Reflections on Table 2 Group Process
Dan Kennedy
September 23, 1998
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    After thinking about last night's class (September 23, 1998) on 'Framing Issues' several things have occurred to me.
First, it seemed early on that our members are still getting to know one another. Because of this, early discussion still
seemed 'stiff' or formal. Actually, the initial conversation began much as it did last week and I'm sure that we all thought
we had the article issue framed early on. Although several members were up and running quickly (perhaps because they
are used to working in groups), it took a bit of time to engage everyone into the conversation. At one point, I felt
obligated to try to pull one member into the discussion by directly asking if they had anything to contribute. Hopefully over time this will pass as we become more comfortable with each other.

    It seems that we spent a great deal of time providing examples of why the benefits of collaboration were more significant than traditional methods. But obviously in hindsight, one of the points of the exercise appears to have eluded us. While we came up with a great visual representation of what we believed the collaborative process to be, I think the author was really digging deeper than that. From the comments from the instructional team, and the other groups in the large group gathering it seems other groups did as well.

    What about the group process? As I mention above, it's still early in the process and we're still figuring out where this 'group' thing can take us. What I have noticed is that once the entire group is involved and focused several things can happen. First, if you are not careful and get off task, often it's extremely difficult to get back on task. Second, if you're not careful about how you get back on task it's possible to do some real damage to the group's functionality. From the experiences that I've had working in groups, one of the most difficult things to accomplish is to get 'active' involvement of members in the direction or focus of the group. This is especially true if the focus is undirected or the group members feel that their goal has been accomplished. This can also occur when each member brings his or her personal agenda, not the group agenda, to the discussion. While we didn't have that occur last night, I can see how easily it can happen. My personal view is that we have limited time together as a group at this point for face-to-face discussions and we should make the best use of it that we can. Being an avid user of e-mail, I would prefer that conversations that are not realated to the issue being discussed be taken 'off-line' or tabled for a later date. However, I only feel comfortable enough at this point to attempt to get us back on track by trying to shift the focus back to the issue at hand.

    As to the actual 'product' that we delivered and the process we used to achieve it, frankly, most of the discussion actually seemed in hindsight to move around the issue of the article we were discussing and focused more on the issue of peer study and our experiences with it. We also spent time both this week and last week outlining the benefits associated with peer study groups.