Whenever the words ‘group project’ are mentioned, I must
admit that my initial reactions are not positive. This is not due to me having any problems
functioning in a group, but it’s the uncertainty that is involved when working
within a group, relying on other peoples
input to get a half decent grade, takes a lot of the control out of my hands ,
which is not a situation I enjoy being in. Part of this is due to finding
appropriate times, in which all members of the group are free to meet for long
enough to make the meeting productive and lay out a plan that works. This
becomes more of a problem towards the end of the semester which is when we had
to carry out the assignment, as everyone is already in lectures at different
times, add to that other assignments and commitments and the window of time in
which they are free becomes a very short and rare gap. As well as this there
are problem in finding a topic which everyone is interested in and then taking
it in a direc6tion that everyone is happy with. Also are the issues that arise
if one person demands to take certain parts of the project, whilst other
individuals insist on doing less than the rest of the group. These issues are
often the downfall of a group assignment, and ultimately lead to the decent
into chaos.
However
this in a very rare occasion was not the case in my group. Part of this may be because
we were free to choose the group that we worked in, meaning we could select
people that we already had some form of knowledge about, thus knowing their strengths
and weaknesses. But in fact our group worked very well together. The selection
of the topic involved no great debate, we simply had an informal discussion
where we all decided we wanted to do something that was extremely relevant to our
university, but also worked in the wider schemes of society.
Whilst we did have the usual problems
regarding time, or more accurately the lack of it, we all fought to make it
work, even if it did mean going out of our way, with some members commuting
just to work on our posters. Due to us all making sure we had a decent amount
of time to talk and not just 10 minutes during a lecture change, our plan of
action just seemed to fall into place, with tasks being fairly divided to who
we felt would carry it out best, this even extended to each member helping the
others in cases of where they encountered any problems.
Although toward the end we were extremely
short on time due to each member having exams of other assignments due at
different times making it extremely hard to meet up and create the actual poster.
We pulled together, to create a poster that we are all justly proud of. Even
though the poster was put together last minute it did not lose any of the
quality from what we originally attended it to have, as everyone just did what
the needed to do with no conflict.
Overall, whilst I still maintain
that this was a rare occurrence, in term of how easy working in this group was,
it was sort of enjoyable in a strange way. As a result I now feel slightly less
cautions about working in a group, although I still don’t view it as an ideal
situation I no longer look on it in complete distain. I just hope our final
mark represents the group effort that was put into it.
No comments:
Post a Comment