Reflecting on Group Dynamics

02-19-2011

This was a week to reflect on group dynamics. Something happened at work that showed me the power of group dynamics and we also discussed it during class.

A colleague of mine is critically ill. We have worked together closely and have laughed and argued and sometimes been very angry with one another over decisions that have been made in the past. We talk almost daily because of work. This last week many people at work, some of whom do not normally interact with one another, but have linkages through our colleague, swiftly met to discuss how best to help by taking over assignments and redistributing workload. The synergistic power of groups when they are functioning well is truly amazing.

However, effective group formation is not easy. Tuckman's four
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman%27s_stages_of_group_development
stages of group development, Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing, immediately came to mind during our after class question and answer period. Personally, I work very collegially and helping groups work effectively is a very important value that I hold so I put an enormous amount of energy in it.

Last week our assignment group put a great deal of effort into totally re-vamping our assignment based on the feedback we received from you, our classmates. I always say to my children regarding education, you get out of it what you put into it. I think we learned a great deal by continuing to work on our assignment, not just about crafting an excellent assignment but about working effectively as a group.

However, the amount of time we put into re-crafting our assignment got me thinking about how much time and effort we put into effective group formation. We talked in class about the process of exploring the emerging technology as more important than the actual product we produce. This post is about the need to acknowledge in our class that group work in an online course requires so much more that should be measured and counted toward completing our class requirements.

Here's why. Offline, I am analyzing, synthesizing and trying to integrate the thoughts and comments of my group members. I ask myself questions such as, how can we include the life experiences of all members of the group so that the creation of the assignment is meaningful? How do we move forward when there is a log-jam? How long do we wait until everyone responds?

After thinking about all of this, I also have many other questions. Am I thinking about the importance of including every member's opinion because I am female? Because I am a Baby Boomer? Because of my Myers-Brigg's type? Because I've been a manager for half my professional career? Because this is my first synchronous online course?

Why am I struggling so much in this course? I am completely fine with "going with the flow", and not knowing what will happen tomorrow because this is basically life and what I am trained to do. I take things as they come and deal with them.

What are all of you experiencing? Oh, I do have one last thing to share with you. About 14 years ago Dr. Curtis Ho taught a class and he came in the very first day and said, "I'm going to try something new that I heard about. I'm going to let you, the students design the curriculum." We were all second year ETEC masters students and were completely floored. We had no clue where to start. Dr. Ho shared that the underlying idea for this teaching strategy was that instead of assuming that none of us had any skills or life experiences on which to draw, we should determine what skills and life experiences we did have together and then go from there. It was pretty radical at the time.

Instead of lecturing us on standard video editing techniques, for example, we learned that one of the students in our class worked at Punahou and had access to a state-of-the-art lab. That became one of the class projects and I was in his group. We created a module and taught the class about emerging technologies for video editing at the time.

In the final analysis, every student in the class said that while it was a tremendous amount of work, the end results of the class were that they learned so much more than if Dr. Ho had just lectured and that they learned who had what around town, and that we bonded as a class. I remember it as one of the best learning experiences I've ever had. But, it started off really rocky because none of us knew what was going on, including Dr. Ho!

This was a hard post. Kim