Guide Team player badge – a few hints

Clause 7 - Take part in an activity to demonstrate two of the following skills:
Active listening
Different types of questions
Giving feedback
Dealing with conflict
Problem-solving
Decision-making

Active listening - you can show this by things like:
• Not interrupting the speaker
• Raising relevant questions which show you've considered what's being said
• Being able to summarise what was said
• Paying attention to the speaker - not letting your mind, expression or gaze wander

Different types of questions
The most obvious are closed questions and open questions. Closed questions are ones that would lead you to give a yes/no answer (like gameshows that do the yes/no game!) Open questions are ones you cannot answer with yes or no, you have to give a lot more detail (these are used by good interviewers). I don't suppose they want you to go as deeply as leading questions and rhetorical questions at Guide age.

Giving Feedback
This creeps a bit into active listening. Again, you could summarise what the speaker said, fill in a questionnaire on what you thought of the speaker, what she said and how she said it, or similar.

Dealing with conflict
This is usually something for chairs of meetings - how do they handle heated debate amongst committee members. This can be set up using role plays.

Problem solving
This one's a bit more obvious - it can be a physical problem, mental or written puzzle, or whatever, or could be a topic to discuss or debate.

Decision making
Who decides? What do they think about in coming to a decision? What factors are relevant/irrelevant? What rules/customs might you have to follow? What do you do with the decision once you've made one? How do you know what decisions have been taken previously?

A lot of this could be covered by holding a debate within a group – formal or informal. You'd want a topic with no clear cut answer. One subject I got at college was a bit of an ethical debate - a blind man lives in a tenement.
Should he pay his flat's share of the bill for the communal lighting in the hall and stairs? This topic was great because we found relevant arguments on both sides - the lighting is provided for the benefit of everyone in the tenement whether they use it - or not - why should the man's neighbours pay more than people in neighbouring tenements just because the blind man doesn't use the lighting provided! You could split the group up into two teams, with someone chosen as chair. It would be useful to at least tape record, and if possible video, the debate so that afterwards you could all review the debate, and how everyone participated. Chances are, all of them will have covered at least two of the points!

Clause 5 - Take part in an activity with your Patrol to discover which type of team member you are by identifying your strengths and weaknesses.

Here you want a challenge in which each person can get involved. You need to make sure that the challenge is on a topic where no-one is the expert, so they can't dominate, but no-one is useless. A task along these lines might be making newspaper towers. Split into groups of five or six, and supply each group with a large quantity of newspapers, and umpteen rolls of sellotape. The task is to create a tower which was as tall, and as sturdy as possible. Extra marks should be given for aesthetic quality. They must spend a minimum of 5 minutes planning time before they are allowed to touch the materials. Some people take the lead in designing, some took the lead in manufacturing, others took charge of rolling newspapers or cutting lengths of tape. Since no-one is in charge, natural leaders come to the fore, natural team players do background work... in theory anyway!

You can also use questionnaires to assess character and personality. There are umpteen floating around - could they try several and see whether their results agree?!