Learning Through Experience

Posted on June 11, 2013 by


I learned that the Constitutional Convention was a meeting of about fifty people who tried to decided how a country should run. The biggest issues were the contrasting moral beliefs as well as the political views over what was fair and just as well as what allowed for a sustainable government. They also had to deal with recently coming out of war with a tyrannical king, so they definitely tried to avoid the same thing from occurring.

The main issues that required  compromise, was how much power does national government get compared to the local government, how much is reasonable for the government to tax, and who decides the new laws as well as the different legislative branches.  The compromises were achieved after long debates and majority rulings, which tells us that the nature of democracy is one of change, compromise, and the combination of ideas from a collective group of people.

The collaboration of sixteen different people in order to create an informative, as well as educational video was difficult. I do not believe that I have ever worked with so many people on one project before and I can honestly say that there were  as many drawbacks as there were advantages. How the group seemed to work well was that we were all very cooperative when we distributed the different tasks that we needed to accomplish and I also believe that there was a great consistency when it came to completing tasks on time.

However, we struggled at the start of the project because we weren’t able to decide on a topic for a period of almost two weeks. There was a lack of any serious communication between a vast majority of the people involved and the topic was finally decided by a select view. Which leads to the second dilemma of the majority of the work being done by half the class.  I’m not saying that only half of the class worked on the project, but that almost everything besides some select work, was done by half the class. In the end, that was how it went and nothing really was resolved.

As for my involvement in the process, I believe I learned a lot about the role that I wish to assume. I found that I was constantly asking others whether anything needed to be done, but I never took it upon myself to ask whether there was anything I could add. I  was someone that did what they were told and not much more, but I did actively ask for a task. The interactions between my peers and I was  kind hearted as well as productive. I believe that my tasks of script editing, speech delivering, and my minor part in editing went as well as I could have hoped. I can say that although I enjoyed some moments when working with such a large group, overall I would not enjoy working with so many people again.

What I would do differently in this project is try and assume the role of leadership, if only for a brief period, so that I may help start the project much earlier. I would then probably step down and continue to finish the duties that I was assigned.  I may attempt to contribute more ideas than I did before, and possibly take some initiative to create other tasks for myself, instead of waiting for one.

The skill that I believe has been tested  the most over this process had to be my communication skills because at some moments, I found that I tried to focus my classmates onto the discussion at hand. I also asked questions that I believe brought attention to some issues that I found with the script or the video. Overall, I felt that there was a definite test of how well I could communicate with fifteen other people and in the end I was happy with my performance.

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