Future Ready Group Roles

Outline

Warm Introduction (10 minutes)
We will have collaboration-themed music playing as participants enter and find a seat in a group of four.

We will introduce ourselves as longtime teachers, school leaders, and consultants who specialize in both curriculum and instruction and career development education.

We will ask participants to set their own goal and then introduce themselves to each other by sharing their name, role, and goal.

Framing (10 minutes) We will provide research-backed framing about the importance of the use of structures during group work that provide clear expectations with skill development. We will explain that the remainder of the session will allow participants to experience roles and associated toolkits that they will have the opportunity to adapt and bring back to their own settings. All roles and toolkits can be found for free on our book's website: https://www.solutiontree.com/free-resources/studentengagement/lc

Team Formation (20 minutes) We will ask team members to select roles from a list of four provided roles:
The Facilitator - The facilitator leads the team through task directions, ensures a high quality of work from each member, ensures all voices on the team are heard, supports the exchange of feedback, and resolves conflict.

The Project Manager - The project manager ensures teamwork is completed on time by creating, managing, and adjusting deadlines and assigning tasks to the team; manages materials, takes notes, and ensures academic integrity.

The Motivator - The motivator reflects on how the group process is going and how motivated everyone is feeling, leads reflection of team dynamics, and takes steps to improve team members’ feelings of positivity and motivation

The Advocate - The advocate acts as the team representative to outside parties, including the teacher, other teams, and members of the community, and identifies opportunities to improve outcomes through better use of resources or access to additional resources

The Motivator will lead the team in a team formation exercise, with the option to do a team personality inventory of the compass protocol or to build a team contract.

Team Task (30 minutes)
The teams will utilize their roles to complete a task of designing a group work assignment, with each team member having specific responsibilities. Throughout the task, they may receive surprise scenarios based on common student group challenges (example scenarios include: The Advocate is upset that no one is listening to their ideas! The Facilitator is not prepared for class! The Project Manager is absent!) They will then use their toolkits to address the scenario.

Reflection + Application (15 minutes) - The team engages in a reflection of its experience and the applications for participants' settings. The team identifies roles and tools to adopt or adapt for use in the coming school year.

Intentional Close (5 minutes) - Team members reflect on their progress toward their goals before sharing gratitude for each other using the sentence stem, "I am proud to be a member of our team, because..."

Outcomes

Participants will leave with a set of roles and toolkits adapted from the presented roles to be suited for their context.

Supporting research

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Duhigg, C. (2024). Supercommunicators: How to unlock the secret language of connection. Random House.

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