Posters. WHAT??? Team roles.

My first three years of teaching, I had my own classrooms. And my school had a thermal poster maker, and really big rooms (with 16 foot ceilings!) So I made a LOT of posters.For the last seven years, however, I’ve shared classrooms. And my poster-making has faded to essentially nothing.

This year, for the first time in ages, I get my own classroom. And so… posters.

My philosophy has changed so much since my last posters. In 2006, my posters were all curricular: procedures, terms, theorems (when I taught geometry). And that’s all well and good, but now I want new posters. Mindset. Make it Stick. And…team roles!

I use the team roles published by CPM pretty much exactly, but because I have mostly groups of 3 I made some explicit changes to allow for that. I use playing cards to split students into groups and assign roles: spades are facilitators, hearts are recorder/reporters, diamonds are task managers, and clubs are resource managers. I decided that for groups of three, the resource manager’s role could be split up into the other roles.

CPM lists the duties for each role in two different ways; they offer a detailed breakdown of their duties in prose, and they have a list of potential things each role might say in the course of work. My students will have the prose version in their notebook and we’ll look back at them each time we get a new group (for the first quarter anyway), but the questions are more poster-able.

If you like these posters, you can have them! They are available as a pdf and as a Publisher file in this shared Google Drive folder. If you get the publisher file, you will need the fonts “Century Gothic,” “Century Schoolbook,” and “Chowderhead.” or you can substitute with your own fonts, of course. I got Chowderhead from ufont.com but I’m sure you can get it other places (shout out to @mathymeg07 for introducing me to that font with her awesome Make it Stick brochure.)