Week in Review: Group Analysis

Group work can be kind of tricky in terms of assigning roles and responsibilities to participants, even in in-person situations. How formal -- or informal -- should our conclusions be? How detailed? In a face-to-face context, sometimes people assign themselves roles and things are figured out quickly, just so people can leave the class or meeting and get on with their day. In an online setting, those face-to-face factors are absent, and the communication styles are different, with the increased possibility of miscommunication and missed connections. Perhaps the broad guidelines for the assignment also contributed to the complications I found with this assignment. We chose an approach and moved forward.

We each worked independently and then combined our thoughts. I'm not sure that's a practical approach for every group project, but in this case, it seemed the most appropriate, since we all weren't present for the initial meeting where we chose the object. Had we all been available, the outcome may have been different, because we would have had initial thoughts as a group, and then been able to reflect on the group work, and follow up with individual assessments. I do appreciate hearing the responses of others to the same object I reviewed. There's always something I didn't see, or didn't think to write down.

I would have liked to hear what other groups were analyzing and how they were working together, as we made our decisions. I'm not sure that would have changed our approach, but sometimes it's helpful to be able to consider some additional options.