What are “ice breakers” for?
“Ice Breakers” are a set of techniques for helping the participants feel like they are part of a group, with shared goals and challenges. A good session of ice breakers will help all the participants feel like they are on the same side. Participants should feel a sense of achievement for every digital story made by the group, not only for completing their own.
Here are some useful aims for ice breakers. By the end of the ice breakers, participants should have:
- Laughed together
- Learnt each other’s name
- Shared some personal information with everyone
- Spoken to all the group members individually and together
- Been able to speak without interruption.
- Found some things they have in common with each other participant.
- Learnt some things each group member loves and hates.
- Become interested in what each other’s story will be, and keen to help and be helped, and to offer and accept creative ideas
- Eating together and sharing food is an age-old social activity. Bringing in biscuits or a cake to share can help make everyone feel at home!
You don’t need to make everyone best friends with each other – you just need to create a temporary community with a goal of everyone making a digital story they’re proud of, and having an enjoyable time in the process.
Using ice breakers to build groups
Workshop facilitators should think hard about how to run these sessions: A badly planned activity can destroy someone’s confidence and make them feel like an outcast, ashamed for spoiling everyone else’s fun. Some people are shy, others talk too much, anyone may have strange and unexpected phobias and hang-ups, religious beliefs, opinions, or mental and physical difficulties. Remember that Digital Storytelling is supposed to be a week of enjoyable creativity, not a painful therapy session, or a party, or a war zone!
There is also a risk of spending too much time on group-building; everyone is there to make stories not to play games, and an over-enthusiastic tutor can bore everyone by insisting on endless “fun” or long sharing sessions!
Of course, you can’t plan for everything, but as a rule of thumb, make it clear that people are allowed to sit out of a planned activity that they are unable or unwilling to take part in, without having to give a reason. Learn from the experience for future workshops and see if you can achieve the same goal some better way.
Keep the activities positive, short and make sure everyone feels included. Don’t let people monopolise the sessions and talk too much about themselves and their opinions. Give the group flexibility to expand and adapt the activities, but don’t let it get out of control.
Always be aware of your goals and how the techniques are leading towards them. Use the activities to see how well the group is coming together, what kind of person each group member is, and what kind of help each will need later in the workshops. Some groups will need to spend more time group-building than others. And some of the most effective group building will probably take place naturally during the actual writing and creation of the stories, and during coffee and dinner breaks.
Kinds of activities:
You will probably not need to use all of these for storytelling workshops
- Name games – helping everyone to remember each other’s name.
- Sharing games – getting people used to talking about themselves and speaking out loud in a group.
- Physical activities – getting used to touching people and having them in your personal space.
- Moving games – getting people moving around and comfortable with the space
- Problem solving – helping others to solve a problem.
- Links – finding out the things you have in common with others.
Shut up!
Sometimes one or two people do all the talking, and keep interrupting everyone else. These “creative listening” techniques can be used give everyone the chance to speak.
- Creative Listening 1: Pass around an object. People may only talk when they are holding the object. Make it clear that if someone doesn’t want to speak, they may pass the object on to the next person.
- Creative Listening 2: The object is placed within reach of everyone. When someone wants to talk, they take the object, and put it back when they have finished.
- Creative Listening 3: If people are talking for too long, or not enough, use an hourglass (obviously, not an hour one though!) or egg timer as the object; it should be turned when people start talking, and they should stop talking before the sand runs out.
Creative listening can be used for “How I’m Feeling” (see below) and some of the other activities. Other topics to use for creative listening could be: Three things you’d put in a time capsule, something you want to do before you die, what you’d do with a million pounds, what your dream job or holiday would be. Always be strict with the no-interrupting rule.
A popular technique for getting silence in a room is to raise your hand as a signal for quiet. Everyone else must raise their hands too and stop speaking.
Ideas for ice breakers
- Body Parts: The group must write down as many body parts using (polite!) three-letter words as they can think of.
- Call my Bluff: Each member says something about themselves that might be true or false. The rest of the group have to guess if it’s true.
- Common ground: Find how many things that all the group have in common. Eg everyone lives in Bristol, or is wearing shoes, watched Big Brother, etc.
- Favourites: Tell everybody what your favourite food is. You could vary this by using a favourite sport, city, country, kind of weather, season etc.
- How I’m Feeling: Go round the group and say how you’re feeling. This can be done regularly during the workshop to let the group know how everyone is progressing through the course and what problems they are encountering.
- I Went Shopping and I Bought: Go around the group, with each person thinking of something they could have bought in a shop. Each person must repeat everyone else’s “purchases” in order before adding their own.
- Interviewer: Split up into pairs. Each should take turns being the interviewer and interviewee. Subjects for the interview could be your first job, favourite food, best or worst holiday, hobby etc. After the interview, each participant should tell the rest of the group about what they found out from their interviewee.
- Jigsaw Puzzle 1: Make a puzzle available which all participants can help to put together. This could carry on through the workshops during breaks.
- Jigsaw Puzzle 2: Hand out the pieces of a fairly simple puzzle (or a picture that has been cut into parts) to each group member. Take turns putting down a piece on the table if it can be made to fit with the pieces already there.
- My Name is 1: Go around the group saying your name and something interesting about the name – what it means, where it came from, etc.
- My Name is 2: Think of an adjective that starts with the same letter as your name and introduce yourself and your adjective. Examples might be Auspicious Anne, Bodacious Barry, Cunning Clara, etc. Alternatives could be a food, drink, colour, animal etc that starts with the same letter eg Peshwari Paddy or Lemur Liz.
- My Name Is 3: Everyone introduces themselves in the form “My name is… …and if I were an animal I'd be a… …because…”
- Pick of the Pics: A selection of pictures or objects are laid out. Everyone should choose a favourite and explain to the group why they like it. This exercise could be done with sounds instead of pictures for blind storytellers.
- Questions to the Universe: Everyone should write a question in the form “Why does…” on a piece of paper. The questions should be shuffled and handed out, and everyone should write an answer in the form “Because…” on the back, without looking at the question. The questions and answers should be read out: they tend to be amusing or at least surreal!
- Questions, Questions: Everyone should think of a question and write it down. Go around the group and answer each other’s questions. There should be a time limit for each answer, maybe 30 seconds.
- Taking a Stand: Think of something people might like or dislike eg football. People who love football should stand closer to a part of the room (eg a particular corner), and people who hate it should stand as far away as they can without leaving the room. People with no opinion can stand somewhere between. Each wall or corner of the room can represent something different, and people should work out where to stand.
- Tell me a Secret: Tell the group a secret that no one else knows. This should be something that you are happy with everyone knowing. Examples might be how many two pence pieces are in your wallet, what you had for breakfast, what film you plan to watch next.
Links to more ice-breaker ideas