to provide a mechanism for teachers to share a common experience and build a common history. The more history we share, the more likely we are to tolerate each other. Even those personalities who are fated never to be best friends find it beneficial to have common experiences in the workspace because those experiences allow the strengths and talents as well as the weaknesses and fears of their co-workers to show through.

Here are five fun activities for team building with the staff.

 Have the staff plan a potluck party. It will be their job to select an appropriate location and time, plan a menu, and provide for decorations. There is usually at least one staff member who is eager to take on the job of coordinating these efforts. Soon you will be hearing reasons why one location or another is not suitable because it will take a portion of the staff too much travel time. Or, perhaps you will hear that the menu needs to be user friendly for those staff members of varying beliefs. Finding common foods that we share leads to all kinds of conversation. For example, how is rice prepared in your house or native country?

 Go to an ethnic restaurant together. If you want to get people to talk and react then try a very different restaurant. As the different foods are served there will be a variety of conversation. Some staff members will be more adventurous while others will hesitate. Watch the staff begin to coax their co-worker to try…just try it and then if you don’t like it… Does that sound familiar? Then listen to the laughs.

 Play a game together. One year the staff organized, unbeknownst to me, to have a sickout. Call after call came until I wanted to run out the door. The substitutes weren’t answering their phones. It looked like a mere four teachers would be working when we were usually twenty-one. The last caller busted it wide open with a big laugh…April Fool’s. That community joke brought more people together than any mandatory meeting could have. Another time I found the staff dancing the limbo together in the lunch room. On another day a staff member was doing a video interview with staff members for a school project. Each of these activities required a staff member to approach another staff member and interact on a non-professional way.

 Plan a family day trip together. It might be someplace a staff member has visited and wants to share or it may be something entirely different…perhaps a group visit to see the circus.

 Plan a fundraising activity together that each staff member can contribute to with his/her talent. Planning and organizing such an event will push staff members to draw upon co-workers’ talents.

As you go along the staff will voice activities that they want to do together. What they don’t realize is that they have become a team. Now they have the tools and the common experiences to draw upon to problem solve in the school environment.