Group work and hindrances

This is an assignment when I was at first year. --- Group work is the most appreciated working method for students nowadays. But to Vietnamese students, this way of working’s still too strange and they find it hard to perform well in teamwork. So do I. Now I have to do teamwork almost every time on class, and being a team leader, I encounter certain hindrances.

First of all, none of my team members and I is familiar with group work. In high school, we usually did everything on our owns, rarely did we cooperate with others to perform a task. So we hardly know how to cooperate each others. In discussion time, we say next to nothing. The leader just ask his members to raise ideas about the topic they are discussing, then the members respond with some opinions, and the leader doesn’t seem to know how to do with the members’ ideas. he doesn’t know how to summarize them, nor he know how to criticize those. So the first obstacle is that the leader doesn’t know what he should do, he isn’t aware of his role in team work.

Moreover, the leader task is to encourage the members to work. He must know the strength and weak points of each members, so that he can make out what to do to make their strength work and to decline their weakness. Unfortunately, the leader is likely to see just the weakness of his members, thus he doesn’t believe that his members can fulfill his given tasks, so he try to do all the tasks, let little or almost nothing for the members to do. It’s not group work. But how to make the leader believe in his team? The answer lay in the members.

The members, like their leader, haven’t got used to the group work yet. They’re usually shy, lacking confidence, sometimes depend too much on the leader. When asked to do something, they reply “Oh sorry, I can’t. just ask the others to do”. If everyone refuse to do, so who’ll do? - The leader, of course. It’s not group work either. My suggestion is that although the leader must encourage his team to work, his members should also try their best to make the leader believe in them, the team must have faith together, to make them a unite, solid and power group.

The last thing I want to mention is the task given to the team. Some tasks such as writing an essay are also required to perform group work. But how can a group can write together an essay? We can’t ask each members to write a paragraph, and the leader is the one who make these paragraph a complete essay. We can ask them to contribute by giving ideas to make an outline, but who’ll write the final? I really find it hard to do team work in such aspect.

To sum up, the biggest hindrance to group work is that not everyone is familiar with this style of working. It may take time for them to get used to it. Now all the team must do is trying harder and harder to cooperate each others better and the leader is the one who try the most.