Reflection on Team Work

As you will note from my CV, I hold a First Class BA Honours Degree in Childhood and Family Studies and Education Studies. Whilst the majority of the modules I studied were based around developing my knowledge of working with children and families, some modules were focused on my professional and ethical practice.

As part of my Business Innovation Development Project Unit, I had the opportunity to put myself into group with my friends or people I believed I could work well with. In the first stages of our group we all tried to get to know each other more through analysing personality and learning types’ test that we previously undertook. I realise we were going through the normal stages of the team formation in particular forming and norming (Tuckman, 1965). In my assignment group we had all Belbin team roles which helped us perform well throughout our project and also helped us to identify other team members’ behavioural strengths and weaknesses. During the initial stages of the group getting together I believed it was

Reflect critically and individually on the experience of producing your presentation as a shared piece of work, and discuss the implications for collaborative working as an underpinning principle of health and social care policy. At its simplest concept, collaboration infers that people from different professional and academic backgrounds form a working relationship for the purpose of enhanced service provision. (Audrey, L. 2003). The SCIE (2013) suggest that because issues within health and social care can often be complicated and service users may have a multitude of needs, collaboration is extremely important in health and social care as it allows practitioners to share ideas and develop their knowledge.

The features of effective team performance are set out in Brian Tuckman’s phases of team development theory, ‘Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing.’ This outlines the phases that a team will go through in order to become effective and reach maturity. At the ‘Forming’ stage of team development individual roles and responsibilities are unclear and each member of the team is concerned to avoid conflict with each other. From this point the team will go through the ‘Storming’ phase which is when they start to conflict as individuals put forward ideas which will be challenged by others in a bid to gain power and position over others. After this the ‘Norming’ phase follows and it is at this point that individual roles are defined and accepted

For this semester, I was very nervous at the beginning since last semester I was out for maternity leave. Coming back to class with a newborn was very difficult for me. However, I was determined to make this work. I have great support at home and you (Danielle) are very understanding and flexible which I appreciate. My biggest take away from the coaching cycle was that some teachers have the ability to do so much with just a little guidance from leadership or someone else. As teachers, we do tend to miss little things here and there. I started off my coaching cycle with one teacher and then ended up switching to Ms. Pennington. My first coachee was not following through with what was agreed upon during the debrief conversations and will not

Teamwork is the joint action by a group to complete a given task. This was displayed by group 20 as each member contributed their individual knowledge and skills towards the team as well as the course objective.

In this essay I am going to reflect on my experience working as part of a team and the preparation on an oral presentation I had to do in class with people from different courses, as part of the Foundations for Practice in Health and Social Care module. Reflection is educational and is used as a means of self-knowledge and to develop using a process of feeling and learning by thinking about what happened and what could have been done differently. (Rolfe, 2011, p.8-12) I will be using the Gibbs (1988) Reflective Cycle to do this. In this model there are 6 different stages to look at to help structure reflection, the description of the event, your feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion and an action plan. There is more than one model

Generally, our team exchanged details well and it could be argued that we mostly achieved goals through real debate, clear understanding and working as a solid team. In summary then, it can be acknowledged that our team communicated effectively throughout and upon reflection, this clearly aided us in reaching our overall aims.

In my undergraduate work, almost all of my classes that were directly related to my major required at the least one group project. In the beginning this was not something I was very fond of mostly because I had some bad experiences when it came to working with others on projects. Usually it was the problem of people not pulling their own weight, and doing their parts to help with the tasks. When it came time to have the assignment complete it was even harder to give a grade to those people. I did not want to be the guy who caused someone to throw someone under the bus. However, after I thought about it, I did want to be that guy because in the real world on a work project if there was someone who did not pull their weight in the job projects would not be successful. So, when it came time for grades, I was always honest, and usually if a person did not do their part I told it how it was.

1- What role did you play in team meetings or discussions (online or face-to-face)? What ideas or. work did you contribute? Consider your verbal (vocal or written tone, etc.) and nonverbal communication (body language, facial expressions, etc).

I have never studied such kind of courses before. My bachelor degree was related more to Law. First what I thought was Organizational Behavior class was something beyond me. In my point of view course was too complicated for me: everything in specific terminology and hard to understand. But after some time I was getting used to everything and even it was very interesting to do all work in group and have discussions on different situations everyone can face in an everyday life. So I completely changed my perception of this course.

Teamwork can be complex and challenging given task and interpersonal issues, level of group motivation and expected performance standards. The concrete experience spoken about in this reflection piece is in reference to the effectiveness of myself as a group member and the group, working to write a report outlining the organisation and structure of Volkswagen. Dennison (2009) applies Kolb’s learning cycle (1981, 1984) which suggests that learning moves through a continuous cycle, between having an experience, and then reflecting on that action. This cycle has been developed from Lewin’s (1951) model for experiential learning. Reflection termed by Boud, Keogh and Walker (1985) ‘is a forum of response to the learner to experience’(p. 18). On reflection, the early set group dynamics was a defining factor in the experience, and how the team conducted themselves throughout the task. Meyerson, Wick and Kramer (1996) note that ‘such rapidly converging groups require methods for developing “swift trust”’ (p. 8), which can explain why initial group dynamics are so important. I took on multiple team roles, including group leader, which could be translated into the team not performing collectively on a high level, however, I could view this as a personal ineffectiveness of my leadership style.

“Group work is a form of voluntary association of members benefiting from cooperative learning that enhances the total output of the activity than when done individually”.

Generally, the team dynamics are good and the team works well together since the members know each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Looking at the team from the context of Tuckman’s model of team development, I believe that the team is past the forming, storming, and norming stages, and we are now at the performing phase. The performing stage is usually characterized with optimal task attainment and a high level of cohesion, collaboration, and communication as well as genuine pride in the successes of the team (Management training Australia, 2015). Everyone within the team is strategically aware and understands what the team is doing and what is expected of them. The leader delegates activities with minimum supervision and members within the team look after one another. Although disagreements may arise every now and then, the team is now mature enough to attend to such disagreements and solve them in a positive way. The following are the team members;

It is about time to write my work term reflection, and it makes me feel excited the idea of sharing my experience and how it influenced me. First and foremost, I would like to thank my college for adding co-op term to our program. I believe there is no better way to finish the undergraduate program without real life experience, it is an essential experience which allows students to develop key skills that cannot be received in the classroom. Secondly, I would like to thank is Ekaline company for a tremendous opportunity they gave me, I felt there as part of the family. Also, I would like to thank my supervisor and the CEO of the company for his patience and fabulous ability to explain the tasks and make people feel confident at the workplace.