I really enjoyed reading the article “Writing ‘eyeball to eyeball’: Building a successful collaboration” because I practiced everything Rebecca Ingalls spoke about in my ENG 2090 course for our final project. Professor Maestroni, the professor for 2090, implemented all of these ideas into our final group project. She left the room and allowed us to anonymously write our thoughts about group work on the board. We all filled the board with our thoughts and then discussed them with her once she came back to the room. She spoke to us about each fear or concern we were having and tried to alleviate our stress by breaking down the process we were going to go through for this project. We then began to go through the steps Ingalls spoke about. We started by first speaking about our experiences from past group projects, then we wrote up our group contract, next we spoke about how we would be dividing labor, and then finally we decided on our topic. We all were in agreement about our decisions so things thus far were going smoothly. Our project management was an app called Asana which kept all of our work in one place and allowed us to mark when things were incomplete, currently being worked on, or complete. With all of these components in place our project did go very smoothly and it did change my opinion on group work.
“Failure is awesome” by Alexus Yeakel was a nice pick-me-up read because it was a good reminder that failure means that things can only go up from where you are in that moment. A quote that stood out the most to me from that text was “There is no growth if we continue to play it safe”, this is an idea that we can apply to everything in life not just the classroom setting.
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