Happy evening,
An ice breaker has a great role to play in training. Among its efficacy are as follows:-
1. EARLY BIRDS: Reward participants who arrive early by giving them a fun task to do (and get a reward). They come early to your session. It is the duty of a trainer to 'engage' the participants the moment they arrive. For a trainer his 'day' begins with the arrival of the first participant. He needs to give a very good and favourable impression of himself to them. Therefore, an ice breaker piece will be welcome. Rather than engage them in conversation (which may turn out stultified and an intrusion into privacy) let them do a task of some sort. Let them do it individually first.
2. TEAM BUILDING: Once all participants have arrived form them into small groups (of 3-5) and ask them to do the same task, but now as groups (and provide a bigger reward). This will encourage open communication among the audience, build teams which produce synergy (compare the individual results with the group results), and generally warm them up to you, fellow participants and the subject matter (if the ice breaker is relevant to the program topic). Note: Rewards such as a tube of toothpaste, tooth brush, drinking mugs, plastic paper folder, stationaries, and other low price items.
3. STAGING: An ice breaker is a great staging device to a program. To do this choose a relevant piece. Suppose you are training on problem solving. Play "Traffic Jam" game (I will give you the rules of the game later) because the learning outcomes of this game are inter alia as follows - groups repeat mistakes because no one identify the cause of a mistake, be systematic when analysing and prescribing a solution, needs a leader (supervisor) who comes out of the crowd to have a holistic view. The game acts as an introductory to your topic "problem solving".
4. FREES MENTAL PROCESS: When you give a sad experience to a person (such as asking him/her to introduce himself/herself early in the program) encephalin may flow in his/her brain, thereby paralysing his mental process. Give him/her instead a fun experience (an ice breaker) and you make his endorphin flow. Endorphin frees the mental process. It encourages idea generation, creativity and state of well being.
5. ATMOSPHERE: You set the atmosphere - that your training session is fun, interesting, engaging - very early in the program and set a favourable tempo for the rest of the program.
CHARACTERISTICS OF AN IDEAL ICE BREAKER
You and I must have seen hundreds of ice breakers - at official functions, Multilevel Marketing meetings, training sessions, forum, public address, etc. Some well-received by the audience; some fell flat (a flop). Some produce brief giggles; some resulted in a pro-longed laughter. In training I have gathered the following criteria or characteristics to judge whether a piece of ice breaker is effective or not:-
1. FUN: To make the endorphin flow, make sure you choose a fun piece of ice breaker such as a brain teaser, a puzzle, an interesting game, or a fun role play. Whatever you do it should be fun.
2. RELEVANT: Ideally the ice breaker has some relevance to the topic of the program. If you are training on team building the ice breaker should involve group task and illustrate importance of team work. If you are training on communication skills, ensure the ice breaker is about failed communication, great feedback, active listening, and such like.
3. INTELLECTUAL CONTENT: Ideally, apart from fun, an ice breaker should have some learning points. In a preview of training on marketing using Facebook which I attended recently the organiser made about 1500 people in the audience danced the "chicken dance" and other karaoke type music for a full 15 minutes. Yes it's fun. But not relevant. A quiz on the audience's current level of knowledge/skill in using the FB will be both fun and has intellectual content.
4. KINESTHETIC: An ice breaker which contains some kind of physical movement will both be fun and relaxing for the audience. At the very least make your seminar participants move around a bit when they do the ice breaker stuff.
5. BRIEF: What's the rule for the length of an ice breaker? My sifu suggested to his students: 5% of the total duration of the training session for the day. So if you have to do an eight-hour training (9.00 am-5.00 pm), your ice breaker for the day should be 20 minutes maximum (6.5 hrs X 60 min X 5%).
6. INVOLVEMENT: Everyone in the audience should be fully engaged in the ice breaker. Small group deliberation on the task will help encourage participation.
7. SIMPLE: Don't dish out a complicated piece of task. An ice breaker should be light and easy.
SAMPLES
Don't think of ice breaker as personal introduction, physical exercise, puzzle, brain teasers, loud music and chicken dance only. Look at some examples below.
I have just finished conducting Train The Trainer course (approved by Human Resource Development Fund - HRDF - of Ministry of Manpower) March 25-29. Some of the ice breakers my participants conducted were as follows:-
1. Emy Norsyahirah: Her topic for presentation was "Fresh a Flower Collage". She grouped the participants into dyads (two member group), blindfolded one of them, and following the instructions given by the partner who was not blindfolded, the one blindfolded had to create a bouquet of flowers using the materials she provided. The result was a disaster! But the participants had a great laugh. She said (the learning point) was that to create a nice bouquet of flowers people need proper lessons such as what she was about to teach them. She took about two minutes.
2. Danny Ang: He did a topic on "How to Do Setting in a Volley Ball Game". He asked the participants to stand in a circle, lobbed a volley ball, and asked them to "set" (tap the ball using their ten fingers, not palm, and return it to him). He commented that one of the participants did not do it properly and proceeded to correct her setting. It took him about two minutes.
3. Saifuddin: His topic was "Pond Fishing". He fixed some masking tape on to the carpeted floor to mark the edge of a pond and divided the pond into two and labelled them: Pond and Sea. Then distributed some pictures of fish to the participants and asked them to put the proper fish according to their natural habitat (pond or sea). One participant put a "haruan" in the "sea". The haruan turned out to be "flat head" fish (ikan sembilang)!!
4. Khairul: He showed a funny video clip of acrobats playing table tennis. His topic was "How to Play Table Tennis".
5. Dr.Shila: The best ice breaker demonstrated by my participant was the one by Dr. Shila of SIRIM way back in 2003. Her topic was "How to Make Pegaga Juice". She distributed seven different leaves and asked the participants (some 20 of them) to identify which one was pegaga leaf. Majority of the males got it wrong. Half the females got it right.
Simple. Right?
Happy ice breaking!!
Taj 300313
No comments:
Post a Comment