RamCamp Director 2019
Development and Growth through Tuckman’s Model
Catalina Currier
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In the Spring of 2019, I was re-hired for my second year as a RamCamp Director- one of four peer leaders who head
the entire operation. As a Director, we directly oversee 122 student leaders, and subsequently solve problems and create
solutions for the 600+ students who participate in the program. For students in LEAD, their first and second year of
the program are divided by a “Pathway” in which a student hosts a leadership position for 80+ hours and develops
leadership skills and reflects on their position throughout the following year of the program.
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I chose my Pathway to be my role as a RamCamp Director, and for my main focus of study, I chose to connect some of my experiences to Tuckman's stages of group development. Both with my director peers and student leaders, the stages of forming, storming, norming and performing were vital to a successful two week program.
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With my peer directors, we began the forming stage in early summer as a group of four leaders. Part of becoming a strong group is communication and developing achievable outcomes and SMART goals. As my second year in this position, I was the leader for my fellow Directors in what this role entailed, and the four of us were familiar with each other in our other roles. This led to a lack of structure in the beginning.
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Since the four of us had a prior knowledge of each other in different roles, we didn’t take the time to get to know each other in a completely new sense of the Director Role. We let go of beginning team building and made assumptions on how each other wanted things to happen. This lack of team building wasn’t evident in the beginning, as it was more individual work at first.
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But, it became complicated as several of us had study abroad trips and other jobs that required our attention throughout the following months of summer. Because of this, the storming phase was not completed together, and instead led to a bit of chaos in miscommunication and attribution of guilt. After we got together after conflict within the group, we brought norms to the table going forward by talking to each other more often and clarifying goals and values, implementing them with input during all points of decision making, and then at the beginning of the week of RamCamp we were finally in the performing stage, working as a seamless team.
With the student leaders, the process was accelerated in only 3 days of training until the second day of RamCamp week. In the forming stage, I was absent in a few sessions due to my RA role- causing student leaders to react to my missing presence. This led to partial storming on the third day of training where the leaders who had missed training felt left out and the leaders who attended training felt ignored by their absent director, leading to an intense discussion of expectations from both the Directors and Leaders. The peak of storming stage was during a late-night event with pizza where leaders came together to vent their frustrations about the event. That was when we began norming as a team; accepting responsibility as individuals and a whole and working harder towards a better rest of the week. What made this stage so successful for my team is that I gave them an open and free space to vent their frustrations and then turn them into successes. Because of this approach, the next day we were in the performing stage, and finished off the week with a motivated team and a high percentage of success.
It was frustrating to come into this role, knowing so much from the previous year where things were completely different, and having to work with a new team, but some of the same peer leaders from the previous year. For some of the returning student leaders, their expectations were completely different from new student leaders, who had little idea what they were to expect. After our conversations, the clarification on which roles were to be fulfilled by each person were laid out in a non-confrontational way, and all parties left the meeting with a more cooperative feeling.
My artifact for my peer group is an example of an email chain both before and after the storming and norming phases of Tuckman’s Model. I think in this artifact we demonstrate acknowledgement of each other’s ideas and move towards a higher rate of success and motivation going into our performing stage.
For the second part of the artifact, I have a list of concerns that were addressed in our meeting on the second night of RamCamp when we stormed and normed. These concerns, as addressed in a calm and open fashion, brought together our group and helped make our team more connected and showed cooperation and teamwork to get to the performing stage.
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