Title: Exercise for "Working in a Group"
Course: Reference Course Group Work > Section: Exercises

The purpose of establishing a group contract is to be clear about how your group will work together. It's about coming up with different expectations, levels of ambition, concerns and the demands of performance from the group that you together must try to fulfill. Work out your group contract as follows:

Each individual

1. Each group member thinks for a while based on the following questions:
  1. How many hours a week do I estimate that I am prepared to devote to this course?
  2. Which elements of the course do I think will be the most difficult to cope with? Why then?
  3. What things in this course do I think will be the most interesting, the ones I think I will be able to learn most from?
  4. What in my other life situation may conflict with our joint work in the group?

The group together

1. Review the members' answers to the questions above together. Go around the team with one question at a time.
2. Discuss how we should practically organize our work with the group's assignments:

  1. When, where and how much should we meet? Book into our calendars. If the course runs over the Christmas and New Year holidays, it is important that we also agree on where, when and how we should work during that period.
  2. How should the group's work be managed?
  3. What tools should we use for shared documents and communications?
  4. How will it go when we make decisions, eg whether we are ready to submit documents or present orally?
  5. What do we do in the group if someone does not do what we agreed?
  6. How and when should we reflect on our way of working together?
  7. Is there anything more that we need to decide together on how to organize our work and how to behave towards each other?

Material from Tomas Jansson and Ulrik Terp, Karlstad University 2018