‘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?’
Meeting the Open Learning group and having the chance to establish ‘rules’ that good group work depends on was invaluable to setting up model way of working together that’s ideal for everyone. Starting with individual expectations, we developed a full Miro board of varying views of group work. Positive and ideal were the most filled quadrants of the whole board, with prohibited being the least filled. It was good to know the group had a lot of ‘ideal’ ways of working, that when put together, would create beneficial and valuable working dynamics. We then moved around the board to discuss why we put each note into each quadrant and to give the creator of the note a chance to clarify further to what the expectation is. Reaching a common ground, we thought it would be helpful to then inquire further into the board and make it so it is easier for everyone to look at and decipher. We did this by getting into pairs and concentrating on a quadrant each to whittle notes down and make the whole board an important and ongoing resource to look back at and help with any group-work issues that may occur.
I believe it is vital to lay down a system of what the best ways to learn are and what to avoid so everybody can be on the same page and be ready to learn and collaborate together. Doing this collaboratively, you are able to see patterns emerge as people have the same learning needs as other people in the group but we can also see expectations that we may not have thought about before or realised were important. This was why we thought it a good idea to take the time to trim them down further to recognise the consequences of what is said on the notes. We considered how ‘emotionally’ driven examples may impact the whole group or how more ‘individual’ ones could do this in a different way with less of an impact. Using the same board was beneficial for this task as we could easily share ideas and move other peer’s ideas around the board which felt equal and balanced between us.
Going into the Make Gold workshop felt easier knowing the group has very similar ideals of what group work should be and how it should be done. When given the task we were all able to configure it together and help if others didn’t understand parts of what we had to do. Thinking about possible scenarios for our collective recipe we went around the group listening to one another’s ideas of what they thought ‘gold’ to mean and represent. Coming to a standstill of choosing what the recipe should be out of all our abstract-leaning ideas, we talked about what a good ending would be and decided on one which was a ‘good environment’. This was a difficult task to complete as we all had differing opinions of what each step should be and how literal the whole recipe should be read out. The dilemma we had concerning the literal and lateral ways of communicating our idea did not become a problem as we all contributed to the task, listened to all ideas and were open to all suggestions.
The first step to working collaboratively is to outline what this means to yourself and to other members of a group. This should be reflected on to ensure everyone is happy with the result and understands all other expectations of this that peers have come up with. This should be then transformed into a resource that can be looked at if an issue arises within a group project to acknowledge and ‘fix’ the problem, ensuring you know what to do if it were to happen again.
I found it interesting to read the part about creating a system to reach group consensus, as our group had not thought of this during the basho assignment. We usually spend too much time reaching a consensus in a group. It is a good idea to define the rules in terms of learning needs. During the make gold workshop, you determined the final good outcome according to what gold meant to you. Did you have any thoughts after the make gold workshop?