Blog topic # 3: Decision Making

Last October 13's class activity on the "decision making process" was 100% chaotic! When I look back during that time, I can't help but shake my head. I remember almost getting a migraine during the whole entire decision making process. Thirty minutes is not enough time for a group of approximately 60 (?) people to come together with a proposed solution to our midterm problem.

Though there was one brave person who stood up and tried to lead the class, everyone was talking at the same time so it made it really difficulty to come to a consensus. I was thinking to myself that we will never get anything done with the rate that we were going. After 5 minutes or so, a couple of people walked up front and then before the 30 minutes is up, there's like I think 4 or 5 people running the entire show.

I personally chose to be "accomodating" because I was honestly cool with whatever grade I got from the first midterm. Although I didn't get an outstanding grade (I barely even passed), I feel that I deserved whatever grade I received. I'm just relieved that everyone agreed on having the curve, which is more than I could have bargained for. I didn't really join in as much as most people did in class because I really wasn't that much concerned as most people in class were. I did vote though, because I think that the proposal that the class had agreed upon was also to my advantage.

I've observed during the activity, there were definitely a few people who behaved aggressively ("compete to win"). For example, the first person who stood up in front of the class definitely set the pace of the discussion. He spoke in front of everybody, strongly proposed for a curve and dropping the lowest grade for the first two exams. I also observed that there were also some people from the audience who chose to withdraw from the class discussion and just sat there looking at everyone else go throat-to-throat. One example is this girl who was sitting right next to me. I feel that she was confused about everything that's happening. I think that majority of the class tried to "compromise" so that everyone can at least get something out of the activity.

If I was chosen to handle the conflict, I would have broken up the class in groups, give them around 10 minutes to chose a representative and discuss the issues amongst themselves. Then, after the 10 minutes is up, I would ask the representatives to go up front and write their proposed solutions for the whole class to see. We would go over those solutions as a class and vote on whichever proposition is the best. This way, I think that each person will have a chance to voice out whatever he/she wants to say.

Blog topic # 2: An Eggs-cellent Way to Plan

I think that one thing that our team wasn't able to do was to pick out a leader. The whole team was focused on getting the main goal done, which was to design an "egg-protection device," the rest was just a blur. I guess because we were too conscious of the time constraint that everyone was just brainstorming for ideas on how to build the protection device. We sort of multi-tasked between getting the design done and fulfilling the rest of the objectives as well.

Overall, I think that we weren't really able to go through all the steps in the planning process quite thoroughly. All that I could remember is that everyone was just working towards one goal, though we also had an alternative design on hand just in case we might need it. It's interesting because when we finally had the egg and the materials in our possession, it didn't look exactly like how we designed it on paper. There were some additions and adjustments that were made that wasn't in the original design that we planned.

Though we had very limited time and resources, and even if our egg broke (in the end), I think that our group did pretty well. We were able to make fast decisions and we worked well as a team.