Tribes

Last week I put my class of 27 students into tribes, using the seven friends strategy described in the manual. It was a lot of work finding the right combination, but so far each group seems to be working well. I have only one student who is disliked by the majority of the class but her group has been positive and inclusive so far.

I have tied building the sense of team with these groups by teaching government (a social studies topic) along with introducing tribes. We studied Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms and then each group wrote their own charter – an agreement of how they are going to get along this year. Then we studied some of Canada’s symbols and the history of our flag. Each group then was charged with coming up with a group name, flag and symbol – all of which needed to be inclusive of each group member, easy to remember and easy to reproduce. This really helped to gel the groups and got them excited about being on a team. I used the additional activities of the Slip Game and Group Doodle to help build inclusion within the new groups.

I have also tied this into the health objectives for grades 5 and 6 – which include items around teamwork and solving/mediating conflict in groups.

My next step is to have each group create a poster that includes their flag, group name, group members’ names, group symbol and their charter. We created the criteria together of what would make a good finished product.  Groups had to plan their poster first and use the criteria to show me they were ready to move on to the good copy. Their plan had to include what role each group member was going to take in completing the final copy.

I’ll post about how this all goes in a few weeks.