In our group work last thursday, i felt like our group accomplished very little. In evaluating the planning process, i see that we skipped through a couple steps and that is probably what ultimately led us to not succeed in our experiment. We were pretty unorganized and pretty much freelanced the whole experiment. Many of our group members brainstormed idea after idea which no one can agree on. When someone finally got everyone to agree another person would come up with another idea and we were starting back at square one all over again! I can say that we had a hard time making a final decision and the decision we made turned out to be a bad one.
In class, professor kurpis spoke about choosing a leader which we completely bypassed. Not intentionally though, it's pretty difficult to decide who should be the leader of the group when we barely know each others names. It would be unfair for someone to volunteer to be leader unless everyone agreed on it because everyone had their own opinions. I believe however that would have been a critical step in saving us more time to brainstorm more had we had a leader to manage the group. Another step we bypassed was the alternate plan step. Since it was already difficult enough to come up with one plan, coming up with a second or even third design would have been impossible.
Although we came up with a design that in the end, seemingly almost worked, i still believe that we needed to work better as a group taking ideas from every member to implement into the design. Had that taken place, i believe our design would have succeeded and the 10 points would have been all ours for the upcoming test! Oh well, you learn from your mistakes. Congratulations to those groups that succeeded! Clever thinking goes a long way. Happy blogging.
Hi! It seems as though you guys weren’t quite as effective as you could have been had you implemented the planning process all the way through. Group projects are always tough; it’s not easy to work with a variety of ideas and then settle on one when they are all different. You also don’t know the backgrounds of your teammates which makes the assignment that much harder. It definitely seems as though the group could have benefited by designating a leader to filter through the ideas.
ReplyDeleteIt was probably difficult to get to step two and three without effectively finishing one; had you guys picked a leader I am sure things would have been different and worked in your favor. It is like Maslow’s hierarchy, you have to satisfy the first step to move forward! Through identifying strengths of group members (drawing, engineering, etc.), the design could possibly have been rendered with greater success. But of course there are many different ways to go about it.
It is great that you were able to see afterwards exactly what went wrong; that is a skill in itself!