Learning Sprint 1 | Peer to Peer: Reflective Analysis
I want to openly collaborate with my peers so that we can learn together. But, I don’t know where to start. How might I create a way of working with my peers that will enable the open pooling and sharing of our skills?
In a group team, communication is the most important thing. First of all, to establish a communication platform for the group to work together, some members may find it too abrupt if we just meet at the beginning. We can try to start by setting up a group chat where we can briefly greet the group members, discuss the goals of the teamwork and choose a place we all like for the first offline meeting. It could be a cafe, an outdoor lawn or a study room. Whatever it is, to ensure a relaxed atmosphere for the next steps.
At the initial meeting, we can hold some simple ice-breaking activities to get the group acquainted as soon as possible. Afterwards, the group members can introduce themselves in more details, including their previous experiences and research directions, so that they can better distribute the tasks and work within the group. With each person being responsible for his or her own area of expertise, the group can work together with half the effort.
During the group discussion, it is important to give each group member the same opportunity to express their own inspiration and ideas on the task topic. Everyone will have different ideas when looking at the same thing, and it is important to brainstorm, as each person looking at something through different perspectives will provide a more diverse answer to the final research results.
Depending on the content of the topic, the next steps may also differ. As an example, the task for week 1 was Create your Basho’s Covenant. In this task, our group first presented our ideas in four different quadrants, Positive, Negative, Ideal and Prohibited, and wrote them together in the Miro board. Each person briefly shared and presented their ideas. When we came across conflicting ideas, we were able to unify them through good communication. After this, we divided the eight participants into four teams of two, each team being responsible for one of the four quadrants, to collate and organize everyone’s ideas, combining different notes with the same or similar meaning into one, and briefly dividing the different ideas into categories so that those watching could better understand the results of our group’s task. At the end, we explained our part to the rest of the group and let the other members judge whether the summary was reasonable and appropriate.
The situation became different in the make gold task in week 2, where we were asked to discuss what gold was to us and give the materials needed and the steps to take to make it. In the initial discussion, everyone had a different idea of what gold was, some thought it was wisdom, some thought it was family, and some thought gold was gold itself. Unlike the previous task of summarizing, we could not combine so many things into one, so we chose one of these directions for the subsequent discussion. This is one way of working together in a group to solve a problem, that is, to brainstorm the best.
Good group work is easy and enjoyable. I have been fortunate to have met great group members over the past two weeks and with everyone working together we have been better able to do what we are supposed to do.
This is an excellent first post Yushan. You focus clearly on addressing the Problem Scenario, giving good advice based on your own experience. In doing so, you also give good insight into the first two workshops. Good also to see you noting the importance of communication in Basho work and showing how you handled this very effectively! What is missing here is your critical engagement with the learning module materials that accompany the workshops. For example, Make Gold is really ‘about’ how we create and follow instructions. It is important to reflect on this since the key issue of implicit Vs explicit knowledge is something you need to address practically in your own Toolkit. That might need a post of it’s own…
Thank you for your suggestion! It helps me a lot. Actually I’m going to post some blogs about each of the sprint assignments, but I haven’t finished putting them together yet. I’ll post these blogs as soon as possible.
Hi Yushan, remember that you have all of Week 5 to update and polish your blogs. You can leave it until then and focus on Sprint 2👍
I love the author’s advice on team communication and ice breaking, which is very practical and has been neglected in my blog. The author’s ideas are well organized and have detailed examples. But it would be nice to talk more about the specific methods of “open pooling and sharing skills”~
The article records the whole group cooperation and learning process in great detail, which makes me feel a good cooperative atmosphere. At the same time, some of the methods mentioned in the article to quickly become familiar with the group members are worth learning, such as introducing one’s own background, skills, etc., which can indeed better promote collaboration.
The author attaches great importance to communication among team members, and the part about ice-breaking activities inspired me very much. I think this is a good way for team members to get familiar with it quickly, which can effectively improve work efficiency and perception.