
Unit 1: Group work
Ground Rules
Most students have had experience of being a member of a group before they
come to university, including family, employment and social groups.
Every group of people will begin to form its own ground rules
and ways of working together. The roles of people in these groups can be formal
and made explicit - complete with titles, like ‘team-leader’; or the roles that
people play may be informal and accepted as ‘natural’. For example, the role of
an older family member may be implicitly acknowledged and accepted by others
without question – because that’s the way it is!
So working in a group in higher education will bring with it for most students a
mixture of the unfamiliar with the familiar; familiar, in the sense that it is yet
another social situation to be negotiated and navigated.
But unfamiliar too, in that the 'rules of the game' are unknown, and that the
student's previous education experience may not have included much opportunity
to work closely with a group of culturally diverse strangers - for assessment
purposes.
Group work: opportunity and challenge
Group work presents an opportunity to:
- Share your ideas and find solutions to problems
- Work closely with students from a range of different cultural and social backgrounds
- Develop important career skills, such as team working and time management: essential for most jobs today
- Discover your specific strengths in group or team working
- Learn how to deal with challenge and conflict
- Gain new, additional, and even creative perspectives on study topics
- Get to know socially a small group of students
- Make new friends
- Develop your communication skills
SMILE - Groupwork by Trans:it and modified by Glasgow Caledonian University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.transitwestyorkshire.ac.uk/transit/students/6-group-work/.