Reflective Report

INTRODUCTION

The following assignment is based on two learning outcomes of the residential weekend took place as a part of Organisation Analysis module. The main purpose of this is to submit an individual reflective report about the activities undertaken during the weekend. I am going to structure my assignment based on Honey and Mumford's learning cycle (Mumford, 1997, p.32 cited in Honey and Mumford, 1992) with the stages of ‘Having an experience, Reviewing the experience, Concluding from the experience and Planning next step', which defines four learning styles ‘Activists, Reflectors, Theorists and Pragmatists'. The reason why I chose this model because it feels most appropriate to me and best supports me to learn from my experience. However, I am going to refer to some published works which I found are relevant or contrast to my learning experience at some specific points.

Activity 1: Recruitment Exercise

As a group consisted of seven people with different backgrounds we discuss about the task. I submit my own idea and two of the students come up with other ideas whereas the rest do not make any suggestion. It is quite challenging for me as I am normally not a ‘team working' person in these kinds of tasks although I must be familiar with it for I am an architect. It now has been for seven hours which I think is very long time for the activity itself. To my opinion, the reason for that is a lack of both proper planning and efficient participation by some members. I am nearly about to give up continuing the activity, somehow, I intervene in the situation. I am not absolutely sure how I could insist on my ideas as the other ideas do not seem professional enough to me. In the end, I strictly object to the people who show very dominant behaviour, indicating my nervousness to the progress.

At first, as soon as I met the group members I felt everything was going to work in a good way. Our group seemed very friendly and enthusiastic which is actually very important issue to me when working in a group. The theory states that Reflectors in this stage prefer to regard the situation carefully which is what I did at first. I was quite ready for thing maybe going worse as it is not always about behaving warmly at the starting point in group working according to my previous experiences. For me, the most annoying thing was the feeling of depress as we had started discussing by jumping to any subject from another. Although I was still optimistically thinking of that we were making good decisions, I knew it was a waste of time.

I also found it slightly annoying that some members were likely to be too dominant whereas some were very quiet. This situation is very exhausting in group activities as I always find myself in a balancer situation, otherwise, the task would depend on only a few people's