Who Packs Your Parachute?

A couple years ago I learned about the former Navy Fighter Pilot, Captain Charles Plumb, who was a Prisoner of War for 2,103 days during the Vietnam War.  In fact, I was captivated by several Youtube videos of him speaking about his experiences in the military and as a POW.  I never thought about how I might use parts of his story as a learning activity, but recently found myself planning a team building professional development session for the teachers in my building.

Most people hear "team builder" and cringe at the thought of wandering around aimlessly trying to find people's names to fill in on a form. I get it, ice breaker team builders kind of suck.  Anytime I'm tasked with the opportunity to facilitate team building, I try very hard to make sure it's not absolutely cringe-worthy.

I wasn't sure what this upcoming team builder might look like, but I knew I didn't want it to cause anyone to groan in anguish at the very thought of completing it.  So, I did what I always do when I'm stuck---started poking around the internet, my Pinterest boards, Twitter, etc.  I was fortunate enough to stumble back across Captain Plumb's story but in the form of an article titled "Who's Packing Your Parachute?"   In this article, Captain Plumb recounts a story when he ran into a man who knew everything about him because he was the sailor who packed his parachute and ultimately saved his life.  This caused Plumb to wonder about all the times he took the sailors who packed parachutes for granted.  It also made him reflect on life and ask the question: who packs your parachute?  Who keeps you going when you want to stop?  Who is there to catch you when you fall?  Who makes even the hardest days bearable?  Who makes it enjoyable to come to work each day?

And I had the team builder: Packing Each Other's Parachutes.

Spring is tough in education.  Spring Break is near; the kids want to be outside; everyone is restless.  We wanted to bring everyone back together, remember how we keep each other going even on the tough days, and thank each other for being great colleagues and friends.  We threw in some root beer floats because ice cream makes everything better!

My principal read the article to everyone, explained the activity, and dished up ice cream while everyone packed each other's parachutes in the form of written affirmations on a paper for each staff member.  We laminated the sheets and delivered them to everyone at the end of the day!

With 50+ staff members, the idea of taking everyone's photos, cropping them down, and placing them on a template was a bit daunting.  However, in an effort to work smarter, not harder, I used the Chrome Extension DriveSlides by Matt Miller and Alice Keeler.  This amazing little Chrome Extension will take a folder of images and put one photo per slide in a Google Slides document!  This saved a lot of time of me manually inserting 50+ photos one at a time.  If you ever need to make a slideshow using Google Slides, DriveSlides would make it so easy and quick.

Once I got each photo on its own slide, I did have to resize and crop each one individually (I couldn't figure out a way to automate this process).  I recently learned that you could crop photos into different shapes, so I cropped the photos into circles.  To crop a photo into a shape in Slides, you just double click the photo until the black crop frame appears.  Then you click the crop tool on toolbar and select your shape.  This will crop your photo into any shape you choose.  In this case I chose a circle.

I found a parachute clip art to put on the sheet and put each teacher's name on each slide.  Then I just printed the Slides document so that each slide was on its own page.

Feel free to use my template here (just make a copy of the document so you can edit). But I would definitely start by using DriveSlides to get each picture on each slide and then add the parachute and name to each slide after.

Overall, it was a great afternoon during which we all just hit the pause button and took time to appreciate the people who make our school so great!