We have learned a lot of group skills and experienced interactions among group members in this course. Generally, we improved our interpersonal skills dramatically in group dynamic.
First of all, we all followed the contracts we wrote to the professor at the beginning of the term. We all attended the lectures and tests. By finishing our assignments and projects on time, we showed our responsibilities for learning by practicing. Moreover, we took every chance to learn from our professor and classmates.
At the very beginning of the course, we set up a clear goal that is to gain comprehensive interpersonal skills and experience in the group dynamic. With this goal mind, each member engaged in the efforts to form a cooperative, effective group. In term of result, we feel that achieved our goal and our group was very productive.
One of our key successful factors was that everyone did her best to try to communicate ideas, opinions and feelings openly and clearly. We learned how to use communicational skills in group activities in the process. We all were good listeners and encouraged others to express ideas freely. Everybody paid attention to others' feedback. We respected the each other even if we had different opinions sometimes. So we could almost always reach our consensus and find the best possible solution.
Every member contributes to our group efforts with her expertise. We shared resources, helped each other, shared responsibilities, and contributed to the accomplishment of common goals. We established a friendly working environment. All members openly expressed her thoughts, feelings, opinions, and ideas to build interpersonal trust and maintain good interpersonal relationships.
We flexibly adjusted decision-making procedures with the need of different situations. Every one participated in the decision-making process. There was no social loafing and free riding in our group. We managed to make all the resources fully utilized. Different opinions and arguments were encouraged.
When we faced the conflicts in our discussion, we saw conflict ideas as part of the efforts of our searching for best solution. Everyone had equal right to express opinions. We felt that as a group we benefited different opinions because we could review different opinions positively as resources to test different solutions, from which we could filter out the best one. The experience increased our capabilities to deal with complicated situations in the future.
Although we had a very productive learning process, we still have a lot of room to improve. Getting better understanding of the theory of group dynamic and practicing the skills more were what we could do if we had had more time. Without language hurdle we could have communicated with other groups more effectively, expressed our opinions in the class more clearly, and participated class discussion more actively. We should enhance our creativity by learning from other groups.
