It’s wonderful to have all of the new and returning Eagles in the studio excited for this new year, it’s off to a great start! This session the MS and HS Eagles have been working on getting to know each other, building contracts and systems, and going through an introduction to psychology (mostly based on interactions in the studio).
The team building activities are geared toward bringing the group together and working through team challenges to help them get to know each other and to start to trust each other. The biggest example of this is the Lip Dub. The Eagles are put into small groups and each small group has to work together to create a finished product that eventually has to communicate with the other groups to make a bigger final product. There are many lessons learned about communication, organization, and basic project management.
The Eagles are also creating new student contracts and rules of engagement this session. Last year this was a lot more difficult because of the high percentage of Eagles that were virtual. The Eagles have been able to have many productive conversations about what rules need to be put into place and why they are important for their studio environment.
On top of everything else, we have rolled out a short psychology quest (three weeks) to give the Eagles a basic nomenclature on performance psychology. The quest was partly based on basic cognitive behavior concepts, social group dynamics, and some from the book It Takes What It Takes by Trevor Moawad.
For this session’s exhibition, we invite you to come learn more about what the Eagles have been working on, an introduction to Acton Academy Systems (presented by the Eagles), and the contract signing ceremony.
