Swag Team Reflection

We are Swag Team 6, and it has been over two months since we were assigned our group. Significant progress was made in the duration of our formation, and within a short amount of time, the adversities we have overcame from where we began is impressive. As we came together initially, we were strangers from multiple different cultures with varying ideas and ways of going about our group. Our group was comprised of 3 Chinese students, and 3 American students. Nevertheless, even the Americans had varying cultures. Alongside the cultural shock, was the moment we realized our ages varied dramatically. Georgette, a 17 year old sophomore, impressed the group the most. The realization that she was only half the age of Mark, 34, was astonishing. The …show more content…
For the most part, this was the first experience of any kind of group meeting that anyone of us has had, and thus we all lacked essential knowledge on how to conduct a meeting and made it severely inefficient. On one hand, we experienced one of our first stumbles, a secondary tension, that may have been because of a task (simple) conflict. On the other hand, we began to build trust amongst the five of us, which would allow us to develop a sense of belonging. Initially, this meeting had no clear goal, and more indirectly turned it into us getting a “feeling” of each other out. At this point, we were dropped into the storming stage. We did not have a clear consensus on what specific volunteer activity we would end up participating in, even though the entire goal was to decide on a volunteer activity. To manage the conflict, we focused on our common goal and decided to postpone the decision-making to the next meeting. As unproductive as that sounds, the first meeting helped us navigate how to interact with one another to directly reach a point. Our group climate was very supportive and everyone was willing to communicate with each other and share their ideas. In addition, we established our team rules and norms that allowed no Chinese to be spoken during the meeting and everyone was expected to be on time to all the meetings, and at the very least communicate with the group and show …show more content…
We finally reached a consensus to do volunteer work at The Family School run by Hands On Greater Phoenix Organization. It was a very effective meeting, every single member had a fingerprint on the suggestions, and this subconsciously made every member feel apart of the outcome. We started to have a strong bond and a more cohesive relationship towards each other. We do not only use the group chat to talk about the project, but also to help one another on other matters such as setting up a group study for the midterm and reminding groupmates of deadlines, and even personal issues that were off school grounds. After the third meeting, Mark glued the majority of the proposal together, and Kedi reviewed and edited the proposal and submitted it on