Team Development Course

Team Development Course

The most popular and most utilized program is the Team Development Course. Participants work through a series of activities and challenges that take them out of their everyday setting and into an environment of unknown outcomes and often surprising results. The EDGE’s Team Development Course (TDC) provides experiences that develop:

• Social, Emotional, Relationship Skills
• Clear and Effective Communication
• Choice and Natural Consequences
• Healthy Risk-taking in a Supportive Environment
• A Powerful Shared Experience
• Executive Functioning Skills

Activities are sequenced to build and practice skills throughout the team’s time together. Facilitators choose their group’s activities, starting with ground-based initiatives and moving onto fixed low elements. That means challenges increase as do creative solutions. Team members learn how to utilize the different physical, emotional, and intellectual strengths within the group. After each element the team reflects on how they worked together and how they can improve with the next event. The power of cooperation and trust builds with each event.

Facilitators utilize reflections to increase awareness of individual and group skills that apply back to real world scenarios. The end result is a truly dynamic team with confident and committed members.

Duration

TDC programs can operate between 2 – 6 hours or over multiple days.

About the Low Ropes Elements

TDC programs utilize the most low ropes elements. These are fixed elements made of poles, steel cable, thick rope, wooden platforms, and other components that sit just off the ground and cannot be removed. These elements are designed to withstand heavy use and the weight of multiple people.

25 Low Elements and more can be found on the EDGE Challenge Course. This allows the EDGE to serve large groups at the same time and allowing each small group (12 – 15) to have their own unique experience. Facilitators have the flexibility to choose low elements that best suit each group’s skill level, ability level, and identified goals.

• Some elements do require some extent of lifting individuals, whether it is helping them step up or move over an entire wall.
• Most elements require some level of balance and bending while walking across steel cables, or narrow boards with spotters.
• Two elements include a swinging component where individuals swing across a space with support from spotters.
• Some elements may be completed seated or standing.
• We do not operate trust falls. While this was a great original element of Challenge Courses, over the last 60 years the industry has developed more innovative elements.

Access:

All low elements are accessed via a wide packed dirt or crushed gravel trail. Individuals can expect to walk at least 1.5mi over the course of a typical 4-hour program. Every low element has bench seating.

Excel Series

Teamwork to the Rescue at The EDGE’s Excel Series! The Excel Series is a series of seven high-level problem solving challenges for the team looking to build creativity, hone excellent communication skills, develop leadership, and explore and enhance group members’ strengths.

Alpine Tower developed the series after a course designer with a search and rescue background discovered he could apply the strong lesson of teamwork he learned in that field to a ground-based group of challenges.

The Excel Series can take a group to the next level of teamwork, creativity, and support by engaging participants in a mock rescue scenario in which one participant is carried in a rescue litter over various challenges. The team is given a set of gear to help them traverse the elements, and within a set of safety guidelines, they must transport one of their team members from one element to the next.

It is a very versatile set of challenges. For example, facilitators may also focus on only a few elements. Some teams may determine they need to transport belongings rather than a person across the series. Some teams may wish to focus only on traversing the elements and not on transporting people or objects.

We recommend the full Excel Series for high school students; college students, staff, and faculty; or professional adults. However, many of the individual elements are frequently used for younger participant groups.

The EDGE recommends the series for groups of 12 to 48 participants at a time.

Team Development Courses can Help Teams:

• Improve problem solving skills.
• Develop or strengthen communication skills.
• Inspire creativity.
• Foster leadership.
• Identify and maximize group members’ strengths.
• Make and realize team goals.

Ready to schedule with us? Submit an Information Request Form or contact us at [email protected] or (703) 993-4313.