Three teams + one dude = FUN!
Spending a few days in a team building workshop with the teachers I'll be working with when we get our new students in a few weeks. We recently rearranged the entire department in preparation for the new class. The new class is going to have to meet much higher standards at the end of the course, but we are also making changes to set ourselves up for success.
The new standards are going to include covering all of our course materials in 2/3 the time. We'll spend the entire third semester working on new curriculum and authentic Korean material to meet the new goal standards for the final tests. Our goal is to have all the students score a 2+/2+/2 on the Defense Language Proficiency Test. The first problem that is obvious is that currently we are not graduating students at the lower level 2/2/1+ standard. So, in an attempt to stack things in our favor, on day one we will not have the normal 30 student teams broken into 10 students per classroom. Instead we will be getting class teams of 12 students and we will start them on day one in 6 student classrooms. We are hoping that the increased teacher to student ratio will help us focus on the meeting our goal.
In preparation for all that, we are now conducting the team building workshop geared specifically towards the teams that will be involved with this new class. Because of the shortage of Military Language Instructors (MLI), I will be supporting three of the teams while the other MLI will support the remaining two. So I am in the workshop with my three teams and he's in the other workshop with his teams.
Today our topics have included the inspiration for the title of this post. We did a Venn Diagram (I like to call them Vin Diesel-Grams because it looks like his head, as seen from above, doubled, and then partially merged) to document what responsibilites belong to the teaching teams, what belongs to the department chair (first name Amanda, last name Hugandkiss - ok, the last name is the joke), and which are shared. We wrote the responsibilities on little stickies and put them on the chart as we thought appropriate. Then the chairperson came in and she put her little stickies up on the chart and then we hashed out the differences. Mucho Funo! Really.
The workshop is pretty good. One thing we are getting a chance at seeing is our meeting 'process'. Mostly that involves the facilitators giving us a meeting task and letting us flounder about. Then in our review of what happened in the meeting, we get told our 'process' sucks. Basically. A lot of that has to do with the fact that we have three separate teams, all of which are made up of people that recently formed those teams from different teams, being forced to work together in this workshop. Compound that with the fact that they are all very quick to act like aggreeable adults to each other faces, but some really dislike many of the people at the table. AND add in that at the end of the course, they will officially and unofficially compare their results/students to the other teams in a very catty game of one-up-manship.
No shit, our 'process' sucks.
The smoothest meeting task we've had was the one where I got bossy. Our 'process' sucked a little less on that one. But, I've been working on my 'process' for years now as a NCO in the Army.
As the MLIs, we are a member of all teams and yet separate. It gets to be our job to try and minimize the suckitude of our 'process' once class starts. We, along with the department chair, get to be the go between and bridge to make sure that they see the sense of one team, in the department. One goal for all 60 of our students. Not five teams competing, but one team cooperating.
Well, that's the hope, right?
We'll see.
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