[BA2101] MANAGERIAL SKILLS LAB II FALL 2012 (SECTION 3)

WEEK 3: ‘PROJECT MANAGEMENT’

Class topic held on the third week of Managerial Skills Lab II was on ‘Project Management’ and ‘Group work’. The topic was carried out with a class exercise where we were given a list of management activities and rank the tasks into order. We first ranked them by individuals, then discussed with a team of five and ranked tasks according to the best reasoning from the team discussion. It was an interesting exercise for me because I was able to learn the breakdown of tasks in a project. Moreover, despite the long time consuming team discussion to make a decision, it was interesting to learn how others thought of conducting a project. By sharing individual’s knowledge as a group, it created a broader perspective and everyone got to considered alternative solutions. However, it was definitely more time consuming because every disagreement had to be discussed, explaining individual’s logic of reasoning and coming to an agreement. Also, although it did not happen in our group, team decisions can be dominated by one individual, which de-emphasizes the meaning of group work.

A book called, ‘Designing Group work: Strategies for the Heterogeneous Classroom’ by Elizabeth G. Cohen address the importance of group work, and its underlying intellectual and social comprehension. A number of key learning abilities such as ‘conceptual learning, creative problem solving, and oral language proficiency’ (p.6) are mentioned. Cohen tries to emphasize the synergy of understanding and comprehensions by exemplifying students achieve ‘much better results on an achievement test and a deeper understanding of opposing perspectives and come to an agreement’ (p. 11). I think this is due to the reduction of uncertainty an individual thinks by getting more knowledge on what others approach