Sometimes, new Team Managers aren’t quite sure where to begin. Destination Imagination uses self-directed learning to teach students about the creative process. This means that the team members decide what they must learn in order to create a solution for the Challenge that they selected.
However, younger children really do need to be given some direction. Your job is to act as a facilitator, to help your team acquire skills that they don’t already have, and to make sure your team gets as much as possible out of the time they spend on DI. But exactly how do you go about doing this?
That’s where Destination Imagination’s Roadmap can help. Roadmap is a course guide for Team Managers, which will show you how to teach your DI team about the creative process, from their first meeting right up to a tournament.
Roadmap is organized around successive stages of the creative process:
- Recognize (Stage 1): Become aware of a challenge, problem, or opportunity, and attempt to fully understand all of its issues or points.
- Imagine (Stage 2): Apply thinking skills and tools to find potential options, and identify ones that are the most promising.
- Initiate & Collaborate (Stage 3): Initiate behavior and commit to an option. Understand and use different problem-solving styles.
- Assess Team’s Progress and Prepare (Stage 4): Achieve the best solution by assessing the project and making improvements as needed.
- Celebrate Your Team’s Success (Stage 5): Celebrate the journey and reflect on the experience.
For each stage of this process, Roadmap provides complete lesson plans for four team meetings. Each of these lesson plans includes:
- A complete list of the materials that you will need for the session.
- Icebreakers, Instant Challenges, and other activities.
- Advice on how to use the activities included with each session to help your team to learn more about the creative process.
For example, the lesson plan for the first session includes:
- A simple warm-up activity to become better acquainted.
- A task-based Instant Challenge.
- Completion of DI’s Individual Specialties Inventory, which is designed to help identify the interests, talents, and specialties of each team member.
- A brief overview of DI’s main components: Team Challenge and Instant Challenge.
- A review of DI’s Interference rule. This includes an Interference Contract that team members bring home to be signed by parents/guardians.
- The first session ends with a second Instant Challenge.
If you want your team meetings to be fun and productive, you’ll need to do some advance planning before each meeting. Roadmap can save you a lot of time by providing ready-to-use lesson plans, which you can either use exactly as they appear in Roadmap, or customize to suit the specific needs of your team.
Team Managers are not required to use Roadmap, but it’s a great resource for learning how to teach the creative process to your team.
Roadmap is distributed as part of the Destination Imagination program materials. In order to use Roadmap, you will first need to get your Team Number (see our team registration page for instructions on how to do this).
Once you have your Team Number, you can use it to download a PDF version of Roadmap from the Resource Area at Destination Imagination’s main web site. You will probably find it helpful to have this PDF file available when you want to print the worksheets and Instant Challenges that are included in the lesson plans.
If you haven’t seen Roadmap yet, please check it out! Roadmap is a very useful resource for all Team Managers, but we think it will be particularly helpful to those of you who are new to DI.