Our Group Consists Of Four Unique Students

As I sit here to this day group work is still not my favorite thing it makes me angry when professors mention it. I feel as if we are now in college not in high school. We should be treated as one person when doing an assignment. So you could see each potential of each

“Alright,” the teacher says to the students, “I’m going to number all of you off into groups. Each group will read a section from the textbook and become experts on that section. Then, each group will teach the rest of the class what they learned from their reading.” This is an instruction common to the classrooms in the United States. More and more is the pedagogy of public education leaning in favor of team-based activities, projects, and learning. Group work is generally seen as an ultimately beneficial way to teach students, but this may be somewhat of a fallacy. The emphasis on group-based learning in public schools causes a multitude of problems.

In my small group for the film project analysis project I worked with four other students, Deonte, Frank, Osama, and Stephen. The specific purpose that we came together for was to analyse the film, Oz, The Great and Powerful and identify the different properties of communication in the film and how they were used. We held our group meetings after class three times and once before class. Our group had no clear leader, and instead each member was self-directed, and instead our group came to a general consensus at each meeting as to how tasks should be divided and what should be done before the next meeting. While there were significant setbacks to our group’s progress, aside from one anomaly our group worked well together and had only one major conflict.

Working in a group to achieve a high quality group project can be one of people’s most difficult school experiences. Working in a group is tough because there is often someone who does not pull their own weight. “There are five stages to group development, adjourning, forming, storming, performing, and norming” (John & Wiley pg 166). Christine’s group from the Case Study the Forgotten Group Member is in between the Storming and Norming Stages. The Storming Stage “is dealing with tensions and defining group tasks,” while the Norming Stage is dealing with high emotionality and tension among the group members” (John & Wiley pg. 166). Christine and her group could have had better

“When groups are planned so that each member's strengths have authentic importance to the ultimate success of the group's activity, this creates a situation where individual learning styles, skills, and talents are valued, and students shine in their fortes and learn from each other in the areas where they are not as expert.”(Willis)

We each completed different aspects of the project which highlighted our creative and intellectual strengths. For example, Emily is very artistic. Therefore, Emily utilized her artistic skills and drew and decorated the game board. Although each member focused on different aspects of the project which highlighted her strengths, we all worked together and did not leave one person doing all of the work. Lisa and I spoke with Emily about the design of the game and we all shared ideas about how the board should look and which elements of famous board games should be incorporated into our project. All group members also brainstormed about what the game’s instructions should be and which elements of other famous board games our game should be based off

As a student of Santa Ana College, I have recently had the privilege to work on a group project. Our group assignment based upon making a postcard for our school. In which this highlights the importance of one of the facilities that Santa Ana College provides for the students. As a group, we choose the Child Care Center as our topic for the postcard. As I worked in the group, I felt respected and valued. I felt that my group volunteered and contributed equally. We decided that two of us would work on the postcard and the other two would work on the essay. As we continued with our project, we divided the work evenly in order to finish on time. My group and I had different tasks in order, and we worked together afterschool

Bri was fun to work with, but I felt that she did not contribute to our group as much as the rest of us. She was hardly here due to her dual enrollment, but when she was, she would not do anything that we asked of her and just tried to copy our calendar. Because of this, Jesse, Kara, and I had to pick up the slack and basically completed the entire project ourselves. We definitely learned that it is extremely hard to finish a group project when a member is not performing as she should. I would love to work with Jesse or Kara again but I would oppose working with Bri. I also enjoyed working with Skylar, Maddie, and Connor; they were not in my group, but we did work with them some to create some ideas and I just wanted to give them some credit because they were very understanding and we used each other to bounce ideas off of when coming up with laws and the music and art therapy. Overall, i think that this project was very fun and it gave us all an opportunity to be creative and I believe that is also taught us about compromise as we ended up compromising with each other and other groups more than any other project I have completed

Throughout life there are many instances in which an individual has to work in a group to complete a task/project. The importance of group work is to have teamwork with each member of the group. Humans are driven to connect with each other and by working as a group ideas become much more enriched and the ideas or thoughts that each person ‘brings to the table’ each individual is able to add onto that idea or it can trigger one to think of something completely different.

This project has been a very enlightening experience on how you have to sometimes let go of the control and let someone else take over. My grade will be based on a group effort instead of my own individual work and that really did leave me feeling uncomfortable especially since we were not allowed to choose who was in my group and who shouldn’t be in my group. I am lucky to say that after really speaking and interacting with my group members, Luna and Lasheika, I felt a lot more secure in my grade for this project. That is not to say we did not have any problems. At first, we had some technical difficulties that resulted in Luna not being able to communicate through group text but she

With the heterogeneous groups the level of discussion and cooperative work is increased, providing benefits for every student partaking. According to Paul Burden and David Byrd (2012), “Having students work in groups generally has a positive effect on their achievement when compared to their work as individuals.” Small-group work and discussions allows for students to improve their communication skill, cooperation skills, and gain new insight and understanding from their peers in a way that could not be achieved working alone.

This relates to our small group class very closely because it takes all the people in the group to achieve the goals of the group, not one person alone can achieve the goal successfully, and if they do it wont be as good as it should have been with all the members participating in the objective.

Assigning group projects can cause many disagreements among participants in a group or groups. Most everyone has different views, therefore arguments can break out between students about ideas or who is right and who is wrong. Many students do not get along either so they could end up jeopardizing the project bickering back and forth or not talking with each other, ruining the grade of the whole project. While some students do

Tuckman proposes that groups develop via five stages; forming, storming, norming, performing and finally adjourning (Archee, Gurney, & Mohan, 2013a). The first stage, known as forming, involves clarifying the task and purpose of the group, and identifying boundaries of both the task and interpersonal behaviour (Archee et al., 2013a). For the presentation task we were randomly allocated into groups. This worried me greatly as I have struggled in the past with group members who do not contribute equally or see the task as important as other group members. To avoid this problem, the group collectively determined and agreed upon a number of ground rules. For example, we decided that all group members were expected to contribute equally to the presentation, all group members were expected to attend and contribute at all group meetings, and all group members would adhere to agreed upon deadlines. Having failed to do this in previous group assignments, this clarification stage

In conclusion, this class has changed my perspective about working in a group. Since my prior experience with groups was so unsettling, I believed that all groups were going to be the same. However, this class has made it possible to believe that there are groups that respect and take into consideration other members’