For what it’s worth I’m sorry. I dunno what good that will do you. I sure as hell don’t think it would even begin to scratch the surface of the problems you are talking about. Of all things I want to say, all I would like to suggest there is one thing I would like you to hear based on what you said.
You aren’t rambling, your voice matters. Those who say otherwise aren’t worth the time.
I’m really sorry that you feel this way about your team, and I wish you all the luck in bringing your team more together (hopefully)!
Truly, I have no malice towards my team. We’re still young and we are almost entirely student-run, we understand that it isn’t always going to be a perfect system. That being said, we had our own run-in with issues this year.
One of our problems was being left out, primarily on build team. We’ve got a large team with not enough jobs for everyone. Many times our sub-team leads would have freshmen vacuuming the floor, even if we haven’t used anything yet. They were obviously getting frustrated and it was easy to see why.
So there-on out we tried to become more organized (forming a day-to-day plan of who did what). We also tried our hand at cycling kids in and out: one day we would have upperclassmen working, the other day we would have underclassmen. For those who weren’t working we tried to come up with little projects: fixing our pit, planning out wall designs, etc. We want to make everyone feel included, as FRC is supposed to be one big happy family.
Outside of robotics, try to have a team dinner or something! We’ve had get together’s a few times, and it’s always been a lot of fun. In the end we are all one big team, and teams are supposed to have fun! On the other hand, there are some people that just prefer to be alone, and there’s no problem with that!
I hope you feel less left out next time. No one should have to be left alone, especially since FRC is supposed to bring us together. I’ve met many great people in my time on my team, and have formed great friendships. I hope the same happens for you, too.
High school is a friggin’ battlefield. Building a program that works around and dodges the social problems that exist in every high school is a serious challenge, and one that I’m willing to bet every team struggles with to some extent.
Back when I was a student, I had a teammate who was truly an odd guy. He was smart and friendly, but spoke weirdly and didn’t know how to effectively communicate his ideas. He’d try to give us robot ideas in week 1 that we would discard out of hand, only to see those same ideas being used by teams like 330 or 1717. He wasn’t “in” the robotics “clique” despite showing up every day and working hard. He was one of the ignored students that you’re talking about, and I was part of the problem in ignoring him. Our (my) unkindness towards him hurt both our team’s performance and its culture. For years now, I’ve regretted how we treated him. I don’t know that if somebody had pulled 17-year-old me aside and told me to be nice and inclusive that I would have listened.
It’s hard to say if it was a problem with us specifically, or if we were just in high school and dealing with the associated social pressures. Are kids just kids, or were those fixable people issues?
It’s one of my goals as a mentor to help build an open, collaborative environment. When you notice a trend in team culture that you don’t like though, it’s hard to steer the whole ship back on course. I don’t see “team culture” discussed much here, and I’m glad to see this conversation happening. Do any of the more experienced mentors have advice on how to build a better learning environment, or books/resources on management that student leaders and mentors could benefit from?
“You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to marshall again.”
Part of (and quite a large one) the reason for my success on my FRC team, and not being ignored, was due to my ability to advocate for myself. However, the reason I was able to do this was not due to my FRC experience, but rather having dealt with some rather difficult high school administrators for the two years prior to me stepping up to the plate on my team. It was really hard to do at first. You always feel like you’re offending someone and are going to get yourself cast out even further than you already are, especially when this other person is a student. In my experience, students have a harder time taking criticism than adults (there are certainly counterexamples, but that’s not the point). It takes a lot of work to overcome this.
What I learned from my past experience is that demonstration is the best advocacy. This can be quite hard if you’re already pushed to the side on an FRC team, but hear me out. Sometimes, the best way to prove you’re right is to show someone that you are, rather than telling them. For instance, when dealing with administration, I was told there was no room in any gym class, but I needed to have one each year to graduate high school. The answer to this was to go to each gym teacher myself and try and find an open spot that fit into my schedule. Once seeing this, the admins eventually let me slide. When dealing with some rather difficult students on an FRC team, sometimes just showing them that no, you don’t need to disassemble the entire robot just to access this one part will go a long way.
I’m not saying that one solution fits all. Far from it. I know some people who really wouldn’t appreciate being shown certain things, and especially not by someone else. But sometimes showing up at the right time with the right idea can make all the difference.
EDIT: I want to follow this up a bit and mention it is possible to over-advocate and come off as a bit of a jerk. I’ve certainly made this mistake too many times. It’s a hard balance to make, but try to balance showing that you’re right with demanding that you’re right.
This is a hard problem and an ongoing challenge in our team, and I suspect that’s true in most teams unless they’re either very small or maybe classroom based. In some cases, what you put into it really does impact how much you get out of it. We have many students who show up only occasionally, and either come late or leave early because of dinner/homework/family obligations. That’s their prerogative, but it will impact how effective they can be on the team. On the other hand, we have kids who are there early every day, ask if they can help carry/set up/clean up, notice when someone is could use an extra pair of hands, etc. They get noticed, and get extra time with the mentors and student leaders. They have no trouble being heard. That’s probably not the OP’s situation, but it has to be said.
On the other hand, I don’t completely agree with either tryouts/cuts or with the POV of running a team like a business and focusing primarily on the most talented students. Unlike a business that uses employees to create a product, students are our product. I’d rather have an impact on a marginal student than increase the probability of my star students majoring in engineering from 99% to 99.5%. Because of that, we encourage students to join whenever they’re inspired to, and some of the holes on our robot are drilled by students who joined in week 6 of build season. Those holes are not always perfect, but that’s OK. As far as I’m concerned, that’s our mission.
Philosophy aside, there are some practical ways to impact the team culture around communication.
Good luck
One thing I noticed both as a student and as a mentor is that communication between both parties is always difficult especially with the age gap and if your team has a low mentor-to-student ratio. Mentors might not understand the problems a high school student is going through and may even expect students to behave a certain way or do something a certain way without communicating it first. Mentors may be burdened by keeping track of 20+ students.
I think the points stated earlier about self-advocacy are extremely important for all students to understand, but it is also important for mentors to actively remind their students to reach out to them if they have issues and try to engage each student on a one-to-one basis as much as possible.
If this is a culture issue on your team, I would try to confide in a mentor you trust the most and discuss the concerns you are having. It also helps to reach out to other teams and see how they run their team by maybe taking a field trip to observe them in-person. Work to fix the issues step-by-step.
Since you are now in leadership, I would advise you to engage the rookie members and any other students you may feel are being excluded, so you can work to change their experience from your own experience. Talk with them on a one-to-one basis and ask how they would improve the team and make them feel like they are making a contribution by using their ideas.
Perhaps, later on, you can become a mentor and strive harder to make a change for the better!
This thread is many parts discouraging and equals parts inspiring.
FRC 4607 has paved its way forward in our school based on the premise that all students have both access and opportunities to grow. We have forged ahead in our local area with the same premise - teams should have equal access and opportunities to grow - which is why we started JUMPSTART.
We start every LGM (Large Group Meeting) the same every Wednesday. We require all students and mentors to attend these meetings. Here are the intro slides for our LGM.
We use these slides to help ensure that all students understand what it is that makes 4607 what it is - a place where all can come and create their own way forward. We incessantly coach the kids about how we developed this team. The mentors did not sit down and come up with a gargantuan plan to become successful - instead we looked to the leaders of the school, the hallways where students were congregating, the lunchroom where kids openly converse and invited them all in. As the lead mentor, I do know that this effort - this approach - has never led us to build incredibly polished robots or compete at high levels. It has led to some interesting robots though.
This approach has also led us to grow in ways that I never would have imagined. Almost all of our outreach and initiatives have come from our student corps. The mentors on the team facilitate these students in their ideas. We know that the more invested that students are into our team, the better the team will survive into the next season and beyond.
This is not to say that all students’ ideas make a difference. Some ideas are inherently bad - either due to lack of understanding the problem fully or because they don’t understand the situation in full. However, students ideas are all heard. Some reach a more full action for the team at large. The ideas that do not flesh out are discarded. Either way, the student has had their time and an opportunity to express their ideas.
So this is why I am discouraged to hear that students are being ostracized on ANY team. If they are feeling that way, it is not just incumbent on them, it is up to the organization to address the situation and work through the problems.
I am also very inspired by those that have posted about how they solve these problems - or offering advice on how to be an advocate for themselves. However, it is best when this advice comes from someone that the student has a relationship with on the team - precisely a mentor.
Just my two cents.
I don’t mean to be callous here, but I think this problem as it is specified in the OP is far too vague for anything coherent and actionable to be formulated to address it.
I have never seen a high school environment (or, really, any work environment, though high-school is particularly fraught for a number of reasons) which didn’t suffer from *some * sort of destructive social dynamic.
A general call to end all destructive social dynamics on teams is, of course, *totally *unobjectionable - but it is also unfortunately rather useless, much for the same reason that it’s so totally unobjectionable. If it were so easy as resolving to “stop leaving people out,” almost no teams would have this problem. Such a call is, in some sense, an “applause light.”](http://lesswrong.com/lw/jb/applause_lights/)
Every team is different, and every team is going to have different problems. Be cautious of generalizing from your own experiences. That’s not to say that there aren’t common social dynamics that can be identified and addressed across teams - there are - but rather that even those require a much finer-grained approach than what is being put forward here. If you want to make a difference, you have to propose something that at least *some *people won’t agree with (in practice, at least, if not in principle).
By providing OP with as many pieces of anecdotal evidence as possible, they can decide what solution is best for their team, no? They have more information than we do.
I’ll chime in as a fairly inexperienced mentor (this is my third season). I’m just an adult and I work in an engineering role throughout the day. I’m not an educator and as such, I don’t know how students work. I have only ever raised a single human and I know how he operates about half of the time. My goal as a mentor is to touch lives. However, there’s a limit to how many lives I can touch when I’m on a team of 40 kids… The Team’s goal is to build a competitive robot and I like to think my job is to make sure that we turn cartoon physics into moderately functional real-world mechanics while ensuring that everyone learns something about the engineering process and how to use tools safely as well as learning a bit about what sorts of things are available in the real world. While doing all this, I like to understand who each team member is as a person… Every year it seems to take a couple of weeks before I develop a good mental map of who most everyone is, what some of their strengths are and what some of their weaknesses are… But there are always a few kids who don’t volunteer for anything, who like to sit on the sidelines and type on their phones, and when asked seem to get annoyed at the very prospect of doing anything that isn’t the coolest job on the team… When I ask for someone to volunteer to sort the box of drill bits or sort the box of miscellaneous bolts, or what have you; I add the volunteer to my mental list of “good people”… Then when the interesting jobs come up, I look around the room for someone on that list and offer it or ask them to do it… I award mental bonus points to any kid that comes up to me and says “Should I do this boring and banal thing that I think is actually pretty important?” … During competition last week, one boy who has a different role on the team was poking around the robot while the pit crew was watching matches and noticed something wrong… He turned to me and said “This bearing is coming out because it’s not retained by a shaft collar. Do you want me to fix that?” I wanted to run over and give him a giant hug but that would have been creepy so I said “Awesome! Go for it!” He won an all-star award in my head.
So the team currently seems to run as a bit of a meritocracy but I like to think we give students the opportunity to step up and shine… But like others have said, not every idea is a good one so if you suggest an idea and it isn’t taken, don’t feel excluded… When that happens, I try to explain why I think it won’t work but recognize also that as a mentor, everyone wants to talk to me at the same time and be heard and I try to listen to everyone’s ideas… So sometimes I’ll just choose the idea that seems most likely to be successful and we go with that… It’s ok. Keep offering ideas and listening to the others… Our team runs on ideas… No problem was ever solved by having a gaggle of kids playing video games.
I also like when kids come to me and say “I have this interpersonal problem; can you help?”
Anyway, this is my long way of saying “participate, don’t worry about being in the clique (if there is one), volunteer, observe, learn, clean, and have a good attitude”… If you have any sort of problem, talk to a mentor on the side…
One thing I noticed both as a student and as a mentor is that communication between both parties is always difficult especially with the age gap and if your team has a low mentor-to-student ratio. Mentors might not understand the problems a high school student is going through and may even expect students to behave a certain way or do something a certain way without communicating it first. Mentors may be burdened by keeping track of 20+ students.
I think the points stated earlier about self-advocacy are extremely important for all students to understand, but it is also important for mentors to actively remind their students to reach out to them if they have issues and try to engage each student on a one-to-one basis as much as possible.
If this is a culture issue on your team, I would try to confide in a mentor you trust the most and discuss the concerns you are having. It also helps to reach out to other teams and see how they run their team by maybe taking a field trip to observe them in-person. Work to fix the issues step-by-step.
Since you are now in leadership, I would advise you to engage the rookie members and any other students you may feel are being excluded, so you can work to change their experience from your own experience. Talk with them on a one-to-one basis and ask how they would improve the team and make them feel like they are making a contribution by using their ideas.
Perhaps, later on, you can become a mentor and strive harder to make a change for the better!
I have had a similar issue before but not exactly the same. When I was a junior in highschool I was being bullied and harassed by a mentor on the team, even though I was in a leadership position it was happening because I was a female.
I mentioned it a few times to our teacher with nothing done. I started documenting every instance and how this was unacceptable. Presented it in written form as well as having a conversation. When presented with the evidence in this clear concise format the teacher really did not have a choice but to address the issue that was right in front of him. I suggest documenting everything, and if you do decide to approach a mentor or teacher having both clear concise examples and documented all examples. This will help it stay away from a he said she said. If you have any other questions please feel free to message me. I wish you good luck.
Sure, but we could be a lot more efficacious in our aid if the OP would share some more team-specific information than they did (and other people reading the thread would be more-likely to be able to take something away if a solution seems appropriate for the described context). A plain collection of anecdotes is of dubious utility, I think.
Thank you for posting OP! It takes courage to bring up and discuss such topics. As you’ve already indicated, it really is a struggle to get through some of these inter-personal issues.
Two thoughts come to mind for me.
As a mentor, I must ask my students for patience and help. I am not qualified to deal with these sorts of interpersonal issues. I am not trained as a teacher, or a counselor. I am not telepathic either. My college degree says I know how to trick rocks into doing math. A neat trick for sure, but basically useless when it comes to resolving people issues. Any time I deal with these sorts of things, I really am flying by the seat of my pants.
Self advocacy is definitely useful. I know we don’t give every student or idea a fair share of time or consideration on our team. We simply don’t have enough manpower to do so. Still, I don’t like telling people to “suck it up” in this case - no one shoudl ever feel purposefully left out of the conversation.
Perhaps more of an aside but still… One thing that stood out to me from OP.
For anyone reading this, what is your answer to the question of “Who are you?”? Answering this should be a non-trivial exercise.
Here’s one example:
Are you the goofball of your group? That’s wonderful! I love goofy people! Case in point: I wear a red chef hat to every robotics competition I go to!
But. Does your goofiness add to your team’s mission, or detract from it? Do your behaviors make people more productive, or less? Also, do you know yourself well enough to honestly answer that question?
If you’re in the “detract” bucket, I do recommend looking to change behavior! Talk with your mentors, and work hard at knowing yourself so that you may better yourself.
Understand too that the barriers to changing behavior are often rooted VERY deeply inside of you - change is rarely easy.
This got more philosophical than I wished perhaps. Some days I forget this is a robotics forum :).
Some really great points have been raised in this discussion so far and, more for my own thought process, I thought I would highlight a few before I add my two wooden pennies.
root cause is culture
“Changing the culture of a team can be really hard, and it’s not a fast process.”
everyone should get an opportunity
“the best parts of FRC is that you need no experience”
self advocacy
“demonstration is the best advocacy”
communication by both parties is key
“don’t automatically assume that your team and mentors don’t try”
“The key here is telling the student why”
over generalization
“Every team is different, and every team is going to have different problems. Be cautious of generalizing from your own experiences.”
Now that the very thoughtful conversation that has taken place has been acknowledged, I want to focus on one very poignant comment that was made:
As STEM professionals, we (mentors) don’t always do the best job of managing the people side of these programs. This usually isn’t because we can’t, it is usually because we have never been taught how to.
One book that really helped me personally begin to understand the people side of management was Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.
I have found that FIRST is an amazing program to teach student’s the soft-skills they need to be successful in their professional careers. I understand though, that not everyone has the skill set to teach the human side of this program, so below I tossed together a few ideas from across my young career in industry.
Open and Honest
Open and honest communication is the foundation of any team made of humans (and autonomous robots for that matter). No one on your team has ESPN, they can’t read your mind, they don’t know what is eating at you. Speak honestly and openly, while always being respectful, to your team if you have a concern. Also, be mindful of the emotional state of your team when you communicate (if someone is having a bad day, they probably are not as receptive to feedback).
Everybody Love Everybody
When you start to get upset by an interpersonal situation, apply Hanlon’s Razor and remind yourself that everyone is working toward the same goal: To inspire students and help them grow.
Why Why Why Why Why
If you are trying to tackle a problem like “team culture” you can use the Five-Whys (5Ys) technique to try and find the real root cause of the problem. You have to be honest with yourself and your team if you want to really address the problem.
Kanban
For the OP, a change management philosophy that might fit your situation is Kanban: “The method does not prescribe a specific set of steps, but starts from existing context and stimulates continuous, incremental and evolutionary changes to the system. It aims to minimize resistance to change to facilitate it.” Basically, determine the end-state you want to achieve, then break down how to get there into small incremental changes, that individually will face no resistance. This takes time, but is how change can be executed in large established environments.
Train the Trainer
Give your team the skills they need to create the culture you want. First, your team has to know itself. Have your team take personality tests and leadership style tests partnered with activities that teach interpersonal skills and leadership skills. With a better understanding of themselves and each other, a team works a lot more fluidly.
I hope some of the rambling above is useful, and now that I see how long this post is, I might just turn this (along with the leadership workshop our team does internally) into a presentation for the Indiana FIRST Forums at Purdue this fall if there is a demand for this type of information.
Thanks for letting me add my voice to this conversation and if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out in a PM and I’ll help however I can.
There are a lot of great thoughts in this thread. Several times now over the past few days I have sat down to try to write some thoughts, but couldn’t figure out what to write. I do not want to victim-blame, but I do want to give you some perspectives on how/why some students can end up feeling left out, even when the team has the best of intentions.
On the one hand, I get it. I was probably that kid. As a result I have grown into an adult that (I like to think) is particularly aware of those kids and have a special empathy for them. I make sure that, as a person, you will not be ignored. We’ll talk to you. We’ll listen to you.
That said, as a mentor I also know that the FRC environment is set up so that certain types of people naturally thrive. It’s competitive, it’s fast paced, it’s dynamic. It’s especially challenging for us as mentors to monitor all the projects, all the students, and keep track of (a) who’s doing what and (b) who wants to be doing what, and © who’s still looking left out and how to encourage them to plug in somewhere.
On my team, we encourage students to take ownership of projects. If you’re really gung-ho on vision, show up to meetings, learn the theory, do research, progress the project, get it on the robot, test it, make it work, then you’ll soon discover that you’ve become the team expert on vision, and will take on even more responsibility: you’ll be the one we call on to do field calibration, you’ll be the one we call to the pit when it’s acting up. Usually there’s one student who establishes him/herself as the de facto project leader, aided by a friend or two helping them. Often the determination between who is the “leader” and who is the “helper” is as simple as who is able to make it out to more meetings. Is that unfair? Maybe, but at the end of the day, unfortunately, it needs to get done…
Now sometimes we get students that really want to do some project “X”. And wherever possible we work to make that happen. However, we do have a product to “ship” at the end of the day and it is not always possible to make “X” work in the context of a working FRC robot. Like RockRGI says below me, we have a lot more leeway with off-season projects, though on our particular team we also have the caveat that once our community-donated build space is gone for the build season and we’re back to meeting at the public library, it’s a lot harder to do stuff that requires any specialized equipment. Bottom line is, sometimes students have great ideas or want to do things that are simply outside the scope of what we’re set up to do on our team.
In the same vein, when we do our team planning after kickoff, there are occasionally students (and mentors!) who insist that we have to build a mechanism to do the “fun” looking task, like shooting or climbing. As a team we have to decide on what level of build complexity we are capable of taking on, and then how to use that capability to effectively play the game. That means, no climber in Stronghold. No fuel shooting for Steamworks. No ramps or complex swinging intakes for Power Up. As cool as those would be, there is a limit to our capability and though it can be disappointing that your great idea can’t get implemented, it would be even more disappointing to try to do it all, and fail.
Sometimes we have students that have a hard time learning to find their place on a large team. We’re fundamentally different from most school group projects (or even smaller robot competitions) where any individual person has a very large grasp on the big picture, and in many group dynamics, one person might even basically do all the work or can exert a lot of control on how the project goes. Not on a large FRC team, where we’re very much dependent on each other, and no individual person gets to throw their weight around, insist on doing things “their” way, or make everyone work on their schedule. Sorry software guy, but you’ll just have to wait for the hardware guys to finish building the drivetrain before you get your shot at testing. Complaining about it isn’t going to make it go any faster. Focus instead on coming up with alternative solutions (such as simulators, plywood prototypes, etc.)
Finally, we have students who are learning how to work independently, and there simply aren’t enough mentors to give everybody individual 1-on-1 training. You must be able to work at least a little bit on your own, and/or not be shy about asking for help from mentors or fellow students when you are stuck. This one is tough because we want to help, we want to teach you, but we also need to be available to all the other students who need our help.
On our team, you will not be “ignored”. However, sometimes you do need to step up a little if you want more attention, responsibility, or help, than you’re currently getting.
I too have been reading this thread with interest and have begun typing replies a number of times then deleting them as my intentions are to help, not hinder, the OP.
I am not the best engineer, best fabricator, or best programmer. In fact I am not as good as most of the kids I work with. What I try to do is help them problem solve and find solutions.
A huge weakness I may have is not wanting to watch people continue down a path of that has lead to failure previously. I have been accused of being to critical, and I suspect it is because with only 6 weeks to build a robot, we do not have a lot of time to go down a path that has little chance of finding success by the deadline.
Off season is a different story. Explore the ideas from the season that we shelved and see how they may have played out. I may be different than others, but nothing would make me happier than to see a student continue an idea that was shelved and show how it would have been a better solution.
It is important to look at the end game, what is the result the team is heading towards during the build project. Realize that sometimes the greatest mechanism simply will not work with the current robot build without major changes. Are your ideas being dismissed because they are bad ideas, or because they would create a domino effect and cause a deadline to be missed?
Are the mentors on your team truly dismissing your efforts, or is it possible your ideas do not fit in the current plan for engineering reasons or programming reasons?
We have students on our team I am sure feel the same way you do, figuring out how to get them involved and feeling part of the group is not always straight forward. We have a student that recently decided to quit. They were a big part of our team and the reason they gave me was that they simply didn’t feel the team could teach them anything more. When they came to me and gave their reasons we talked about each part of the program. They believed they had learned everything about electrical, they learned everything about fabrication, they learned everything about scouting, and they had no interest in being on the drive team or programming the robot.
We have another student who wanted to quit because they felt they didn’t know enough about how to build a robot to help the team. They asked about classes they could take, books they could read, things they could do outside of the team to learn to build a robot. This one struck me as odd since the entire point of our team is to teach these things to our students. This student was new to the team and we were only a couple of weeks into the season.
These two student situations tell me we have a situation we need to address. However, the question is how do you reach these students who believe there is nothing there for them? As a mentor, I want them to have fun and learn something. I also wonder if they truly wanted to be here in the first place. One always had other things going on so they missed most meetings. The other missed a lot of build season meetings and when they did attend would go off in the corner with one or two students and play on their phone.
These students are not being dismissed or ignored, reaching them with my current skill set is the problem. So to the OP, or anyone, how would you suggest reaching these two examples? What can we do as mentors to involve them more?
One thing here that grabs my attention:
You’ve created a different account to remain anonymous and left the single post in this thread.
To me, that’s a bit of a red flag. I’d expect someone wanting to understand or help others to see a problem to be engaged in the discussion. If not, it makes me wonder how engaged you are in other discussions. When conversations move forward, often those that stay engaged get heard while those that sit and listen do not.
Are you remaining engaged on the team or are you offering a single thought and then watching how the rest of the conversation unfolds? The reason I suggest the post is a red flag is it tends to suggest you do the second. If you’re doing the second, it might not be fair to expect to continue to be heard if you’re sitting back and listening. FRC teams are overflowing with ideas. As a mentor, I cannot possibly remember all of the amazing things kids have come up with. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear someone was disappointed at some point their idea wasn’t integrated. Don’t be afraid to remain in the conversation.
Thanks, these are a lot of really great resources. I’ll be studying up and keeping them in my back pocket as we start laying out the framework for next year (and those to come).