Team Building & Leadership Development within the Ensemble


In the midst of everything else we do as music educators, from aſter school sectionals and rehearsals, parades, performances, and our fes- tival work assignments, the latest trend has also been on team building and leadership. I hadn’t given any thought to this idea of “team build- ing” in my ensembles until a director, during some downtime chit-chat working a middle school band camp, started talking about how they always did trust walks as part of building trust and camaraderie. Much of our school provided professional development has even been focused on community and team building both in and out of content area instruction, so if it’s not on your radar yet, it will be in the very near future.


Do we really need to take away from valuable rehearsal and instructional time for the sake of working on “team building”? Does it really work or is it simply a bunch of Kum-Bah-Yah feel good exercises? Tis topic has been pop- ping up everywhere for me the past few years so I decided to devote my thesis for my masters degree to this very topic: What are the effects of team building and leadership development on the peer-to-peer relationships as well as the musical performance of a band/choir?


My sixth year of teaching was the first year I began incorporating these teambuilding exer- cises into our band camp. We did the trust walk exercise that a colleague had recommended and I simply headed to Google to find three more exercises that would realistically be something I could incorporate the rest of the week. I began scheduling them into our band camp day and figured that the 30 minutes following lunch would be a great time to regain their attention, burn off some steam, and focus on one another prior to our sectional time.


Te purpose of this article isn’t to dive deep in the particular team building exercises I do at


Bryan Akers


my camp as all of them have benefit but I do change them from year to year depending on the students and what I feel they’ll enjoy. I’ll briefly describe them here and provide some re- sources at the end to help point you in the right direction. At the very least, if you’re required to do some team building exercises as part of your school improvement plan as I am, you’ll have a starting point to get you going.


Te first day of camp we did a simple icebreak- er by splitting the students into their sections as best as we could and gave them some random questions to talk through to help them get re- acquainted. Tere were some serious questions plus a bunch of silly ones that the kids enjoyed and laughed through. Day two we did a Hot Lava game where we had a bunch of squares taped down to the floor set up in an 8 X 8 for- mation. My camp instructors created a secret path they had to silently guess where the next correct step was and make it across as a team. Day three we did the human knot where the students stand in a circle and grasp arms with two different students and untangle themselves. Day four we did a Walk the Plank Challenge where students were divided up in teams and they had to get three members of their team across the width of the football field rotating through these planks. And day five was our tra- ditional student led awards ceremony but still fit very well within the teambuilding category.


My first year incorporating these the students were a little hesitant the first day or two but as they got in to the routine and I began following up each activity with some thoughtful ques- tions, the students started to see where these activities were headed and took these concepts out on the practice field with them. Tey began to see that when there’s a communication breakdown we don’t simply try to “pull rank” and yell but find a better way to communicate, just like we did in the human knot activity. Or


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Instrumental


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