Komives III~Courtney Reid

Since I wrote about section II last time and thought that I was reading section III, I am going to do section III this blog. I thought that this blog described the New Century College first year experience completely. This section described “Interacting in Teams and Groups” which is what we primarily what we do in New Century College. The group experience that was mainly described in this section was when we had the BIG group in Unit IV. Our group pertained to criminal and social justice. There were approximately 32 people in our group and during the duration of our project we had people trying to become so-called leaders in our group. It said that when people get in groups together like of that caliber they tend to act that way. “Opinion givers” are the people that ran our group and who also “threw-out” a tremendous amount of ideas and never came up with any solutions to what we need to do for our project. On page 216, it states how groups act differently pertaining to how long they are in a group together. We were in a group that is called a short-term task group, which is that we are only in a group for a limited amount of time, which puts pressure on the group to get the work down which caused some turmoil within our group. We did not have ample amount of time to get the work done. “Meeting once to discuss a specific issue or completing a task in approximatey 6-8 meetings” (Komives 217). Having time restrictions dampened the group because not only did we not have that many meeting times scheduled in the course, people also had time restrictions which made us have to work harder since we also had limited group members at the majority of the meeting. The stage that I do think went rather well was in the “Storming” part of Group development. When I read about how at this stage people become “geared and differences of opinion begin to emerge” it made me recall this group experience. Our group possessed such strong opinionated people that it was hard to move along the process of the project. But like the book says it can be a short process and it happened around the time of when the project was supposed to be presented. So it did last a short time and least we got our differences and opinions out so we can narrow it down to a final issue.