What are groups? Essay -- Communication Skills, Team Work

Groups are collections of people with similar qualities and shared aims coming together to share knowledge and to learn from each other through discussion (Jaques and Salmon, 2007). Through group work (GW) students acquire effective collaborative, problem-solving, teamwork and communication skills. These are key skills required in employment where graduates will often need to work in teams to discuss solutions to problems / tasks. According to Race (2007) the above transferable skills can only be learnt from, and with, other people. Humans are social beings, thus individual learning is seen as a cultural process of participation as a group member interacting and socialising with each other (Maiden and Perry, 2011). Learners were tasked to design a module in groups of five or six in LTM113. Tuckman’s Model (TM) of group development will be used to discuss how GW is employed as a means to achieve the development of a module. TM is used by behaviourist scientist to analyse individual and group behaviour in the workplace, but the realm for Higher Education is that by recognising where a group is in the process, teachers can help steer the group to the desired stage. A brief synopsis of each stage is outlined below, reflecting on my experience in GW. The first stage of TM is Forming where members comes together to form a group, which involves testing limits to identify boundaries of both interpersonal and task behaviours (Tuckman, 1965). My group consists of a heterogenous mix of five lecturers from different faculty, providing mixed academic ability and experience to benefit GW. Participating in self-selection into groups promotes a sense of ownership, but self-selected groups can be subjective to discrimination by... ...eeping a focus on the task enabled the group to effectively reallocate roles, and collective effort helps towards the building of the module. A criticism of TM is that it is linear and observations are qualitative, subjective to bias. Findings cannot be generalised as there is a lack of control of independent variables and inequality in representation (Tuckman, 1965). An argument is that development of groups is not straightforward because human processes are complex. There may be overlap between different stages in TM as when group conflict is fading, feelings of cohesion may be rising. These changes do not occur in a discontinuous, staged-like sequence. Furthermore, groups are constantly forming and changing and they can move to a different stage. For example, when the group was performing, unexpected problems could force the group back to storming.