Presentation Day

In many classrooms, group work is often being incorporated whether it be in discussion settings or group projects. This positive psychology course is no different. The interesting part about a group is that each individual is unique and brings his or her own contributions and work ethic into the group. This can be good or it can be pretty bad. There is always some apprehension when a professor mentions group work because of the uncertainty that lies ahead when you first meet your new group members. Will everyone do his/her part? Will the group work together or fight each other throughout the entire project leading to frustration and a desire to finally be done with the project and to get it over with?

Fortunately enough for Group 5, these problems were nonexistent. When it came  to discussion, all group members participated equally and no one individual tried to be heard over all the others. While there were no outstanding problems, any group can always find room for improvement when they take a moment to evaluate themselves on their performance. For our group, only three things needed to be eliminated: long breaks (substituted with smaller ones), the short time between breaks in place of longer periods of productive work,and avoiding Chinese buffets on lunch break. These are all minor changes.  There were many things the group elected to keep up: the accountability of each group member, the casual and friendly atmosphere when working together, the editing technique, and the meetings for pastries and coffee before getting down to business on projects. The only thing to be added in the future is experimenting with new study environments and the addition of bonding over food or other activities after the completion of the next project to celebrate.

Group 5 had a solid presentation for this first round. The improvements are focused in the time management category. We elected to change the time spent rehearsing. There should be more rehearsal in order to create a smoother overall presentation. The only other problem was spending too much time together brainstorming ideas. This can easily be solved by creating a google doc before the first meeting to start a project so that ideas have been tossed around and each member is familiar with the requirements of the project. As something to continue, our group decided that we would keep our own personal photos to be used throughout the presentation again and if possible keep hands on activities for the class. After observing the other group presentations, we were not above stealing some of their techniques to add some things to out next presentation. The facts and personal experiences included in the other presentations intrigued us and we aspire to do the same in the future to keep our listeners engaged and interested. the last addition is to incorporate a general overview of the topics in class and to then move from that into an explanation of how we narrowed down these concepts to our final narrow research topic. Outside of this, our group was satisfied with the first project.

Group 5 is happy and flowing naturally together and have decided to remain together to knock out this last project and finish off the course in the original Group 5.