Building a team

Most Thursdays, I speak to our teachers at the Canadian Institutes teacher training mornings. On this Thursday, I had been asked to speak about teamwork & conflict. This had been prompted by a few arguments between the manager and the staff during the week, which had gotten quite heated. Heated arguments are quite a common occurrence amongst people in this culture.




One of the arguments had led us to think of some ways to improve our English courses, even though we disagreed with the suggestions being brought by the teacher.

Conflict is an opportunity

I told them that conflict is not necessarily a bad thing- a team which has no conflict is a team which has no ideas. If we see conflict as an opportunity to hear new ideas from others, then we will listen respectfully to what they are saying and stay calm. A team makes better decisions than an individual because more than one person's ideas are being considered.

Reconciliation

The staff and the manager then started discussing some of the issues which they had been arguing about during the week. I was impressed with how they managed to stay calm and friendly this time around.

These teacher training sessions are a great opportunity to impart new values which are not normally part of the culture here. In the future, we plan to offer the same training sessions to teachers of other colleges around Aden.

No, it's not our new car. It's a picture I doctored to advertise our new course- English for taxi drivers.