Group Projects Are Always Difficult, Especially With...

Group projects are always difficult, especially with strangers. Going into this project I was precautious, but the results proved me wrong. Our assignment, to write an informative group speech, was focused around the Westboro Baptist Church. Our group consisted of 5 people who had just met each other a couple weeks before. We got started right away on trying to come up with ideas for our presentation style. Deciding on a news broadcast, we assigned each other subcategories to focus on. Even though there was some obstacles and difficulties associated with this speech, we pulled through at the last moment. Leadership within a group is the influence used to help clarify a group’s purpose or help guide a group to achieve its goals. Within a†¦show more content†¦In the end, we focused on the task and leadership was not an issue. Another key aspect we looked at in our groups was our member participation. With the tendency to not have everyone in class that our group faced, it was hard to check on equal participation. With group messaging and last-minute meetings we were able to even out the participation. I found that Katie was our information seeker, Allison our evaluator, Chelsea our orienteer, Justin our coordinator, and me the energizer. This distribution of responsibilities and jobs was hard to coordinate with one another but learned to focus on each other’s strengths. While in group projects, one tends to find an unequal distribution of participation within a group. Our group faced this same challenge with some people putting in more effort than others. We face d some help seekers and withdrawers, as our book talks about, but were able to corral them back into our speech. Problem solving and decision making is also a key concept in group work. To start off, deciding our topic was the first big decision. We went around our group seeing if anyone had any ideas of which topic and the presentation style to go with it. A few murmurs were here and there and we decided on the church. Once the project was started, we found a problem in our ability to meet up as a group. Our work time in class wasn’t being utilized correctly when we only had two people in class. We weren’t able to meet outside of class because of our