Group Experience Analysis
	Upon transitioning from giving solo speeches at the beginning of the quarter to working in a group on developing a blog and giving training presentations, each individual now in a group had to focus not on achieving their goals in their own personal way but instead on working together to accomplish a collective task.  Doing so required a different skillset, and while beneficial in the long run in terms of ideas and productivity, it proved its minor, temporary difficulties throughout the process.  Working in a team requires the participation and coordination of everyone, regardless of extraneous circumstances.  Throughout the quarter my group “Outdoor Sport Technology” grew cohesive and we were very successful at accomplishing out goals together.
	When our blog groups were first formed – when individuals were given the task to form groups with similar interests – we encountered the “orientation phase” and the “primary tension” phase simultaneously.  We were given a task we were uncertain about, and told to find other members with similar interests, almost skipping orientation altogether because we were already focused on a task.  Once we settled on a group, and were told to clarify a blog topic and begin posts, we experienced the remaining team development phases.  Our “conflict phase” was defining a topic we all agreed on, the “secondary tension” phase we experienced when we had to normalize our blog posts and ideas, and the “emergence phase” we encountered when we finally began to bring everything together.  Once we were becoming successful at working in a group, our “reinforcement phase” was apparent and our group from then on was highly cohesive (Beebe, 237).  
	Back when groups were formed, when the members of each group hardly knew one another, if even their name, the prospect of an impending (large) project was daunting.  Many key aspects of a successful group were yet to be developed, such as a sense of trustworthiness, leadership, unity, and action.  With new, foreign people, we all had to develop trust in one another, especially on a project which impacted our class grade and indirectly our future.  Accordingly, in every group there is a leader, and before we could get far as a group, there had to be a leader “chosen,” whether directly or implied.  Following the growing sense of trust in our group members, action was a major concern of group members, especially mine.  Coming directly out of high school where I would usually be the group leader who did the vast majority of the work, I was fearful that this was just another project that I would have to do.  I didn’t mentally take into account that this is college and that everyone is similar to me in the fact that they are all successful academically, and everyone in my group did their part as well as go beyond and try to do more than their share.  (This led to trust and ultimately led to our group’s cohesion (unity) and success.)  
	Throughout the process of creating a blog and giving presentations, our workflow similarly matches Beebe’s proposed “Structuring Group and Team Problem Solving” model (Beebe, 252).  When we were presented with a task, be it the Group Training Presentation, we were given the problem and began to analyze it and the different elements the problem entailed (Beebe, 258).  We each individually developed creative solutions, proposed our best, and collectively tweaked the most promising idea to fit everyone’s liking and the criteria.  During each major decision it was obvious that we never succumbed to groupthink, agreeing to a faulty idea just to avoid conflict; after each idea was presented if anyone had any problems with it or could propose something different, someone definitely did.  Each idea and decision we made we decided as a group and talked about each one considerably.  
	Our group found our most success when we were given a problem, divided the tasks up among us, and came back together at once and constructed our final project from everyone’s individual contributions.  Because we could all work on our own parts individually, and then come together and combine everything, every member had a lot of control over their own portion of the project.  Once we came together, we could tweak anything that needed to be normalized.  One thing I would change with this practice would be to set a standard or a norm before we split and worked on our own part of a project, because when we came together, we had to format everyone’s blog content or reorganize everyone’s part of a speech to make them all similar.  Accordingly, I would try to spend a little more time working directly together with everyone, as opposed to working along on my personal tasks.  Ultimately, however, our group practices and habits were extremely successful.  Everyone felt unity and everyone felt like they had a large say in what we did.  Our projects turned out great and working in a group was the sole reason for that.