Back to school: 5 team building activities to help break down boundaries

Anna Roslaniec
Anna Roslaniec
A group of children sat in a park high fiving each other

At the beginning of term adolescent learners are often shy, embarrassed and awkward. They are reluctant to speak English in front of their peers or show enthusiasm in class, often suffering from social pressure and lack of self-confidence. It can take weeks or months for students to get to know each other and form bonds. However, don’t despair if your teen learners are like this. There are plenty of team-building games and activities you can do to help students build relationships that will allow them to feel comfortable and relaxed in the classroom.

Team building activities to help break down boundaries
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Why use team-building activities in the classroom?

Team building activities can help:

  • Break down boundaries
  • Teens get to know each other
  • Build trust and teamwork
  • Bring 21st-century skills - collaboration, communication, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills - to life

Team-building games can also be a lot of fun. They require students to work together to reach a common goaland sometimes include a competitive element, which can encourage teenage learners to get really involved.

There is a wealth of different team-building games and activities suitable for older children and teens, but here we have chosen five that we think your teenage learners will love.

1) Human knot

In this funphysical activity, teamwork is essential.Students form a human knot, which they have to work together to untangle. It will also give you an idea of which students show leadership qualities.

Materials needed: none

How to play:

  • Have students stand in a circle, making sure they are close together. If you have a large class, having students play in two or more groups may be better. The larger the group, the more complicated the puzzle will be.
  • Tell students to reach across the circle with each arm and hold the hands of two other students. They can't choose the people standing on either side of them. Make sure students hold a left hand with their left hand, and vice versa. Now the human knot is formed.
  • Tell students that they have to try to untangle the knot without dropping the hands they are holding. When they have successfully untangled the knot, students will be standing in a regular circle holding hands.
  • Students will need to bend, twist, and move under or step over other students' arms.

Tip: If one student is reluctant to play, give them the role of "director". This student can walk around the outside of the knot, giving instructions to help the group solve the problem.

If you are doing this in groups, have them race against each other. The team to solve the problem first - wins.

2) Magic carpet

In this game, teams stand on a "magic carpet" which they have to turn over while still standing on it. Teams must decide on a strategy together and carry it out — if they try to do it individually, someone will inevitably fall off.

Materials needed: rugs, towels, or large pieces of cardboard (one per team)

How to play:

  • Give each team their magic carpet and have them stand on it. Tell students they are on a magic flying carpet high in the sky, but there's a problem — the carpet is upside down. They need to turn the carpet over without anyone falling off.
  • They need to devise a strategy for turning the carpet over without anyone touching the floor.
  • Teams can work individually, or they can collaborate to help each other.
  • The activity can be set up as a race to see which team flips their carpet first.

Tip: Encourage students to rethink their strategy if it doesn't appear to be working.Evaluating your decisions and adapting your plan is a useful 21st-century skill that students can use throughout the school year.

3) Build it

Teenage students love a practical challenge; in this activity, the element of competition will undoubtedly get them involved. With just basic materials, students have to work together to build the tallest freestanding tower within a time limit.

Materials needed: balloons (one pack per team), sticky tape, a tape measure, balloon pumps (optional)

How to play:

  • Have students form teams of four and hand out the materials.
  • Tell students to build the tallest freestanding tower using just balloons and sticky tape in ten minutes. Explain that after ten minutes, you will check and measure the structures. If it falls over, that team is eliminated from the challenge.
  • Tell students how much time is left after five minutes and again two minutes before the time ends.
  • Have teams stand back from their towers. Inspect each tower, measure it, and record the results. You may wish to give the winning team a prize.

Tip: Increase the challenge by giving students mixed bags of different-shaped balloons, including modeling balloons.

4) My eyes, your eyes

Students will have lots of fun guiding each other or being guided through anobstacle courseby their teammates. This activity testscommunication skillsandbuilds trustbetween pairs of students.

Materials needed: blindfolds or scarves (one per pair) and obstacles, e.g., chairs and boxes.

Preparation: Before the activity, set up the obstacle course by placing furniture and other items around the classroom. Decide where the route students take will begin and end, marking the finish line.

How to play:

  • Put students in pairs. If possible, have them work with a student they don't know very well. Have one student in each pair cover their eyes with a blindfold. This student is a blinded person and their partner will be their eyes.
  • The guide stands behind their blind partner and places their hands on their partner's shoulders. Their job is to quietly give instructions to guide their partner towards the finish line, navigating the obstacles.
  • The first pair to finish wins.
  • Have students swap roles. Move some of the obstacles. Then repeat the activity.

Tip: If possible, play the game in the playground or in the school gym. The larger the space, the more complex you can make the route.

5) Scavenger hunt

This is a longer activity that requires slightly more planning than the others. Teams will complete a set of tasks and challenges as a race. Choose a mixture of fun challenges and serious tasks to turn this activity into a fun diagnostic test to determine students' English levels.

Materials needed: Worksheet containing a list of tasks and challenges (one per team). Tasks can be both language-related and practical.

Download our Scavenger Hunt sample worksheet

How to play:

  • Put students into teams. This activity is ideal for students with different skills and abilities, so try to ensure teams are mixed-ability.
  • Tell students that they are going to race to complete a series of tasks that they will find on their worksheet. The fastest team to complete all tasks correctly wins. Some tasks can be completed by one student.
  • Explain that students don't need to complete the tasks in order. Point out that you will monitor them closely to ensure there is no cheating.
  • Remind students that they must use English at all times. You can choose to penalize students by having them repeat or do an extra task if they use L1.

Tip: If you think students might try to cheat, before you set the teams nominate students to be team monitors (one per team). They will have the worksheet and make sure that the team fulfills each task. Alternatively, if students have mobile phones or tablets, have them take pictures and videos of their team members completing the task.

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    Does progress in English slow as you get more advanced?

    Por Ian Wood
    Reading time: 4 minutes

    Why does progression seem to slow down as an English learner moves from beginner to more advanced skills?

    The journey of learning English

    When presenting at ELT conferences, I often ask the audience – typically teachers and school administrators – “When you left home today, to start your journey here, did you know where you were going?” The audience invariably responds with a laugh and says yes, of course. I then ask, “Did you know roughly when you would arrive at your destination?” Again the answer is, of course, yes. “But what about your students on their English learning journey? Can they say the same?” At this point, the laughter stops.

    All too often English learners find themselves without a clear picture of the journey they are embarking on and the steps they will need to take to achieve their goals. We all share a fundamental need for orientation, and in a world of mobile phone GPS we take it for granted. Questions such as: Where am I? Where am I going? When will I get there? are answered instantly at the touch of a screen. If you’re driving along a motorway, you get a mileage sign every three miles.

    When they stop appearing regularly we soon feel uneasy. How often do English language learners see mileage signs counting down to their learning goal? Do they even have a specific goal?

    Am I there yet?

    The key thing about GPS is that it’s very precise. You can see your start point, where you are heading and tell, to the mile or kilometer, how long your journey will be. You can also get an estimated time of arrival to the minute. As Mike Mayor mentioned in his post about what it means to be fluent, the same can’t be said for understanding and measuring English proficiency. For several decades, the ELL industry got by with the terms ‘beginner’, ‘elementary’, ‘pre-intermediate’ and ‘advanced’ – even though there was no definition of what they meant, where they started and where they ended.

    The CEFR has become widely accepted as a measure of English proficiency, bringing an element of shared understanding of what it means to be at a particular level in English. However, the wide bands that make up the CEFR can result in a situation where learners start a course of study as B1 and, when they end the course, they are still within the B1 band. That doesn’t necessarily mean that their English skills haven’t improved – they might have developed substantially – but it’s just that the measurement system isn’t granular enough to pick up these improvements in proficiency.

    So here’s the first weakness in our English language GPS and one that’s well on the way to being remedied with the Global Scale of English (GSE). Because the GSE measures proficiency on a 10-90 scale across each of the four skills, students using assessment tools reporting on the GSE are able to see incremental progress in their skills even within a CEFR level. So we have the map for an English language GPS to be able to track location and plot the journey to the end goal.

    ‘The intermediate plateau’

    When it comes to pinpointing how long it’s going to take to reach that goal, we need to factor in the fact that the amount of effort it takes to improve your English increases as you become more proficient. Although the bands in the CEFR are approximately the same width, the law of diminishing returns means that the better your English is to begin with, the harder it is to make further progress – and the harder it is to feel that progress is being made.

    That’s why many an English language-learning journey gets abandoned on the intermediate plateau. With no sense of progression or a tangible, achievable goal on the horizon, the learner can become disoriented and demoralised.

    To draw another travel analogy, when you climb 100 meters up a mountain at 5,000 meters above sea level the effort required is greater than when you climb 100 meters of gentle slope down in the foothills. It’s exactly the same 100 meter distance, it’s just that those hundred 100 meters require progressively more effort the higher up you are, and the steeper the slope. So, how do we keep learners motivated as they pass through the intermediate plateau?

    Education, effort and motivation

    We have a number of tools available to keep learners on track as they start to experience the law of diminishing returns. We can show every bit of progress they are making using tools that capture incremental improvements in ability. We can also provide new content that challenges the learner in a way that’s realistic.

    Setting unrealistic expectations and promising outcomes that aren’t deliverable is hugely demotivating for the learner. It also has a negative impact on teachers – it’s hard to feel job satisfaction when your students are feeling increasingly frustrated by their apparent lack of progress.

    Big data is providing a growing bank of information. In the long term this will deliver a much more precise estimate of effort required to reach higher levels of proficiency, even down to a recommendation of the hours required to go from A to B and how those hours are best invested. That way, learners and teachers alike would be able to see where they are now, where they want to be and a path to get there. It’s a fully functioning English language learning GPS system, if you like.