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Exploring personal patterns in youth worker teams
Exploring personal patterns in youth worker teams
Content
This activity invites you to explore your behavioural patterns when working in youth worker teams.
Youth workers often have recurring ways of acting, reacting, and positioning themselves within diverse teams of volunteers and youth workers. These patterns are not always visible to us, yet they strongly influence how we contribute, relate to others and shape team processes.
Youth workers often have recurring ways of acting, reacting, and positioning themselves within diverse teams of volunteers and youth workers. These patterns are not always visible to us, yet they strongly influence how we contribute, relate to others and shape team processes.
The activity is designed as a journey from the outside (outdoors) to the inside (introspection into yourself). Using movement, reflection and dialogue, participants explore how they behave in teams, what roles they tend to take, and what these patterns serve.
While an outdoor hike offers a powerful environment for reflection and inspiration, this activity can also be implemented through visualisation, drawing, or creating constellations using objects such as LEGO figures or natural materials.
By becoming more aware of your patterns, you can begin to make more conscious choices about how you show up in teams and how you support collective learning and collaboration.
By completing this activity, you will be able to:
- Reflect on your behavioural patterns in youth worker teams
- Identify recurring roles and their function in team dynamics
- Analyse how your patterns influence both you and the team
- Become more aware of opportunities for change and development
This activity explores your patterns through the ETS competence aspects of self-reflecting on your values, beliefs and attitudes, and identifying diversity, strengths and weaknesses in the team.
If you go on the hike, here are some ideas on the flow:
Arrival and tuning in (first 30–40 minutes)
Let people walk in pairs and answer easier, experience-based questions (from your positive and challenging team experiences). This warms them up and builds trust without forcing depth too early.
Pattern awareness (next 60–90 minutes)
Introduce the more systemic questions. This is where you can bring in:
- "What position do you repeatedly take in teams?"
- "What do you tend to carry that may not be yours?"
- "What are you loyal to in your teams?"
Keep people in pairs or trios and rotate every 20–30 minutes. Changing partners is key — it allows new insights to emerge through exchange with other peer learners.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions for exploring your own team patterns or offering it within your training session:
1. Dig deeper into some memorable, CHALLENGING experience of working in a TEAM…
Think for a while and share with someone…
- What position did you automatically take in that situation?
- What did you start doing more of?
- What did you stop doing?
- What do you think the team needed from you then, and what did you actually offer?
2. How do you feel about entering a NEW team of colleagues/ youth workers? What is the process for you?
- What do you usually scan first when entering a new team?
- Which part of yourself is easy to bring into a new team?
- Which part of yourself tends to stay hidden or held back?
- What silent contract do you tend to make with a new team?
3. When you are in teams, what are your behavioural PATTERNS?
- What role do you tend to occupy without deciding to?
- What function does that role serve in the team?
- What risk does it protect the team from?
- What price do you pay for taking that role repeatedly?
4. Recall a team in which you felt fully in flow…
- What was happening there?
- Who were you able to be in that team?
- What in that team brought out your best contribution?
5. What are you ‘loyal’ to when you work in teams? (and how does that loyalty shape your behaviour?
- Harmony? Quality? Inclusion? Efficiency? Recognition? Control? Something else?
6. What invitation do teams seem to give you again and again? How do you respond to that invitation?
- To lead? To mediate? To rescue? To challenge? To hold emotions? To make structure? To stay quiet?
7. What pattern of yours do you keep reproducing in teams, even if you don’t like it?
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After the exploration phase, participants enter the debriefing phase:
- Create a visual representation of their journey on a sheet of paper or using other materials. This can include symbols, metaphors, drawings or constellations that represent their patterns, roles and insights.
- Look at their visualisation and reflect individually, zooming out to identify what it reveals about their patterns of being a team member. Share their insights with a partner or small group.
In a larger group, participants explore what they discovered about themselves and discuss possible invitations for change, as well as questions and dilemmas they carry about their role in teams.
Reflect together on what these insights mean for your ongoing development as a youth worker.
Please share what your invitation is — your calling — for exploring certain patterns of being in teams and changing something in your behaviour when working in youth worker teams?
Before submitting to the badge, check that you have:
- A description or photo of your visual representation (drawing, constellation, or symbolic journey) of your patterns in teams.
- A short written reflection naming: the experience you drew on, the recurring role or pattern you noticed, what it tends to protect or serve in the team, and one change or intention you want to carry forward.
NGO Awero created this educational resource and activity for the Erasmus+ Accreditation ETS modular training for youth workers working internationally.
Sources:
- Processing the experience: strategies to enhance and generalise learning, by Luckner, John L
- Moving Questions by Siets Bakker
- Role of experiential learning trainer/facilitator, by Dr. Arturas Deltuva, kitokie projektai, in cooperation with Mark Taylor
This activity supports youth workers’ competence development in the "Collaborating in Teams" area of the ETS-YW competence model — specifically the competence aspects of self-reflecting on their own values, beliefs and attitudes, identifying diversity, strengths and weaknesses in the team, and helping build team spirit and trust.
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Teamwork Patterns Navigator Get this badge
The badge earner described their experience of working in youth worker teams, identified recurring roles and behavioural patterns they bring into teams, and analysed what these patterns serve and how they influence both themselves and the team.
These insights can come from this activity, a similar reflective exercise, or from prior professional or volunteering experience.
To earn this badge, the youth worker:
- Described a personal experience of working in a youth worker team — both a challenging and a positive one;
- Identified recurring roles, behaviours and patterns they bring into teams;
- Analysed what these patterns serve in the team and what impact they have;
- Identified possible changes and development directions for more conscious participation in teams.
Related their experience to the ETS competence aspects of self-reflecting on their own values, beliefs and attitudes, and identifying diversity, strengths and weaknesses in the team.
EQF level: Level 4
Estimated learning effort: 5 hours
Tasks
Task no.1
Evidence verified by: one activity organiser
To get this badge, submit evidence of your reflection on your patterns in youth worker teams:
- A description or photo of your visual representation (drawing, constellation, or symbolic journey) of your patterns in teams.
- A short written reflection naming: the experience you drew on, the recurring role or pattern you noticed, what it tends to protect or serve in the team, and one change or intention you want to carry forward.
Skills
#Identifying diversity, strengths and weaknesses in the team
#Ensuring that knowledge, skills, styles and preferences in the team are shared and communicated
#Self-reflecting on their own values, beliefs and attitudes
Organisers
Awero
Cities of Learning Network
Badge issuer recognized with
Awero not-for-profit organisation manages this platform and develops it together with leading educational organisations. The European Union's programme Erasmus+ granted co-funding for building the first version of this platform. Contact support@awero.org.
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