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Team Relationships
Team Relationships
Compass Points Collaborative Style Activity
Compass Points Collaborative Style Activity
Similar to the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory, the Compass Points exercise (right) uses descriptions of preferred actions when working together, helping us to understand how our own and others’ tendencies affect our working interactions.
This activity helps teams explore their collaborative style and provides an opportunity to see value and connections in all members' contributions.
View (right) or download (linked here) the activity.
Additional Options for Compass Points Activity:
CompassPoints-N_0.pdfTrue Colors Activity
True Colors Activity
True Colors is an inventory designed to help you better understand yourself and others while promoting the appreciation of individual differences. This self-awareness activity helps participants understand their preferred style and that of their colleagues.
True Colors is an inventory designed to help you better understand yourself and others while promoting the appreciation of individual differences. This self-awareness activity helps participants understand their preferred style and that of their colleagues.
Each of us has a different and unique personality; however, there are commonalities that we share. True Colors is an attempt to identify various personality styles and label them with colors. This model of categorizing personality styles is based on many years of work by other researchers and psychologists.
Essentially it draws heavily on the work of Isabel Briggs-Myers, Katherine Briggs, and David Keirsey. Don Lowry, a student of Keirsey, developed the system called True Colors which uses four primary colors to designate personality types and behavioral styles.
True Colors Test.pdfBuilding Relationships with Teachers
Building Relationships with Teachers
Trust is an essential element of successful group work.
The following checklist of simple strategies is a great way to track your efforts to improve the interpersonal connections with teachers on your team, in your department, or at your grade level.
Use the form to monitor progress in your efforts to building trust with team members.
View the form (right) or download here.
from Building a PLC at Work™
© 2010 Solution Tree Press • solution-tree.com
buildingrelationshipswithteachers.pdfInclusion Activities
Inclusion Activities
Inclusion activities help build and strengthen community and relationships prior to getting down to business. They tell us who we are in respect to the room and tell us more about each other. Engaging in inclusion activities helps set norms of the session and focus mental energy in the room.
Here are some Inclusion Activities you might use when checking in with your PLTs in person or virtually.
Ways of Talking
Ways of Talking
To develop shared understanding and be ready to take collection action, working groups need knowledge and skill in two ways of talking.
One way of talking – dialogue – leads to collective meaning making and the development of shared understanding.
The other way of talking – discussion – leads to decisions that stay made.
Read more about dialogue and discussion below. Read about strategies for facilitating dialogue and discussion in the next section of this module.
Dialogue and Discussion
Dialogue and Discussion
Dialogue honors the social-emotional brain, building a sense of connection, belonging and safety. As a shape for conversations, it connects us to our underlying motivation and mental models. This way of talking forms a foundation for coherent sustain effort and community building. In dialogue, we hear phrases like, “An assumption I have is…” and “I’d be curious to hear what other people are thinking about this issue.”
Discussion, in its more skillful form, requires conversation that is infused with sustained critical thinking, careful consideration of options and respect for conflicting points of view. This way of talking leads to decision making that serves the group’s and school’s vision, values and goals. In discussion, we hear phrases like, “We need to define the problem we are solving before jumping to solutions”, and “I’d like to see the data that these assumptions are based on before we go much further.”
During conversations, many groups default into the Western cultural habit of polarized discussion and debate. Our media-saturated world bombards us with arguments framed by commentators as point-counterpoint, pro and con, left versus right and other polarities.
These models transfer to conversation in working groups; they frame how participants listen to others and how and when participants speak.
From Adaptive Schools Foundation Seminar Learning Guide © 2014
by Thinking Collaborative and Robert Garmston & Bruce Wellman. Pages 24-25
Dialogue & Discussion
Dialogue & Discussion
Dialogue leads to collective meaning making and the development of shared understanding. The resource below (left) helps identify the different forms of dialogue and ways to manage it during meetings. Review and engage with the Dialogue Protocols resource (also linked here).
The protocols below (right) can be used to balance participation and facilitate dialogue and discussion.
The most heroic of group members will begin to lose information in short-term memory without interaction with ideas. The most effective groups use processes learned in classrooms to keep members engaged and thoughtfully productive. Any meeting that runs beyond 20 to 30 minutes without members being directed to turn to a neighbor and talk is probably burning out brain cells.
In one of the strategies below (right), members turn to one another and summarize the most important point of the preceding conversation. In another strategy, pairs identify concerns about a topic before general discussion begins. In yet another, subgroups read and discuss a policy statement to identify topics for full group discussion.
© 2017 Adaptive Schools Seminars
Dialogue Protocols
Dialogue Protocols
DialogueProtocols.pdfProtocols for Dialogue & Discussion
Protocols for Dialogue & Discussion
Decision-Making Protocols
Decision-Making Protocols
Decision making is the process of making choices by identifying a decision to be made, gathering information, and assessing alternative resolutions through discussion.
Using a decision-making protocol or step-by-step process allows teams to make thoughtful decisions through a clearly articulated procedure. This clarity mitigates potential for individuals to feel like they were uninformed about the process.
Use the protocols to the right to make thoughtful, intentional decisions with your team.
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