In this class, I learned to look at the groups to which I
belong with new eyes. I find I sit in a board meeting and think, “he’s this
type of leader” and sit in a newly formed group and think, “I can’t wait to get
over the forming, storming and norming phases to get to the performing stage,”
and yet now I now that all of these stages are necessary for the effective
functioning of the group. In meetings at work, I watch how the members interact
and the different roles they play. I watch how I interact and evaluate whether
it’s effective.
My favorite thing about this class was actually attending
the group for our group process. I have never been a part of a support group
and really didn’t see how a group could help people. Through my observation, I
saw how extremely helpful attending and participating in the group was to
people as they learned that other people also shared their same issues and
heard fresh ideas of how to cope and learned new skills that might help them
with their issue. In addition, I enjoyed seeing the concepts I learned in this
course in a real-life situation. It sure would be helpful to long-term
retention if all courses had an opportunity for a practical application!
My least favorite thing in the class was studying for the
quizzes and tests; however, I know that through the process I gained better retention
f the material.
As far as how this class can be improved, I would only suggest
that it be required that the first three postings be completed by midnight Wednesday
so that the rest of the week would provide the opportunity to read all postings
before responding to the required three. So many good postings came in on the
last day to which I would have liked to respond; however, I’d already completed
my responses by then and moved on to other work.
I was having trouble thinking of a way to improve the class and I think you came up with a really good one. I am always posting responses to the same bloggers because I knew they would have their posts up early in the week. It would have been great to explore more of the bloggers by leaving the second half of the week for responses. In the spirit of team building and group comm I think this would really be practicing wht we are learing about inclusion of all members and building group moral. Good idea. The other good Idea I saw was to shrink the size of the paper and that made me think. If the grou pproject was broken down into three section, we may have used more concepts from the book in less words. Maybe do two write ups on the individual observartions and one write up at the end to sum it up. Anyway. good post.
ReplyDeleteWhile taking this class I noticed that I too have those moments where while being in a group flashes of what I was learning would “pop up” in my head. I feel this class ahs really made me kind of more cautious and observant when it comes to working with groups. This was most evident when I noticed there were times in practice I would use communication concepts to look at the way we were handling certain situations. As of now I do feel I’m more aware of the way myself and others around me communicate when we’re grouped together. Hopefully not only does this sense of awareness stay with me, but I also hope I can improve the way I communicate with others and put the skills I’ve learned to use.
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