Every class I’m taking this semester has a group project in it. Every. Last. One. So far, we’ve been terrible at communicating. The preliminary outline for one class was done entirely by one student, while in another class the group wasn’t even formed until the day of our first presentation. And coordinating individual responsibilities when you don’t even know anyone’s email address is the strangest thing I’ve ever seen.
Needless to say, these issues needed to be resolved. And some of them were: I now know the email address and phone number of every member of every group I’m in, and have emailed each person with the list of all the group members’ contact information. I’ve even held (as outlandish as this is) meetings outside of class to talk with one group and make sure things get done.
But a lack of communication isn’t the only barrier to completing group projects. While this may be true for the first two classes described, in the third class I’m taking this semester, we have an entirely different issue – overcommunication. The group meets weekly after class, as well as some Fridays and Saturdays to discuss our project. We’ve been doing this since we were assigned the project, even though its initial definition was so flimsy, group meetings were spent doing nothing.
While it is important to meet with your group members, it’s more important to get things done. A meeting where no work is accomplished is a useless meeting. One of the biggest obstacles was meeting with no idea what we were going to discuss. If a meeting is called, it should be called for a specific reason. That reason can’t be “we’ll talk about the project.” It should be something more like “let’s work on selecting our topic,” or “let’s get the outline out of the way.” While simply meeting to talk about a project to get a baseline is a good place to start, the agenda for every meeting shouldn’t be “talking about the project.”
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