Playworks offers a variety of service options to best meet the needs of our partner schools and youth serving organizations. And while we’ve been telling you all about our Coach program recently, we want to shift gears and talk about our other school based service, TeamUp. TeamUp provides a Playworks Site Coordinator to up to four partner schools for the full school year. The Site Coordinator serves a consultant role for their schools, utilizing the “I do, We do, You do” teaching method. They spend one week every month at each of their schools leading, supporting, and empowering the recess team to create a safe, healthy, and inclusive playground for all students.
Playworks Indiana has nine TeamUp partners this school year, split between our three Site Coordinators: Jamequa Harris, Karlencia Johnson, and Nicholas Pointer. These Site Coordinators are challenged with juggling multiple schools and rotating between them every week. They are providing tailored experiences that fit each schools respective needs and it can be complicated.
“Juggling four schools is hard but fun experience. It’s hard to build the rapport that I would like at each school in such a small amount of time a week but it’s so fun playing with all of the students and watching their faces get excited when you come back after a month. I enjoy getting to know everyone from the teachers to the students, I just wish there was more time! We all love playing together and the competitive spirit there very fun and serious with the older kids. They let a coach know they are not going to go easy on her. It’s so fun.” -Jamequa Harris, Site Coordinator
TeamUp is our capacity building direct service, bringing together elements of both Coach and our Pro services to create systems level change for schools and establish a high-functioning, healthy recess that leads to positive student and school outcomes. Schools with TeamUp follow a lot of the same structure as our Coach schools do; a Playworks recess, class game time, and the Junior Coach leadership program. So what happens when the Site Coordinators aren’t there to facilitate games and run the Junior Coach program? School staff and teachers take on that responsibility as the “Recess Team” and put their Playworks training to the test for the weeks that Site Coordinators are offsite.
“Part of what makes TeamUp so great is that we really put the power back into the hands of the school staff. Site Coordinators get to better equip our school partners for success by coming to model recess best practices and teach some of our favorite games before we hand it back over to teachers. When Playworkers are not on the playground, staff and students get the chance to take recess into their hands, and make it their own!” -Nicholas Pointer, Site Coordinator
TeamUp has been around in Indiana for a while and we are so proud of the joint impact we have been able to achieve with our partners over the years. There are also plenty of exciting changes and developments coming to TeamUp next school year, like our Leagues program. Thanks to our partnership with Indiana Sports Corp, we are going to be able to ramp up our non-competitive sports leagues and give more students the opportunity to participate in after school sports.
If you’re interested in learning more about TeamUp and getting Playworks TeamUp at your school, contact our Regional Partnership Manager Audrey Hallmann at audrey.hallmann@playworks.org.
Special shoutout to all our team up schools: Clinton Young Elementary, Thomas Gregg Neighborhood School 15, Lowell Elementary, Eastridge Elementary, Deer Run Elementary, James Russell Lowell School 51, Eastbrook Elementary, Matchbook Learning at School 63, Emma Donnan Elementary School, and George Washington Carver School 87. You are all recess rockstars!
