Discussion Board 8, Chapter 10 - Essay Example

Discussion Board 8: Chapter 10 When I was in high school, I often had to work on group projects with my mates. Needless to say, we often had around 4 people with varying and contrasting ideas for our experiments. Our teacher helped resolve this issue by assigning a group leader to make all the final decisions. However, our group still had disagreements as to how to conduct experiments. Oftentimes the arguments would center around the statement “Its too complex”. Which is what high school students normally say when we want to just get an experiment over with and not have to think about how to do it too much.

But our group leaders had a tendency to challenge our abilities. They would often ask us how we knew something was too complex without even trying to accomplish the instructions for the experiment. Our leader chose to validate our concerns by understanding our point of view and then negotiated with us regarding how we could complete the chosen experiment. That is how we would find ourselves working out the “complex” instructions and actually getting the work done. Then we would find out that it was never too “complex” at all.

Then there was the time when I was part of the school dance committee. Our theme was 80s retro. The cost of our decorations were beginning to skyrocket and our class president would often remind us that our budget was running low. Luckily, we were a highly creative bunch in the group who knew that just because something was expensive, that did not mean we could not have it. Rather, it just meant that we would have to improvise instead, and improvise we did. By getting everyone involved in finding a solution to the problem, the result was a highly cooperative group that managed to pull off a school dance that looked expensive on a shoestring budget.