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How can I leverage the team aspect of Classcraft to its fullest potential?
Balanced Classcraft teams will change social dynamics in your classroom. First, let's start with some tips to create teams that will work in your class!
- Create academically and behaviorally balanced teams of four to five students.
- Avoid creating teams of friends and instead create teams with students from different social circles and backgrounds. This will teach them to work with different people, a skill they can use for their whole life.
- Have teams of 4 to 5 students if you can.
- Make sure that there is at least one of each character class character in each team.
Collaborative powers are great for promoting teamwork as they benefit the whole team. Because they don't benefit the student who uses them, collaborative powers grant a certain amount of Experience Points to the player who used it. There are some default collaborative powers in-game but you can edit existing powers to make them collaborative and more interesting for students.
When students fall, make sure you give the team enough time to react. If necessary, reiterate that students will earn Experience Points for helping out their teammates by using collaborative powers. You can also create pledges that affect the whole team indirectly to increase student accountability.
Random Events, Quests, and Boss Battles can be used as a way to bring teams together.
Create Random Events that affect teams rather than students to foster collaboration (such as giving Experience Points to all members of the team who can come up with the best poem) or that will build relationships within the team (such as letting each team choose who should get 100 Experience Points).
When starting a Formative Review, select random teams for each question rather than random students. You can also create quests with tasks requiring teamwork or use branching paths to give each team member something specific to do.
If your students are sitting in groups, you can have them sit in teams and do classwork in their Classcraft teams. Make sure that you reward collaboration (you can even create a behavior preset for it!) and highlight any hero moments in your classroom.