Reflective Journal - Lesson 1

The 1st ever GRACE lesson in my life started this week, coming out a lot better than I expected.

This week's lesson was on Group Formation, the roles each member had to play and what the responsibilities that came with it. Well, there has to be some bad things that are bound to happen in any project work, much less GRACE. Things were kind of disorganised in the beginning, everyone not knowing what to do and such. Luckily, we had the help of our supervising teacher, Ms Florence Lim to guide us along the way.

We spent a long period of time deciding on the group's "image" factors - group name, its meaning and group motto. These were the ones that really required us to think hard: What do you want others to have when hearing these? So we mixed ideas here and there, for short moments just having fun, but returned back to work. I don't know how but when the supervising teacher walked past to see our progress, Yen Wee just typed the word "Perfectionists" on my keyboard, immediate;y causing the teacher to "expect" the best from us.

The group meaning was sort of an easy thing to do, just altering the meaning of the word a little bit would do. Motto: 99% is not acceptable! 100% is! It's kind of an unaccomplished task for us presently, but that is what keeps us striving to improve on the way we do things, with the best effort.

During the meeting, I discovered interesting things around me that I never noticed before. I learnt that GRACE helped in the building of trust and cooperation amongst each member, that my group members were actually very creative! They had plenty of ideas just for a single group name, but in the end we settled for Perfectionists.*

Three things that I learnt during the meeting were: How to communicate effectively with my group members, how to manage time efficiently and the importance of information. I previously thought that all project work had to be dull, doing the typical kind of things projects would do, but now I think that project work can be interesting if you set your mind to it.

Something surprising happened during the meeting. It seemed that some of my other group members had not downloaded the GRACE Lesson Resources. I decided to transfer it to them via a flash drive since downloading form the Net would take much longer.

Something that I learnt, which I may be able to use in the future would be following instructions. Not doing so may be disastrous at times.

Things I like about this lesson: The dummy-proof instructions and tasks, the participation of my group members and the helpfulness of the teacher. Things I dislike about the lesson: None so far.

Gavin Chan
2 Benedict 2010 (5)