It's done and thank God. When I found out about this group task I was mortified because I feel I don't work well in a group doing this sort of thing. However, during the planning of it, I started to relax and felt like I contributed to conversations with ideas/thoughts.
Despite team leaders being allocated (infact they volunteered themselves) in the very first meeting, namely Lauren, Tom, Jasmine and an unknown one from the photography group, Becky pretty much did the co-ordinating of the planning, making notes during the meeting of the timetable, ensuring everyone got a copy of it and leading each meeting and has played a large part in this event happening today. She kept us focused, and knew exactly what was supposed to be happening, what each task was about and the one we turned to with questions.
Olly and Dan took responsibility for getting our Christmas hats which we all paid a £ for. Graham got the bread and marshmallows from Aldi where he works. He also took on the task of getting the music ready for the presentation and gave us a cd yesterday, Wednesday.
The photography group have been sporadic in their involvement both in the planning and at the actual event only 3 of their team turned up. Ben volunteered to take photographs at the event which was part of a task. However yesterday apparently he rang to say he wasn't doing it. However, fortunately Gemma stepped in and said she would take the photographs which was great. She organised the camera, uploaded the photographs and did what she said she would before had to leave. The other two of their team were Erini and Amy. There were a few of the girls at the meetings including Gemma, Chanee, Amy, Graham, Erini. Chanee took responsibility for producing a poster which I have not yet seen! I do wonder if they felt we as a group had taken over the event? But someone had to start the ball rolling and start getting organised.
The music cd was prepared by Graham. Graham was willing and delivered on what he agreed to do, even though he is part time student, he was volunteered in his absence by his team to be a team leader which just shows some of their attitudes to the whole event i.e. get someone else to do it. I also feel (as I may have expressed already) that their group was almost given a choice when they were discussing with tutor Richard when we said well if really you can't be there you can do an exhibition next year - to me this was allowing them to make a choice which is very unfair to our group. That said, the fact that we all took part, attended meetings and carried out the workshop speaks volumes for us.
We spent the whole of today getting ready for this afternoon. We (Becky, Dan, Tom, Lotty, Olly, Lauren) started at 9.30 am by getting all the stuff i.e. black bag of bread, wrapping paper, roll of green paper, white board, pens/pencils, scissors and went to the fine art studio in Fleet Street. I suggested we use a trolley as a black bag full of bread is quite heavy so I retrieved the trolley from Textiles to transport our stuff. On arrival, we unloaded the trolley and I took this back to Textiles. There were 2 whiteboards in the room, however one of them had permanent marker on it so I when I took the trolley back, I asked if we could borrow the whiteboard and I proceeded to take it to the fine art studio.
In there, we cleared all the tables and chairs to the outskirts of the room giving us maximum space. There were to be 18 teams in total so with Becky giving instructions, we set out 18 sets for the teams which included wrapping paper, scissors, masking tape, a loaf of bread, strands of wool. We decided not to put the marshmallows out incase the teams thought they were for eating.
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| setting up the room |
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| the table at the front held the things required for the tasks after the break |
The powerpoint presentation was done by Amy and it was a creative, funky looking presentation. We discovered today though when we projected it onto the whiteboard the red text didn't show on the board. So Lauren came up with the idea of opening the PDF in Powerpoint and doing a print screen to alter it, and Jasmine promptly did this and it took about 20 minutes or so and it was completed with minutes to spare.
With elf hats on, we quickly ran through the timetable which had been pinned on the board, with the relevant coloured stickers next to each item. The sticker idea was that each team member would have one colour and that meant they would do the relevant coloured task. This worked well I feel. The only drawback with this was that if someone with little confidence had to get up and go to the front of the room to do a task because of the colour sticker they had, they did refuse but at the end of the day, I was powerless over that and I feel the sticker system worked. Had people not had stickers, the same confident people may have ended up being nominated or pressured into doing tasks.
We welcomed people at the bottom of the stairs and formed a kind of elf chain pointing people in the right direction, with me at the bottom of the stairs and Dan and Olly at the top. I felt confident doing this. I advised students to start getting into their teams ready for their team photograph. Once everyone was in the room, I joined the rest of the elves and it was a bit overwhelming seeing all those people in one room. I was excited though and the event started. There was a lot of noise from our audience and the team members introducing the event struggled to be heard and ended up using the megaphone which wasn't ideal as we could not be heard clearly enough. And this was a major problem throughout the whole event. On reflection, we could have done with a microphone. Infact we could have gone and got one early on once we realised that the megaphone wasn't working.
The first task I feel people got on with. I circulated myself round the room amongst the groups to see if people were ok and to answer any questions people had.
The awarding of points was not consistent during the tasks. At times, I feel nerves took over with our judges and snap decisions were made but that was down to being a human being and just making a snap decision and then reflecting afterwards. Also this is down to planning each task and not being completely clear on how we would judge.
I was supposed to present the squat til ya drop task with Becky which I was ready to do, but Becky had the megaphone before I had chance to do anything, and I just let her get on with it. I wasn't nervous before the event until about 15 minutes before, and I think in my head I had a confident presentation for the task but when it came to it, I couldn't do it. I tried to get involved in the squat til ya drop telling some participants they weren't actually squatting and a young man said this is how you squat and I couldn't handle it. He was looking at his mates in the group and any confidence I had disappeared because I just felt like I didn't know what I was talking about. I didn't see it then but on reflection when I got home and chatted it through with a couple of people, I had been transported straight back to being at school as a 13 year old, waiting to be humiliated by the lads I was at school with. I loathed secondary school and my issues started around this time and during the workshop, my buttons were pressed and I shut down and stayed in the background. I got home and I cried as I felt like a failure. I also during the event started to feel isolated from my fellow students who I was presenting with and by break time, I was wishing the event was over. I did though pick up the camera to take pictures as I was comfortable doing that. I also helped tidy up the room.
I couldn't have done anything differently because the experience I had was totally related to my emotions and my lack of confidence with a large group of 16/17 year olds. I know this journal is not about feelings, but if I am to reflect honestly I have to include them for this task otherwise my evaluation will not make sense.
Students got into the tasks especially the black dress and Christmas tree. Infact people were overall happy to get up and get involved and have a go.
What would I do differently on another group task?
- ensure I fully understood the tasks and the relevant point scoring system
- demonstrated the squat - what is and what is not a squat for the purposes of this task
What did I do well?
- admitted my discomfort at group tasks
- went to all meetings
- didn't take charge and try and organise everyone and everything
- sourced things like wool, the white board and cleared up afterwards
- took some photographs at the event
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| Squat til you drop task in progress |
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| Creative Crusts task where people had to create as sculpture made from bread |
