Group Work
Group work is a common form of assessment assigned in college. It can be a pain because you might not get to choose who you work with and be thrown in with people you don't know well. However, group work is assigned to help you, not annoy you. Group working has real benefits for learners. You can:
- Meet new people and perhaps make new friends
- Gain new perspectives on study topics
- Discover your specific strengths (and weaknesses!) in group or team working
- Learn how to deal with challenge and conflict
- Develop communication skills
- Develop "soft skills" such as negotiation, leadership and conflict resolution
- Build transferable skills that can be used in future employment after college.
Working as part of a group can be good fun; you can get a real buzz and sense of achievement when you meet - and exceed - your goals. Groups, however, can be challenging. People can be fairly random in their attitudes, standards, ideas and personalities and so some groups may not gel so well, but this is all part of the learning curve.
This section looks at how to work effectively in groups. There are pages on:
- getting started in groups
- managing group meetings
- group work best practice
- managing group dynamics
- the different kinds of group roles
- group presentations
- study groups
- group working online
- communicating effectively in groups
- giving and receiving feedback
- quiz: how good a listener are you?
- some group work related ebooks owned by the library
