This episode is a review model, we will explore the model and the parts that make up the model first then we will discuss at the end how you will use this model to review your tasks and challenges with your students.
The model is called the 5 P's which is made up of 5 words beginning with P to describe the roles that are filled in a teams experience.
Not all the roles are filled all of the time, sometimes only 2 or 3 roles will be filled at a time and sometimes all 5 will be filled.
To try and describe in the best way there are 2 positive roles in a team, one neutral role, not negative or positive and then 2 negative roles that are fulfilled in a team.
The P's are Pilot, Participant, Passenger, Protester and Prisoner.
We will start with the 2 good P's , P number 1 is Pilot, this is someone who is the leader of the group, they guide and support the others throughout the entire experience. They are happy to get hands on and very much want to set the plan, support the plan, lead the plan, they want to take control. They are the pilot, they are flying the plane in the direction it needs to go in to meet the objective.
The second P would be Participant, this is someone who wants to get involved and actively participate for the entire experience. They are a team player, they will listen to instructions, they will follow instructions , they want to learn, they are really enthusiastic and engaged in the process and actively trying to support everyone through out the experience. that is what the participant would do.
The next one is the neutral role, the person who doesn't really do that much and that is the Passenger. The passenger is just happy to sit back and get success by association, they are not getting hands on, not engaging in the activity and not taking an active role throughout the experience. Equally they are not trying to disrupt anyone, they are not trying to distract anyone, they are not negative or positive , they are just neutral player, just standing there being present, not helping and not hindering. They will just about do enough so they don't get caught by teachers like you. They will do enough so when you look over, you will see them kind of doing something, maybe thinking or supervising on the edges so you think they are getting involved but when you look away they go back to not doing very much. They are the masters of doing just enough but they are not doing anything at all if that makes sense.
The fourth P is Protester, this is someone who is actively looking to disrupt the experience and this is probably for two reasons. They don't want to be doing the task which tends to stem from a fear of failure, if they actively decide they don't want to do the activity and they make sure everyone knows they don't want to do the activity then they haven't failed. This is what they see in their minds, they haven't failed because they haven't chosen to do the activity. However if they chose to do the activity and they didn't manage to meet the objective or it didn't go as well as they had hoped, then this would have been considered a failure in their eyes so they become very scared of that and they actively want to disrupt everyone else and to make sure they don't take part in the activity themselves.
That could be one reason they are a protester but another reason is they may be in a group with someone they don't get along with and they maybe haven't developed those social skills to communicate with that person effectively and remove that emotion from it. They probably haven't developed the skill set to collaborate with someone and to explore ideas that they don't fully support. That's when you will get sayings like "that won't work", " you are being stupid""your plan sucks" "listen to me, why are you listening to them?"They are an idiot" .Those kind of things, very negative, actively trying to sabotage it as it's not their way so it can't be the right way, complain about everything and everything is spoken about in a negative manner. They are looking to destruct the activity and if they can disengage anyone else in the activity they will actively do that as they are trying to stop the whole experience, this is what the protester does.
The fifth P is Prisoner, this is someone who feels trapped in the experience. Something with the experience makes them want to escape, this could be the challenge itself, it could have made them take a step too far out of their comfort zone so we have a comfort - a stretch- breaking zone. The best part of learning happens in the stretch zone, comfort zone we don't learn too much we develop habits. In the breaking zone we start to develop associations later which tend to be very negative, having been pushed too far we become very anxious, very scared, we become angry and we want to escape and we will do anything we possibly can. We have also created that negative association so whenever we come up to a challenge which feels similar to the one that made us feel like that before, the same negative emotions overwhelm us again and we become quicker to shut this experience down. That could be because of the activity itself or it could be they have been put with people that are making them feel uncomfortable. It could be the protester, the arguing, the shouting , the dominance and the presence that the protester has is making that person feel uncomfortable. The best way you can see these is through their lack of speech, they tend to be very quiet and also they are upset, shy and have a withdrawn demeanor about them. Finally would be their body language , they have crossed arms, they are looking to the ground, they actively try to place themselves further away from everybody else. These would all be signs that this person is not feeling comfortable in the experience, is feeling trapped and actively wants to escape.
These are the 5 P's, you have Pilot, Participant, Passenger, Protester and Prisoner. All of these describe the different roles you will be able to find when a team is taking on a challenge. Like I said before these roles don't all get filled so can be pilot and participant and if so that is a very strong performing team, that is the team that will smash all the objectives, they are growth mindset orientated so they are always looking for solutions and failure is a step in the process of learning.
You can on the flip side have a group of protesters and prisoners as well, people that don't want to take part in the activity, they start to get louder and louder and maybe one protester starts to disagree with another protester, there is bit of a friction there and everyone else feels uncomfortable and becomes that prisoner trapped in the whole experience.
There will always be some roles filled in every team, this is how this 5 P system works.
As the facilitator how are you going to use this? There are 2 ways you can use this review model, you can use as a guided review, so the best way to do that is to discuss the review beforehand, list out Pilot, Participant, Passenger, Protester, Prisoner and you can discuss those different elements or you can ask leading questions to get your group to identify the different roles in a team and you can relate them to the 5 P's and deliver the model that way.
You can be leading open ended questions like " What roles are there in a team?", there will be leaders and second in charge. You can ask them "What makes up a good leader?", they need to listen to people, they need to be kind, they need to make decisions, they need to be able to keep people involved and enthusiastic, you can list all these qualities and then move on to what the polar opposite of a leader is? This is someone who is shouting and screaming and actively trying to make their team not meet the objectives and get their team to excel and you can then say that has outlined the protester, so on and so forth.
Open ended questions and get them to list different values that each role you would have in a team and them you could add the 5 P's as the heading, this could be your guided review. If you were going to do the 5 P's as a guided review it would take about 10 -15 minutes at the very best. You will be looking at a long drawn out review process as you will be looking at a lot of questions, teasing, reframing and follow up questions to get you to the point where you have all the information to introduce that model so bear that in mind timing wise. If you are tight on time and you have only got 20 minutes and you are spending 10 minutes on the activity it might be a bit too tight trying to do the 5 P review in the 5 - 10 minutes you have got left before you start lessons.
The second way you could use this 5 P model is through a self reflection review, so this is a reflective process where you would front load the review, discuss the different qualities as one big group, list out the 5 P's and the qualities associated with each P and give them 2 minutes of sitting in silence and get them to walk themselves through the timeline of the activity, from the very start to the very end and see if they can identify the qualities that they presented, showed and fulfilled in their groups. See if they can pin point themselves to one of the categories, were they the pilot, were they the protester, were they the prisoner, you get the point. They are trying to link the qualities they showed during the activity with the qualities they just listed next to each title and suddenly they can put themselves into one of these groups.
This is the idea of reviews, it is trying to make your students aware of how they are acting towards others and how they are acting when taking on challenges. The more times we can expose them to different challenges, review models and working with different people, the more opportunities we give them to grow and develop their skills, both social skills and also their personal growth with them being more problem solving based. They will be able to take on tasks, they won't shy away from them , they can become excited by them and they can use those new founded skills to become leaders and to become participants and stay away from the prisoners and the protesters.
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