Last year in one of my courses, our final assessment group project was a bad group experience due to a few things. The biggest issue was that one of our group members completely neglected her responsibility in the group to do her part. There was a miscommunication about when she was going to get it done and ended up never doing her part. She had told us that she would be undergoing a minor surgery and would be able to do her slides while she recovered, but she didn't and didn't communicate anything to us about what was going on even though we emailed her. My group members and I ended up doing her part since she did not communicate with us. She missed class work days that we had to work on it and then emailed me the night before we were going to present our FINAL project and asked what she could do. I then had little choice but to offer her slides of each of ours to present otherwise she would fail the course. So she presented our work essentially.
The other issue I had with the group experience is that my other group members lacked initiative and I had to direct every move, every slide, the content, etc. Even when I asked them to do work outside of our work time like I had, when I met up with them again they still didn't have it done. My group members seemed to lack the norms of behavior you would expect from a group and it was very frustrating. I didn't think I'd have to establish effective norms because we had delegated the work out from the beginning and set due dates. In conclusion, I think the bad experience came down to different personality types and work ethic.
I think my group could have benefit from this article on effective group work.
https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teaching-excellence/teaching-resources/teaching-tips/tips-students/being-part-team/teamwork-skills-being-effective-group-member
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