Tag: challenges

A Classroom  Management Professional Development Activity

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Get your free Circle of Community™ Preview video here!

Classroom Management Professional Development

Don’t waste your teachers’ precious time this summer! Have them take part in the Circle of Community™, a perfect activity for classroom management professional development.

Circle of Community™ is a team building / community building activity for groups working together in classrooms, teams, families, or on the job.

Cover for Circle of Community a classroom management activity

Works For Both Teens and Adults

In particular, the activity builds social emotional learning (SEL) not only for teens but also for adults. In prior presentations, staff found this professional development tool useful as well as entertaining. Participants receive both personal gain and the ability to practice with the resource before sharing with their students back in the classroom.

Get your free Circle of Community™ Preview video here!

Improve Group Dynamics and Solve Misunderstandings Between Members

An illustration of a stalk of celery trying to mediate between two angry onions

At its core, Circle of Community™ works to resolve misunderstandings between group members. This improves group function, group member relationships, and the group’s success. Furthermore, the activity works to develop communication, problem solving, and goal attainment skills in a fun and engaging way.

How It Works

  • Using The “Identify your Gifts” handout, participants learn about their own and others’ personal strengths and challenges.
  • Then, in their respective “gift” groups, participants work together to solve a fictionalized real-life scenario related to a common critical issue or problem faced by the larger group.
  • Using the provided facilitation questions and learning about personal strengths and challenges, participants begin to see and understand how groups and their members often approach and solve problems differently. Often, staff receive insight into how “diverse” groups with a mix of strengths and challenges are best at solving problems.
  • In the end, all participants receive a “Reaching Our Potential Together” poster, the “Gifts and Challenges” and “Social Styles” handouts, and a special personal gift of a colorful “Totem Card” representing their own “gifts” / strengths.

In Short…

You can’t go wrong with the Circle of Community™ classroom management professional development. Don’t take my word for it – see a preview of the resource below.

Circle of community poster with gifts/strengths and corresponding totem animals
Get your free Circle of Community™ Preview video here!

A Fun and Easy Way to Support “May is Mental Health Month”

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Supporting “May is Mental Health Month”

When I’m not working on a picture book or this blog, I am playing with my granddaughter, socializing with friends and family or participating in outdoor activities like kayaking and biking with my husband. Like many people, I have a “health” app on my phone that tracks the number of “steps” I take in a day. But it always frustrated me with its inability to track non-stepping activities like kayaking and bike riding.

Our kayaks on the Myakka River in Florida

A good tracking app with “challenges”

A few years ago, a friend and avid cyclist suggested I use Strava. Strava is an app that has the ability to track time and miles for just about any activity which, when I’m not taking steps like walking or jogging and doing non-stepping activities, I like. Strava also offers users “challenges.” These are opportunities for users to best their personal record while boosting motivation and goal attainment (a mental health skill)!

A great “May is Mental Health Month” partnership

So, it was nice for me as a mental health educator and a member of Mental Health America’s Advocacy Network to see that MHA is partnering with Strava for their May is Mental Health Month campaign.  Mental Health America is the nation’s leading community-based nonprofit addressing mental illness and promoting mental health. To raise awareness, MHA is partnering with L.L. Bean in the L.L. Bean Feel-Good Challenge on Strava. If all challenge takers spend a combined 500,000 hours participating in outdoor activities during the month of May, L.L. Bean will donate $50,000 to MHA for their advocacy efforts.

Go Outside

Strava challenges are fun and easy. The app takes care of all the tracking and lets you know when you have completed the challenge. It then provides an overview of your activity such as the number of miles and time spent.

For me, the L.L. Bean Feel-Good Challenge on Strava hits all the right buttons – promoting mental health, being active outdoors and participating in a Strava challenge!

There couldn’t be a better May is Mental Health Month activity for me! I hope it can be yours too!

Click here to join me in this fun challenge and support mental health!

How to Get Along with Others

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Building a Circle of Community

Just about everywhere – school, work, families, neighborhoods – we have to work and get along with others. If conflict is kept to a minimum, everyone “gets along” better. And the group, team or committee accomplishes its goal more effectively and efficiently. But key to this effectiveness and efficiency is knowing “how” to work together. Often, we’re expected to do this with no instruction or guidance. Teaching about keeping conflict to a minimum and get groups to their goal or “win” often lacks in education. My activity, Circle of Community™, shows teams how to work together to keep conflict to a minimum giving them a better chance of reaching their goals.

a picture of the Totem Animals used in the Circle of Community team building resource that helps students learn how to get along with others

Teamwork

A scene in Apollo 13 provides my favorite illustration of positive teamwork. The astronauts stranded in their capsule need to get back to earth. The NASA scientists and engineers work together to solve the problem. I enjoy challenges with a problem to solve. But not unless I do it with others. For me, there’s comfort in working on a team. I like offering my strengths to the group but I don’t have to know or do everything!  Where I lack certain knowledge or skills, other members’ strengths compensate.

Reducing Conflict and Bad Feelings

But thrown into groups, there’s an expectation everyone will get along. With no direction for how to deal with different personalities, ways of thinking and problem-solving methods, conflict and bad feelings arise.

A Way to Get Along While Working Together

Circle of Community™ helps groups bypass conflict and bad feelings by showing them a way to work together. The activity provides a fun and easy way to build communication skills by assessing each member’s strengths and challenges. By understanding why members do or say what they do, inner team conflict decreases paving a solid road to their business of problem solving.

Circle of Community™ is an activity that works to build community within groups, teams, families, etc. It provides a playful way to learn about each other’s strengths and challenges, illustrating how working together and getting along is an effective strategy for solving problems and attaining group goals.

The activity is for teachers, trainers, Human Resources, parenting educators, parents or any teams or groups working together in for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Every team needs Circle of Community™!

click here to Get Circle of Community™ at “teachers pay teachers”