As part of ETL 504 I have been working with a tutorial group. I was unsure about this to begin with, I had memories of when i was doing my bachelor degree of people not showing up and not contributing at all.

When reflecting how I feel about working with others after the tutorial tasks are over are a bit mixed. In the beginning I really enjoyed working with others and always had time to contribute, but then we had a bit of a family health matter with my mum ending up being in RPA hospital for 5 weeks very critically ill and to be honest i dropped the ball. I had great intentions but with not being home and being in and out of hospital visiting rooms I missed a few. I explained this to the group and didn’t feel like they were upset, but I felt massive guilt about not doing my best, not contributing to my group like i had originally wanted to. The reflections were well written and when only a few had contributed i felt even worse. This is something in my own self that i need to get over, that sometimes things happen and people are generally of good nature and do care about more than the task.

When i did contribute to the discussions i really enjoyed it, i have noticed that i never really took the lead in the reflections, i submitted my thoughts but let the others lead, some of the leaders who stepped up were fantastic and really took everyones ideas into considerations where one decided to post the reflection a week earlier to ‘get it out of the way’ with most of the group then missing out in contributing, this showed me that you can have the confidence to lead but must also consider others as i felt most people were upset with this as now we could not contribute our ideas we had already been working on.

In reflecting about it, i really need to allow myself to step out of my comfort zone a bit more and realise i do have some things to offer the group and i won’t be stepping on peoples toes if i do step up and lead.