Blog Post 1 - Rawan Hussain

     Last week, we had to present on chapter 9, which is “Communicating in Groups.” When I first found out about this presentation, I was shocked. How could we have a presentation this early in the course? But mostly, I was worried about who would be part of my group. I hoped we could work together without any issues coming up. My worries worsened when the groups were separated; no one was communicating. It was ironic we were assigned this chapter since we were doing everything but communicating for a while. I tried to bring up the presentation and I had very short answers, which was understandable since a presentation being assigned on the first day. We all agreed that we should first read the chapter before assigning anything and that on Wednesday we would talk about it. On Wednesday, some students already chose their parts, and we assigned the rest based on who and what parts were missing. A google slides was created and we each worked on it separately. 

    The day of the presentation came, I was nervous but excited. The first group presented chapter 10, “Group Leadership and Problem Solving.” Different types of leadership styles were presented, including autocratic, democratic/participative, laissez-faire, transformational, and servant. This was interesting since in chapter 9, there was also mention of leadership, in a family group, and how they communicate in a group. It was interesting to see the leadership concepts expanded upon. The different roles of members of a group expand the concept of communication in groups, how does someone communicate non-verbally in a group, how do they interact with others, what do they contribute to the group are all questions that can be answered. While not everything fits inside of the set standards, it does make it easier to understand the different roles an individual holds in a group. Diversifying a group with different roles is important since someone is not able to do everything; being able to rely on others is just as important as relying on oneself. Sharing responsibilities like this also removes the pressure of holding a group together on a sole leader; this contributes to how healthy and strong a group is. Many groups come together to discuss a topic; it would be counterproductive to not prepare the meeting. Using the time effectively permits everyone to be able to feel fulfilled by the meeting. The most important part about communicating together is to always try to be understanding and to not jump to conclusions. After the meeting, reviewing the outcome must be done by everyone so that any improvements can be made. These meetings can go hand in hand with problem solving since no one can improve themselves without knowing what to improve. Meeting and discussing what went wrong and how to improve should be done regularly, especially if the group contains a lot of people. Group effectiveness is evaluated thanks to all these factors; the group should be able to fulfill an end goal, it can be from showing support to one another to creating a presentation on a chapter for a college speech class. I really enjoyed this group’s presentation. It was very interesting and lively. 

    The next group presented chapter 3, “Intercultural Communication.” When I saw this theme being presented, I was shocked since my part of our presentation dips a bit into culture and communication. This chapter is extremely important, especially in a culturally diverse area like Miami. Learning about different cultures and how they interact with each other in one’s area is important since there can be a dominant culture, which may not be the one the person grew up with. In my case, being around so many Hispanics was a culture shock. My idea of the United States before moving to the country was mostly English speakers interacting with each other in different cultures; however, my neighborhood’s dominant culture is Hispanic culture. It was hard to adapt to two new cultures, the American one and the Hispanic one. Communicating was especially hard since I did not speak Spanish. The different cultures affect many things like communication methods, context, individualism/collectivism, chronemics, uncertainty avoidance, power distance, long/short-term orientation, and indulgences. These form the different standards that a culture adheres to. Even while knowing all of this, finding ways around these differences to communicate interculturally is a task that is learnt. I enjoyed this chapter and its relevance to my daily life. This presentation was interesting and engaging; the videos shown broke the monotonousness that a presentation can have if there are only people speaking in a non-engaging manner. 

    My group did not present on the same day as the others. While I was anxious, I would’ve preferred to be able to complete this presentation earlier than later. I even prepared videos in case I was absent on the day of the presentation. I would not say that the videos were useless since they did force me to practice beforehand, but I did delete them rapidly once I knew I would be present. While we had a laissez-faire attitude for this presentation, my friend and I decided to communicate about our parts since it was the same section. Our group consists of nine people and the chapter contains 24 parts, so a couple of us had to use only 2 parts of the chapter to create three slides. My friend and I agreed that I can take over the introduction of our part since I only covered two sections. We even worked around the design choice of each other. We finally presented our PowerPoint on Wednesday. 

I would like to say that overall, for the short amount of time we had to not only work on the presentation but also work around each other, we did well. I also enjoyed the fact that we were discovering about group communication while working on the chapter “Communicating in Groups.”