Sunday, October 27, 2013

Group Experiences

I believe group projects, in a school setting, offer students a chance to collaborate and engage together in the subject class material and in some cases can help students understand the material in a way they perhaps wouldn't if they were to learn the material through other mediums, such as self study or lecture. I believe that this outcome not only depends on the attitudes and work ethic of the members of the group, but also the material and the appropriateness of using a group to get the project done. I have been apart of a few group projects for classes, and have mixed feelings and experiences about what makes an effective group. 

One of the group projects I was a part of was presenting a group of historical figures and relating how the individuals were relevant in understanding the history of South Africa as a whole. The class as whole had about 40 people and we were broken down into groups of 5. My group was to be the first of the groups to present and problems immediately occurred when even trying to meet/ know who was in my group, because we had just started the class. After meeting them, it became increasingly hard to meet with the members to get the project together and we actually ended up having only 1 meeting where all the group members were present. A few of the members had jobs which made it very difficult to meet up and one member had just got a new dog and he said he couldn't leave it by itself. 

The next problem we had was assigning tasks. Certain individuals we were researching were more well known and finding information about them was relatively easy. Others took more work to find relevant information and all of us wanted to be responsible for the more well known ones. One member simply just said he was already researching one of the individuals, so the rest of us decided to just randomly pick names from the list. Then, the night before the project was due, I found myself being appointed by the rest of the group to be the person who puts everything together on a power point. I really didn't want this job partially because I am not very good with technology and moving information from their emails to the power point was daunting. Furthermore, when going through the other member's material, some of it was incomplete and really didn't answer the larger question of the individuals relevance to South African history. I had to add some information in and it was both frustrating and unfair. I felt like I cared more about the grade we were going to get on the project than a few of my group members.Because we really didn't meet up and I was the only one who worked on the order of the power point, my group was not well rehearsed and unfamiliar with the structure of the power point. The presentation did not go well and we really couldn't connect our researched individuals to the larger picture of South African history, partially because the class just started and we didn't know very much about the general subject.

A group project in which I had a positive experience in was for an aviation ground school class. My group was assigned a topic in weather. Because aviation classes are small and typically don't change people( many of the people that I had class with when I was in 101 have stayed in the program and we have always had aviation courses together), it was very easy to meet up and get along together. The information was something we were all familiar with, which made it easy for us to split up the work and find information. We also got very lucky because one of the members in the group was an atmospheric science major, and we were able to exploit her deeper knowledge. This was great for the rest of the members in our group, however, I'm not so sure she enjoyed being relied on to be the expert. We all worked collectively on the material and made sure the information was complete before it was combined into a power point. It seemed like we all took the material and job seriously, which made everything go much smoother.  

2 comments:

  1. It's interesting to me that part of the reason why your second experience was so much more positive because you weren't the one in charge, and it sounds like the atmospheric science major was. I'd agree that the stress of a group project is diminished when you serve as a component rather than the key player. I wonder, like you, if the experience was as positive for her, or if she felt more similar to how you felt in your first example, despite what sounds like a positive outcome.

    In terms of your negative example, I don't think there is anything worse than a rushed group project. I had a very similar experience in a history class last year, and ended up dropping the class because the presentation and report went so poorly, but like you said getting together and meeting was nearly impossible due to the limited time schedule. Its interesting because I used to believe getting things done early is always the best way to go, but in that scenario, much can be said for the benefits of more time.

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  2. I think your bad feeling in doing power point in the first example is interesting and common. Some people might think that it is a easy job to consolidate information. However, I had same experience of becoming so anxious for the incompleteness of information and doing extra works in last minute. In this case, you can strongly observe the difference in group members' efforts and have some negative feelings towards some members.

    In some of my classes, we were required to do case study, for example, analyzing communication strategies of an RSO. In this case, people will more likely to choose organization that have someone they are familiar with, and the person who is responsible to connect with the group and RSO seems to have extra responsibility. This project goes really smooth and this person is responsible. Yet I have the same concern after I read your post, do he really enjoy being relied by all team members? The emotional aspect of group project is also something interesting to consider about.

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