Training Icebreaker Exercises
Opening Activities for Events, Conferences and Meetings
It is important to develop icebreaking exercises that build team work, assess prior learning and engage learning so that the stage is set for the training to follow.
When participants first meet each other for a training event or meeting, they need a way to get acquainted and feel part of a team. Icebreaker exercises offer a way to get things started. Avoiding the typical roundtable introductions or pairing up to participants to interview each other and then report back the findings to the group is a good idea as these activities have been done to death. Show your creativity but more importantly, set the stage for the rest of the training by creating an introduction that stimulates active learning.
Mel Silberman, in his book Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs, Case Examples and Tips offers three goals of an icebreaker exercise.
“1. Team building – helping participants to become acquainted with each other and creating a spirit of cooperation and interdependence.
2. On-the-spot assessment – learning about the attitudes, knowledge, and experience of the participants
3. Immediate learning involvement – creating initial interest in the training topic”
Silberman, Mel, Active Training: A Handbook of Techniques, Designs, Case Examples and Tips, Pfeiffer, San Francisco, CA, 2006, P. 53-4.
Your Name History
A good icebreaker to use in a classroom setting at the beginning of a course or series of workshops is to ask people to talk about their name. Were they named after someone? Is their name misspelled often? Do people mispronounce their name? Is their name a nickname i.e. different from their birth name? Does their name mean something in a different language? This icebreaking exercise helps everyone to remember names as the stories provide a memory hook.
Little Known Fact Bingo
This exercise requires some pre-work. Collect little known facts from the participants. For example, “this person used to live in Antarctica” or “this person’s first job was as an ice cream truck driver”. Each true fact is placed in a square on the board and the object is to see who can identify all the owners of the facts first or the first three to find all the names. Offer prizes to the winner(s).
Themed Activity
The best activities are based around the theme of the training. If the training is sales related, break the group into teams and give them a bunch of unrelated items and ask them to create a commercial for a service. If the training is on communication skills, ask each participant to contribute a sequential sentence to a story or memo by starting the process off with one statement. If the event is based on a theme of goal setting – ask each participant to state one goal they achieved last year. Make the activity relevant to the theme and you’ll engage participants early.
Assessing the Prior Learning
To assess the differences in level of prior learning on a topic, break the participants into groups and give them three questions that will provide the information on their past experience and education around the topic. These questions can be “Who in your group has taken a course or workshop on X before? If yes, what are you hoping to gain from this course/workshop?”, “Who in your group has work experience related to X? If yes, what are you hoping to gain from this course/workshop?” This will help presenters gauge the depth and direction of the content delivered.
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