Reflective Learning Journal #7

I find it harder to work with a group than on my own. Our writing techniques were so different that when it came to editing, as we had three editors including myself, it was sometimes difficult to make exceptions for personal writing styles. Overall, however, I believe as editors we worked well together and managed to make a good report. Were I to criticise our approach to writing the report there would be several things that I would change for the next group project. I do not think that we allocated roles very well. Since there were eight of us, we split ourselves into four groups of two and I designated a paragraph to each group (one on familiarity, another on idealism, a third on nature and design and the last on management) but we did not think about the other four stages of our report (introduction, literature review, methodology and conclusion). Therefore, in the end, it was myself and the two other editors who ended up writing the other four sections as well as our own and then edit the entire report.

There were a couple of people in the group who myself and others feel did not contribute and most of the time we could not get in contact with them. Even when they said they would do a designate task they never did, meaning that there were less members to help with the group report. I feel annoyed that they will get credit for something they did not contribute to but now that we understand where problems and potential failures lie we can address any issues faced during the making of this report in future projects. It is difficult to get in contact with some people, despite having a group page on Facebook, because people don’t tend to look online to see posts and sometimes just ignore them. As a result, a minority of people did not read the final report, yet again leaving it up to me and three others to make sure it was correct. These failures need to be addressed by doing the following: properly allocating paragraphs to distribute the workload equally among the group, ensuring people also upload their own notes onto our group discussion so that we have more notes to work from, ensuring that everyone contributes (although I do not yet know how we will do this) and making sure everyone reads the finished report and give feedback.

Overall, I am pleased with the finished report but definitely think that, in future, work needs to be equally distributed among the group. The amount of work I have contributed towards finishing the report put me under quite a lot of pressure and I do not think that it was fair or sensible to have worked as a group the way we have done with this report. We achieved 60% for our report and 72% for our minutes which overall was a 2:1 about which I am very pleased. I believe that next time, based on our experience from the first report and the comments given by the assessor we may be able to achieve a higher overall score. We may not be able to reach a first at this stage because, after all, first year is about developing from experience, but I believe that at least a higher 2:1 may be possible.

~ Jones' Journal