Can you imagine a world without any compassion or integrity? A future where a person’s character doesn’t matter? We can’t.

October’s Character Traits are Courage and Teamwork!

Below are some resources to help nurture student’s ability and willingness to pursue common goals as part of a team, constructively participate in cooperative learning, and communicate effectively in cross-cultural and multi-lingual settings.

Application suggestions:

• Assign specific roles and responsibilities during group work. 
• Illustrate techniques for compromise. 
• Focus on (and evaluate) the process of group projects in addition to the final products. 
• Examine careers and look at the role collaboration and team skills would play. 
• Practice group or class activities that require working together.
• Team up with another class in a target language country to identify and compare endangered species in both countries and produce a multimedia informational presentation.
• After studying an environmental community issue (landfills, water quality, maintaining open space, recycling), compose email messages to various local, state, and national officials, stating their opinion and offering alternatives to current methods of dealing with the issue. 
• Working in groups, students could survey favorite forms of recreation among local teens.
• Research the local history of recreational facilities for teens and the potential sources of political and economic support. Graph and analyze the information, and then have each group create a business plan for developing a local recreation center/club for teens. 
• Collaborate with senior citizens in a digital storytelling workshop. Assign different groups of students to different senior citizens. Then have each group bring to life a story from their senior’s history as they collaborate on writing and creating a video, including recording the narration and selecting images and music. 

Quotations:

• “Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller
• “If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself.” – Henry Ford
• “I never did anything alone. Whatever was accomplished in this country was accomplished collectively.” – Golda Meir
• “The secret is to gang up on the problem, rather than each other.” – Thomas Stallkamp
• “Individually, we are one drop. Together, we are an ocean.” – Ryunosuke Satoro
• “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” – Phil Jackson
• “Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success.” – Henry Ford
• “The lightning spark of thought generated in the solitary mind awakens its likeness in another mind.” – Thomas Carlyle
• “Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both, that I should labor with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.” – David Hume
• “Individual commitment to a group effort–that is what makes a team work, a company work, a society work, a civilization work.” – Vince Lombardi
• “No one can whistle a symphony. It takes a whole orchestra to play it.” – H.E. Luccock
• “Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizational objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” – Andrew Carnegie
• “If two men on the same job agree all the time, then one is useless. If they disagree all the time, both are useless.” – Darryl F. Zanuck
• “Many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than the one where they sprang up.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
• “If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.” – George Bernard Shaw

Additional lessons, videos and articles can be found here.