Instructional Tool/Resource - Essay Example

Instructional Tool: Exercise for Teambuilding The training workshop or room topic in which this exercise will be used as an instructional tool is ‘developing group skills in an organizational context’. In this exercise, the trainer asks the students to form groups of a certain number of students depending upon the total strength of the class. For example, a class of 40 may have 10 teams comprising 4 students each whereas a class of 30 may have 10 teams consisting of 3 students each. Supposing the total strength of the class is 40 students, the strategy behind teambuilding in this exercise requires the trainer to ask 10 of these 40 students to give the names of 3 friends each.

The condition of choosing the friends would be that the friends chosen by a previous student cannot be chosen again by another student. Surely, this gives the first student a lot of benefit as he/she can choose 3 students from 39 students whereas every successive student has a total population reduced by the number of that team. Therefore, in order to remove the bias, the 10 students will be chosen from the pool of 40 students through lottery; names of all students will be written on 40 separate pieces of paper and 10 will be randomly chosen by the trainer.

Similarly, after the 10 students have been chosen, the order in which they will be asked to pick the friends will be decided by a second lottery. Again, the trainer will pick one piece of paper from the pool of 10 pieces, one by one, until the pool diminishes.Once the order has been finalized and the teams have been formed, the trainer will take a day to change the teams in a way such that no friends remain in the same group. This may be hectic for the trainer, but the purpose of this exercise is to provide the students with an opportunity to develop coordination and group skills.

Friends easily work together; the challenge for any individual is to survive and be productive with people he/she would not otherwise socialize with. After the teams have been altered and declared by the trainer, the trainer gives the 10 teams 10 different tasks, which they have to achieve in 5 days. The achievement of task and the performance of students will be marked and graded so that students take the exercise seriously. The productivity of students will be analyzed individually by considering the contribution of each student toward achievement of the final goal.

Definitely, this requires the teacher to demonstrate separate milestones for achievement to each student the very first day of task allocation. The exercise will make the students work together in a focused manner in a way that goal achievement becomes more important than anything else including their personal egos. The final part of the exercise requires the trainer to give a task to the students to write a piece of reflection on how the exercise changed or improved their teamwork skills so that the lessons thus learned can be internalized and remembered forever by the students.