For those of you who are wondering why that series of words sounds so familiar, they are 4 out of the 5 stages of Tuckman's "stages of group development" that we all enjoyed learning about in first year management.
I actually cannot testify that that theory works in practice, but oh well. It sounds nice and neat as a theory for textbooks.
In my first year Communication Skills unit, we have to do a group project. We all love those, don't we? There are 9 of us in a group, which proved incredibly hard to find a time that everyone was free, which ended up in me having to go into the city for the meeting on my day off, which made me incredibly not happy. But another girl has since moved one of her classes, so we can fit it between our lecture and our tute on Monday. Happy.
Well we had our first meeting last week, in a noisy cafeteria in which no one could hear what anyone else was saying, which was frustrating. (Even more frustrating that no one seemed to agree on anything. And to a certain extent, that because some people's first languages were not English, made worse by the fact that the noisy environment meant we had to keep repeating things. (I actually feel really condescending when I have to repeat and explain again to someone else who doesn't speak English well what I/someone else said). Also last week, Berlin and I were late. Due to having to go through a maze of a tube station called Elephant and Castle. That probably frustrated everyone else.
This time, we made sure we got there early, and booked a group study room in the library. Much better. We could actually get some decent discussion going, and we got quite a bit of work done. Of course there were the ones that were a little bit quiet, the ones that talked a little bittoo much more *guilty*, the ones who got into too much detail when we hadn't quite finished the basics, and the one who was a hard taskmaster and made sure people weren't wasting time and were instead talking about the relevant things within the specified time. No guesses who that was *beams proudly*
I now feel like we know what we're doing.
"Performing"
I actually cannot testify that that theory works in practice, but oh well. It sounds nice and neat as a theory for textbooks.
In my first year Communication Skills unit, we have to do a group project. We all love those, don't we? There are 9 of us in a group, which proved incredibly hard to find a time that everyone was free, which ended up in me having to go into the city for the meeting on my day off, which made me incredibly not happy. But another girl has since moved one of her classes, so we can fit it between our lecture and our tute on Monday. Happy.
Well we had our first meeting last week, in a noisy cafeteria in which no one could hear what anyone else was saying, which was frustrating. (Even more frustrating that no one seemed to agree on anything. And to a certain extent, that because some people's first languages were not English, made worse by the fact that the noisy environment meant we had to keep repeating things. (I actually feel really condescending when I have to repeat and explain again to someone else who doesn't speak English well what I/someone else said). Also last week, Berlin and I were late. Due to having to go through a maze of a tube station called Elephant and Castle. That probably frustrated everyone else.
This time, we made sure we got there early, and booked a group study room in the library. Much better. We could actually get some decent discussion going, and we got quite a bit of work done. Of course there were the ones that were a little bit quiet, the ones that talked a little bit
I now feel like we know what we're doing.
"Performing"
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