Any training workshop of one full day or more should have an "Ice Breaker" session of approximately 50 minutes, scheduled at the beginning of the workshop. . What does an ice-breaker do?

The purposes of an ice-breaker are:

to encourage all participants in breaking down and discarding status, prestige, authority, structured attitudes and behavior habitually employed in day-to-day activities ("ice" here is slang for rigid formality);

to encourage all participants to relax and enjoy themselves and each other as persons (not limited to roles or status holders) in preparation to becoming more open and open-minded towards the substantive training to follow;

to encourage participants to interact with each other and get to know each other in non-orthodox and untraditional contexts;

to soften up participants before they face the core material of the training; and

to improve the training process of the overall training workshop by preparing the participants as above.

Many ice-breakers involve small group activities, including cutting out shapes, pasting, drawing, writing or acting out parts. . Be creative, light and relevant in assigning tasks to groups of participants.

Some ice-breakers involve physical activities, such as the balloon race where pairs of contestants must each hold a balloon between them, without using their arms or hands, and move from a start line to a finish line in a race. . It creates many laughs; and breaks ice.

Some ice-breakers require co-operation, where a small group is given an over all task where each individual must contribute different but complementary tasks. . Others require negotiated cooperation between the small groups.

The "Sabotage" session, for example, is often used as an ice-breaker, and also helps us to see how we inadvertently sabotage each other in day to day activities. . It can be played for 30-45 minutes.

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Participants who play the game learn to become more sensitive

to how they interrupt their friends and colleagues.

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Participants are divided into groups of three individuals each.

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Individuals in each group are labelled "A," "B" and "C." . The facilitator gives a brief description of how the game is played, then calls everyone labelled "C" to herself/himself.

Participants labelled "A" are told to be avid listeners and those labelled "B" are told to be enthusiastic in explaining to "A" about any self chosen topic or incident. . All those labelled "C" are told to interrupt their "A" and "B" with a trivial topic of their own choice.

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The facilitator announces that all the groups of "A" and "B" should start. . After about 60-90 seconds, the facilitator then tells those labelled "C" to each go over to their respective group and interrupt them with their trivial topic.

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The facilitator stops the process about

60-90 seconds after the interruption. . For further play, the roles can be rotated

one or two times, time permitting.

The facilitator then calls everyone to plenary for debriefing. . Participants are then invited to tell about their responses and reactions.

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This is important for recognizing and defusing any residual resentments (this was only a game) and demonstrating how easy it is to sabotage or be sabotaged in our day-to-day work. . Ice breakers are valuable sessions for beginning training workshops, for many reasons.

They can be – but do not have to be – enlightening like the "Sabotage" session in raising awareness about social interaction. . Simple games like the balloon race serve an important pedagogical service like breaking the "ice" of our day-to-day interactions and expectations about people, and allow us to take ourselves less seriously.

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Training, especially training that involves awareness

raising, is improved by prior "Ice-Breaker" sessions.