My Group Work Experience

The group work in which I participated took place over the course of a week. The first day was spent
in collaborating on a variety of group activities. The participants in these groups were all from different
backgrounds and included students taking courses in a variety of healthcare areas including
radiography, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, and occupational therapy. Although the
students were all from such allied health professional groups, there was a mixture of postgraduates
and undergraduates, and the vast majority of the students had not met each other before.

In order to tackle the task, we decided to separate it into smaller tasks according to the three target
audiences involved, dividing ourselves into three smaller groups and working on one target audience
per sub-group. At this point, I was part of the group of four people who were responsible for
considering the campaign to target graduates not taking healthcare courses. As some group
members had responsibilities outside the unit, we decided as a whole that it would be useful to utilise
the discussion boards via Blackboard to communicate with other members of the larger group. Our
smaller sub-group decided to have meetings at the university during the week in addition to this
means of contact.

The work progressed in this way for most of the week until, on the last day, the groups joined together
for one key session in the afternoon. At this time, we worked together to give our presentation for the
campaign that we had devised, for which we had a 10-15 minute window. In preparation for this
session, our three sub-groups had a meeting in the morning to discuss the presentation and finalise
issues such as how the material was going to be presented and who would be acting as our group's
spokespeople. We also made use of this final discussion session to voice whether we agreed or
disagreed with several assertions that had been raised through working on the campaign. This
session went well in general and was successful. I found that I did participate, but perhaps not to the
extent that I would have liked. Overall, I experienced that all of the group members came to know
each other on a personal level through working together over the week to complete our tasks.

Feelings
Although I was relatively quiet at the start of the session, I became more comfortable as time went on
and, by the end of the session, I had begun to contribute my views and ideas to the group discussion.
I believe that this initial quietness was a manifestation of my inner feelings of being intimidated by the
group. Interestingly, the overall session actually went well and many group members expressed their
enthusiasm about the discussion topics. These feelings of intimidation were more acute after the sub-
groups reunited as a larger group of 10. I believe that this was because I had become accustomed
through the week to working in a small group of only four people, and suddenly becoming part of a
much larger group threw my habitual role in the group into uncertainty. I usually experience myself as
a very confident person who finds it easy to take charge of situations and engage with activities in a
proactive way. However, this was not the case during the aforementioned group session.

In retrospect, if I had been in a group of people with whom I had felt comfortable then, regardless of
the size of the group, I believe that I would have participated fully in the discussion by contributing as
many ideas as possible. In this scenario, I would neither have felt anxious about making a mistake
nor experienced the self-censorship that came as a consequence of this anxiety

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