Week Seven

The Lecture

In week seven we looked at collaboration and cooperation. We learnt about what makes a successful team and what makes a team fail; this was in preparation for our group task for task three. The lecture was in 3 main sections: Drivers of team performance, what makes a team fail or succeed and, stages of group development.

There are 3 main drivers of team performance and they are Knowledge or Thinking, Behaviours or Doing and, Attitude or Feelings. Thinking can be described as knowing what it is you have to do, where you can find information it can also be helpful to have examples to drive this process. As a team you need to know what the task involves and how to do it. Behaviours focuses on the ability of the group to carry out the task, this can involve things like is their a leader to guide the process and to handle issues and if the team is working well together and getting the task done. Attitudes is to do with if you have a vision for the task, what it is you want to accomplish and if you trust the other members of the group to do what they need to do for the benefit of the team. If all these factors are managed well are the team has a good relationship, then team performance will be of high standards.

A team may fail when one or all of its members does not do what is required of them and reduces their efforts and contributions to the group. Many reasons that a person may limit their efforts are:

•  Presence of someone with expertise
•  Presentation of compelling argument
•  Lack of confidence in ability to contribute
•  Unimportant or meaningless decision
•  Pressures to conform to team decisions
•  Dysfunctional decision making climate

Most of these reasons can be summed up by the fact that the person doesn't feel needed or wanted in a team or feels like the team environment is unappealing to the member. To make a team work, all members need to have their voice heard and their ideas considered, make decisions as a group and make sure the environment is friendly, engaging and open to all members.

http://pixabay.com/en/organization-teamwork-fish-organize-152809/

In order for a team to work their needs to be planning of jobs and timelines for each task to be completed by, these schedules need to be stuck to and support needs to be given to all team members. You need to go over you work and the other members work and make sure the final product is up to the standards that the team desires. Team members must know what is required of them and need to make sure they are capable of doing what is assigned to them, if they are struggling then they need to let other members know well before the set completion time arrives. If all these things are followed and the team is happy with one another then the team will be able to work well and complete the task to a high quality.

http://pixabay.com/en/organization-teamwork-fish-organize-152809/

The stages of group development can be classified into 4 groups - Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing.
In the forming stage the group is just trying to get to know and get a feel for each other, group members will try and avoid conflict and are wanting to be accepted by other group members.
Storming is when tensions in the group may arise as people are putting out their ideas and are debating with other members about the validity of their plans and perspectives of the task. It is important in this stage to be accepting or the other members ideas and to be tolerant of your group members.
In Norming the group members know what needs to be accomplished both individually and as a whole, members need to be aware of what other members are doing and provide feedback to other members as well as focusing on their set tasks.
Performing is when team members are confident and are working interdependently and not requiring large group supervision, the group will have a set way of handling issues at this stage and smooth, effective running and completion of the task should be well on its way.

The How to Lecture

In our how to lecture we were shown how to perform our peer reviews for task 2. We were told that we would be put into small groups and that we could review as many as we like but only the last one will be marked. The first ones could be used as practice before your final one is marked. I thought in theory this was a good idea, but |I had the question in mind, what happens if one of the earlier reviews was done better? I guess the tutors don't have time to go through and check every review as it would take weeks if everyone reviewed more than 2 people. I guess if you think that you did better on an earlier one then you could just redo that one over again. However I'm sure that generally most people will improve each time. This review is great practice for when we become teachers, the skills we learn here of how to review and analyse work against marking rubrics is very beneficial to work in classrooms in the future with our own students.
we also looked at the start of task 3 and asked questions about what would make this task be completed successfully.

The Workshop

In the workshop this week we formed our groups for task 3, we had to record our groups on the Google Drive folder and we began to work on our Team Contract. At the moment we are looking at doing something from the Health and Physical Education strand of the Australian Curriculum.

Our lecture on collaboration will be very helpful for this task as it shows us what we should do as a team and how we can overcome problems if they arise.  

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