I guess we are roughly ending the “forming” stage and getting ready to head into “storming.” I offered up the prelude to the Week 4 class outline with, “Things are starting to get serious!” because I had come across the first instance of interaction between students that seemed a bit testy. Then, we had group reports to open the class and three of the four teams were woefully unprepared. They put on a good show (well, they tried to put on a show). Obviously – painfully so – the contrast between the one team that stepped up and the three teams that hadn’t was probably the main point.
Students have begun to discuss content for the course wikisite, and also to sort out questions/concerns about the research study I hope to conduct on establishing a correlation between peer evaluations and the stages of group development.
So far, I have to say, so good. 🙂 We are learning skills and working on applications of those skills; the collective discourse of the group is developing within contours that I believe will yield both a quality outcome and a productive process.