Group Skills

This topic provides information about major types of groups, icebreakers and warmups for groups, facilitation (face-to-face and online) and general resources for more information. Note that the reader might best be served to first read the topic Group Dynamics to understand the basic nature of most groups and their typical stages of development. (It's not clear at this time if online groups have similar nature and stages.)

(For a complete "Facilitation Library", click here.)

Sections of This Topic Include:

Some Ice Breakers and Warmup Activities
Major Types of Groups and Their Facilitation (many types of groups)
Parliamentary Procedures

General Resources
Facilitation Library

Ice Breakers and Warmup Activities

Warmup Activities
Respect Icebreaker
Anagram Ice Breaking Activity
Icebreakers
10 Ways to Break the Ice
Sizzlin Session Starters

Various Types of Groups and Group Matters

Action Learning
Committees
Communities of Practice
Conflict Management
Dialoguing
Facilitating in Face-to-Face Groups
Facilitating Online Groups (virtual communities)
Focus Groups
Group Coaching
Group Dynamics (about nature of groups, stages of group development, etc)
Group Learning
Group-Based Problem Solving and Decision Making
Large-Scale Interventions
Meeting Management
Open Space Technology
Self-Directed and Self-Managed Work Teams
Team Building
Virtual Teams

Parliamentary Procedures

Parliamentary procedures provide a set of specific rules by which members of meetings can conduct their meeting process in a very orderly fashion, thereby helping to ensure that members get the most out of meetings. These procedures are usually used in very formal meetings, for example, meetings of Boards of Directors.
Jim Slaughter, parliamentarian (see his "cheat sheets")
Roberts Rules (the official site)
Rules Online
Trout's Top Ten Rules of Order

General Resources

Small Group Skills
Center for the Study of Work Teams
Group Discussions

For the Category of Facilitation and Teams:

Recommended Books

Program Planning Kit to develop high-quality peer coaching group program: by Carter McNamara, MBA, PHD, published by Authenticity Consulting, LCC. The program planning kit provides step-by-step guidelines to plan, market (internally or externally), facilitate and evaluate a high-quality peer coaching group program for any application our outcome. The kit includes a program planning guidebook, a facilitator's guidebook and a guidebook for members of a peer coaching group.

The following books are recommended because of their highly practical nature and often because they include a wide range of information about this Library topic. To get more information about each book, just hover your cursor over the image of the book. A "bubble" of information will be displayed. You can click on the title of the book in that bubble to get more information, too.