Group Work Reflection - Full Marks PDF

Preview

Summary

Full Marks...

Description

Reflection on Group-work In reflecting upon my individual experience surrounding the teamwork of the group during Engineering communication, I will detail a problem that not only challenged myself and the team but also what I learnt and will apply as a result. In doing this I intend to provide an insight into my general growth and experience within semester one. Unfortunately, the profound issue for the group was non-contribution. As we reached crucial times (25th of May onwards) for developing, finalising, and presenting our project, two members of the group became effectively M.I.A. Multiple attempts were made at contacting said members as outlined in our team charter, specifically on dates the 2nd, 4th and 7th of June through direct ‘teams’ messages and calls, resulting in one member returning to participate in the presentation. Personally, this brang about feelings of disappointment and frustration after being let down without explanation. Especially since I had taken on a leadership role for the group and various members looked to me on how to deal with the issues. In honesty, for perhaps the first time my value of patience and loyalty didn’t serve well in this situation as admittedly I took to long to act upon the matter in delegating tasks and roles to compensate for the lacking persons. Additionally, in an act of mistrust, I perhaps wrongly persuaded contributing team members that the defaulting member may have completed their sections in a location we were unaware of thus further delaying our progression. What this meant for the team and I, was firstly we had to all increase the amount of work we had to do to make up for tasks not completed. This was further emphasised for myself as I had to find a new approach to getting reports and presentations submitted. Consequently, the wasted time and rushed completion of tasks resulted in poorer quality submissions and higher levels of stress for me, as the effort and time added to this subject was taking from others. In a more self-analytical sense, it left me in a confused state upon my future approach to group tasks. Should I take on leadership roles? Is it ok to be harsher and more selfish in dealing with these situations? Ultimately, at this moment I cannot provide definite answers to these questions, but I can apply the learning I took from this experience and further research approaches that can reduce the likelihood of such occurrences. From this project and the process of reflection I feel the most significant points of learning were. 1. Remember things do not always go as planned. 2. Be transparent about expectations. To ideate on how I can apply these learning areas in future I researched relating questions. First, I found [ CITATION Ain17 \l 3081 ] which emphasised the need to “set ground rules” and “document communication.” The second source [ CITATION UNS19 \l 3081 ], reported that to make “a team function,” roles need to be explicitly allocated amongst the group. Conclusively, to administer the ‘what now’ portion of my reflection I will apply these techniques to hopefully improve the outcomes of the issues covered above relating to group work. Additionally, I feel it would be effective to continue the reflection process iteratively when participating in similar work in future.

References Abdullah, A. (2017, May 30). How to Deal With Difficult Group Members. Retrieved from EduAdvisor: https://eduadvisor.my/articles/deal-difficult-group-members/ UNSW. (2019, August 14). Guide to Group Work. Retrieved from UNSW Sydney: https://student.unsw.edu.au/groupwork...