All About Group Work!
Group work… these two words can make or break your day.
Normally, if you are able to pick your groups, you feel fine, but if you are put into groups, your day suddenly feels a whole lot worse. I am no exception. I like working in groups, but if I’m with people who I wouldn’t necessarily work with then the whole process just feels more stressful. Do you agree, does the stress escalate when you work with different people? With your friends, you know what ideas they have and the way they work but with new people you have no idea how they complete the objectives in front of them. This makes things more complicated and you start to think that the easiest tasks will never be completed.
However, this is not the case. Recently, I did a group project where we were put into groups and were tasked with creating a movie about Academic Honesty (we based it on Alfred Hitchcock's film, Dial 'M' for Murder). At the start, I believed that we would never be able to achieve this task and if we did, it would be a film of poor quality. I soon realised that this was not true. Just because they aren’t my friends, doesn’t mean they aren’t hard-working and incapable of completing a task.
We all used class time to the fullest and managed to do all of the work within the lesson. Of course, at points we got distracted, but that’s natural… even with friends you get distracted. Well probably more actually! We organised an agenda for our first lesson and that got us through all the work we needed to do. After the first lesson we made to-do lists which we stuck to (mostly). It was all going great, we stuck to the deadlines well and managed to get it organised, filmed and edited within the time limit.
This process made me realise that working with other people is just as easy as working with your friends. Yes, it’s harder to start with as you don’t know what role you fit in but then again with your friends you stick to one thing and you aren’t able to expand on different skills. I noticed during this group project that I was quite organised but a bit impatient at times, which is something I would definitely improve on next time.
After I watched the film we created, I was relieved we actually managed to get through the whole process. But then I realised that we had created a good amateur movie within in the time limit of a couple of hours. We had shown a whole short story, added music, effects and dialogue and made it look good! (You can watch the short movie below.) When I came to this realisation I was shocked at how much you could actually achieve even with different people. So, I guess what I wanted to say through this blog post was that, it doesn’t matter if you work with other people, you can still accomplish a lot of things. Other people enhance your work and can make you question things more than your friends who will just accept your opinion. Next time, try to think positively about working with others and you will amazed at how much you can do! Have you ever had an experience where you had to work with people other than your friends? Did it go well?