Listening in groups - activities and games

For this reason, it is wise to use dot-voting not as a final instrument to select the best option, but as an indicator of which few options are the most popular. Dotmocracy action decision making group prioritization hyperisland remote-friendly. Dotmocracy is a simple method for group prioritization or decision-making.

It is not an activity on its own, but a method to use in processes where prioritization or decision-making is the aim.

The method supports a group to quickly see which options are most popular or relevant. The options or ideas are written on post-its and stuck up on a wall for the whole group to see. Each person votes for the options they think are the strongest, and that information is used to inform a decision. So you opened your workshop with large group games that were fun and inclusive, and then included group activities that got the group talking and make important decisions.

How then, should you finish the day? What group activities help a team reflect and come away from a workshop with a sense of accomplishment? The below facilitation techniques will help to effectively close a large group session. They are simple, time-bound and allow every group member to share their opinion and find the key takeaways after a workshop or event.

Remember that you should close a session with the same attention and enthusiasm you started with. Group activities such as those below help ensure the energy and success of the session are carried forward and followed up upon. Have you ever met this situation? Someone is asked to present back after a group session and it gets unfocused. This group activity helps to maintain attention and forces everyone to stay concise during a closing round with a natural limit: You are only allowed to share your opinion with just one breath — that is usually no longer for 30 seconds for most people.

In case you have a large group, it works most effectively if you split up the group to circles of participants, in order to keep the feedback round under five minutes. Remember that group activities that are timeboxed in this manner can help keep the energy up and ensure you cover everything you need to in time. One breath feedback closing feedback action. Feedback Mingle is a great closing group activity to generate positive energy in the group.

At the end of the session, group members are invited to give feedback to every other member of the group via post-it notes. After people finished writing a post-it note to everyone else in the group, invite them to mingle and deliver the feedback to each other. The feedback should always happen one-on-one, shared verbally.

If you have larger groups, create smaller groups of people who worked together on group activities during the event. Feedback Mingle hyperisland skills feedback.

The Feedback Mingle is an exercise in which every member in a group gives feedback to every other member in the group. Often used as a closing activity, it aims to facilitate feedback, generate positive energy and create a sense of team. You can use this group activity at the end of a workshop or training program to inspire future action. Participants write and send a letter to their future self, in relation to how they will apply the insights and learning they got during the course.

You can define the timeframe with the group. Since participants reflect individually in this activity, there is no limitation to scale this exercise in larger groups.

Letter to Myself hyperisland action remote-friendly. Often done at the end of a workshop or program, the purpose of this exercise is to support participants in applying their insights and learnings, by writing a letter and sending it to their future selves. They can define key actions that they would like their future self to take, and express their reasons why change needs to happen.

I hope you have found some useful tips for large group games and workshop activities above. What are your favorite facilitation techniques and large group games that work well in workshops, meetings or training sessions? Have you tried any of the methods or group activities above? Let us know about your experiences in the comments. Im trying to look for some workshop games for energizer in some of my trainings. I found this. Thanks for this website. This blog post is so awesome!

Many of these activities are perfect for my team and department—Thanks!! Thank you for the suggestion, Alisha! It sounds like and interesting one! Can you tell us a bit more about how to run this exercise? Thank you for the question, Veda. Hi Sanjay. Are you looking for opener activities to kick-off meetings and workshops? Rob, thanks for these awesome tips. I will surely try some of them.

Keep sharing such in-depth guides. Your email address will not be published. Try it for Free. Are you facilitating workshops, meetings, or training sessions regularly? Do you sometimes feel that the good old pen and paper or the MS Office toolkit combined with email leaves you struggling to stay on top of managing your workshop preparations and delivery?

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Taking your group workshops online? Get started for free! It can be played with adults of all levels as well as kids and it always works! Bang hyperisland energiser Bang is a group game, played in a circle, where participants must react quickly or face elimination.

Coat of Arms teambuilding opening ice breaker team get-to-know thiagi Coat of Arms exercise provides a way for participants to introduce themselves and their colleagues, particularly for groups who think they already know each other very well. Imagine how much more difficult it is for your students who are listening to a second or third language! So what are some great exercises and activities to help your students get better listening skills?

Draw This. So how does it work? Give each of your students a blank piece of paper. Then, ask your students to pass the paper to the next student so that everyone has a new paper. Now see which papers have turned out correctly. You can modify the instructions according to the language level of your students. Daily Quiz. You can make the questions entertaining.

The student s who get the most right answers get a gold star. Story Listening. Read your students a story. After the story, summarize the story as a group. Call on one student to tell the first significant event in the story, then another student for the next and so on.

For the first few rounds, do it correctly. Raise the right hand for sandwiches and the left hand for hamburgers. Then, start mixing them up. This game can be a lot of fun, with people misjudging the verbal cues and the actions, leading to some good hearted laugh. Divide the team into groups of two.

Make the two members of each group sit back to back. Give a sheet containing a simple drawing, such as a mix of various shapes, to one person, without showing it to the other. The person without the sheets gets a blank paper and a pencil to draw. They then have to ask questions and draw what they believe they are hearing, based on the answers from their partner. This can be taken up as a group activity, but it essentially involves two people.

They should ideally have opposing points of view on a given subject. They should also try to gain insights into and genuinely understand the reasons behind the opposing point-of-view and how they came to settle upon it.

The entire activity should be in the form of a friendly conversation without any argument or confrontation. This is an active listening exercise that is subtly different from exercise 7. In case sufficient alternative viewpoints are not available in the original game above, you can take up a modified version of this activity:. For each group, Provide a topic to start the conversation. One person expresses their views on the topic, while the other person tries to glean more information about why they hold those views.

The questions should be soft and meant to bring out more information, rather than to badger the opposite party into changing his views. This a self development activity, meant to be practiced in a calm and composed state of mind. Find a quiet place for this activity. Reflect upon some important conversation that you have had in the last few days.

Try to identify situations that triggered a certain emotional reaction from your side. Now try to think of ways in which you could have handled the situation better, without giving in to the emotional outburst. Emotion triggered: Anger.

You may have berated the employee and made them feel ashamed. Possible alternative response: You could have reiterated the urgency of meeting the deadline and asked them what the reason for delay was.