Individual Reflective Essay

These days, many educational institutions and organisations require students to work as a group at certain tolerant and coordinative levels. Ideally, working as a team will help to achieve better outcomes and efficiency while improving social and analytical skills.. I used to believe that group works are straightforward and do not require applicable societal skills, however, after having several meetings with my partners my perception has shifted. I had the privilege to work in a group with excellent students for “Cultural audit” presentation/report for our subject which was an enjoyable and valuable experience. In this essay, I will critically reflect on the process of our teamwork, discuss the challenges we faced and how this teamwork impacted us and my contributions to this presentation.Initially, we faced several issues such as punctuality and lack of communication which was quite crucial for this group work. The main issues which concerned me were the lack of communication which I think is the essential characteristic of teamwork. In our first two meetings, whenever someone tackled an issue or shared ideas, they were having trouble to get any feedback or response from some of the partners. Fortunately, we all discussed this matter, and by the time all of the members of the team were fully engaged in discussions and analysis. My main important concern that I had were the small conflicts we were having about our decisions. When you’re working on a group project, tensions are bound to surface. But for many people, it seems wisest to swallow frustrations about your teammates’ decisions and avoid getting into a debate about group decisions. However, I realised that is extremely crucial for partners to give their honest opinions and to contribute to every decision made. This is significant because I realised that the more we challenged each other’s the better outcomes we were getting.My main contributions were managing the slides, fixing grammatical and structural errors and analysing work of my partners. Overall, it was an enjoyable experience, and we all learned new skills from each other.Our team did not perform well immediately of course as teams need to learn to work together. Tuckman and Jensen (1997) developed a theory that groups potentially pass through 5 stages of development which are forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. In our forming stage, our teacher decided and told us to form our group and gave her instructions respectively. Storming stage caused conflicts and disruptions in our group because initially, not everyone agreed on the time of the meetings and the structure of the presentation/report. Our norming stage was crucial for us because we had to clarify our roles and responsibilities. At this stage, we were able to decide how we should handle the tasks and how to work effectively. After deciding our responsibilities, everyone in our group was performing at a high level and speed. Finally, after completing our tasks and roles, we had to submit our work and adjourn. I would say that every member of our team and his/her unique role and characteristic which helped us to be more efficient.