Group Presentation

53rd R.T. Learning Team Report INTRODUCTION

The time of the entry into the professional word is approaching and the GAIA project was the opportunity to manage some different jobs on the one hand and to learn to build a learning team on the other hand more especially concerning the domains of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, group synergy, personal skills… In this report we will explain our approach trough the project, our difficulties and our solution to solve them, and last but not least the lessons we have learned.

GROUP PRESENTATION

Natalia’s Integration

At the beginning, three of us had already experienced what a learner was during first engineering year’s experience, but Natalia was a new student in our school and she had not had this experience before. Then we began our work in a team with a phase of integration and communication with her in which we share tools and lessons learned from last year. Also we present the objective of the personality test, learning style and mode of operation, which would define the first bases of our way of working together.

Obviously an important characteristic of our group is cultural diversity, so it was also important for us to make a step of integration between the different culture (French, Arabic and Colombian). During this period we did sessions where Mohamed, who already had more time living in France, shared with Natalia the experiences when he arrived in France and how was their integration process. We also had meetings where we talk about stereotypes that each culture over the other. These activities were useful to create a point of cohesion and integration within the group.

MBTI PROFILS

Name MBTI Profil

Joris ISFP

Maxime INFP

Mohamed ESTJ

Natalia ISTJ Score TOEIC

Name TOEIC Score at the beginning of year

Joris 650

Maxime 780

Mohamed 500

Natalia 620

It can be seen that the level of English in the group is homogeneous. Maxime is the person who has the highest score during the beginning and who had the role of leader and responsible for creating a dynamic learning English.

Learning Styles If Natalia and Joris have a learning style rather close, Maxime and Mohamed were unlike most unique trends. One is very Cartesian-verbal-sequential and the other is global-reflexive. And Natalia and Joris will find it easier to work in pairs which will be more complicated for Mohamed and Maxime. But it is also an opportunity to differentiate strength.

BELBIN Test

Overall, the team is quite heterogeneous with a good balance between the different tendencies. We see a score under the dominant shaper important distributed under two heads: Jeff and Mohamed. This will require that the two protagonists provide moments of discussion on the project vision and continuity to give him. Specifically it is to any differences of opinions a force to reach consensus. Note that the difference between RI IMP reflects a preference to investigate and seek information rather than perform tasks "less intellectually stimulating" we will have to fight. Otherwise it will use the strengths of each to coach others. Note also the strong dominant Team Worker suggesting a cordial understanding within the group, but the dominant shaper will not make us lose sight of the ultimate goal.

SH CO PL RI ME IMP Joris 14 11 7 14 0 1 Maxime 19 4 2 5 3 0 Mohamed 18 9 5 0 11 6 Natalia 0 9 5 10 7 16 Total 51 33 19 29 21 23 1 2 Joris Resources Completer Finisher Investigator Maxime Completer- Shaper Finisher Mohamed Team Worker Shaper Natalia Team Worker Implementer

GOALS: LANGUAGE, MANAGEMENT AND PERSONNEL

Name Language Management Personnel Exercise my ear Learn to be firm Learn how to sounding foreign sometimes when I structure my speech, Enrich my vocabulary give my instructions. to be clear and fluid in in English speaking Structure my work in my speeches. professionally. creating a framework Focus my emotion Quickly summarize to be followed by all Learn to have the the overall content of well. eloquence or at least Maxime written documents. Express my feelings, be comfortable in Write fluidly-English deal with conflict front of an audience document rather than brooding inwardly. Learning to leave sometimes thinking aside and move directly to the action Natalia Work and strengthen To be a more active Leave on one side the my listening and component in the barrier of culture and reading skills. Develop project group. Learn language, to take my ability to read from a well motivated better advantage of documents and books, young people working the educational or scientific, with me in a good system of French professional or about mood, and also how education and entertainment in to plan and manage especially training as English, without much time and resources to Engineer ENSGSI. need of interactive accomplish project Increasing the belief in dictionary or goals with the end of myself and also more translator. Get to the the year. security to help me end of a TOEIC score develop my that is at least as B2. communication skills with others. Benefit from training in a different control is the fact that I have in Colombia to find out what really are my preferences in the workplace and also to define my career plans and long term staff. Develop the ability to use well the two foreign languages, French and English. Reach out to To be more synthetic Controlling the stress communicate without and departing from in difficult times Mohamed problems in the first the scope that I and have more the instance impose belief in myself Joris My main goal and Create and evolve I put to advantage in work my within a framework the center of my understanding of the that involves an equal personal development language. Whether at and mutual trust by identifying and the level of writing between group mastering all the than the oral. In the members. Strokes do resources I have to short term, I want to more positive or reach my goals. significantly increase negative towards my my TOEIC score, which comrades to report will be a very good my position to them indicator of my vis-à-vis. Take greater performance as it account of my evaluates both the preferences and those written and oral of other operations. comprehension. In the Leave my state of long run, I would have perpetual the capacity to quickly procrastination to be scan a text in English proactive and trigger to get the most future events. information that I consider relevant and able to understand and assimilate all the information from an oral source. Sub-objectives: to enrich my vocabulary and overall technical and improve my ear to pick up foreign sounds.

LEARNING PROCESS AND ACTIVITIES

OUR PROGRESSION

Different stages:

 Introduction of Natalia  Activities unprofessional  Activities professionalizing  Formulation of our goals  Separating the group into two pairs  Redefinition of responsible language Our first weeks were aimed at the integration of Natalia subtleties of self-learning. Natalia is a foreign student; she has not had the opportunity to work his capacity for self learning. We then focused on some tests such as the Belbin Learning styles or to help him understand how it works and that of others.

When Natalia began to understand how the car we work on learning activities in terms of simple realization as breaks or meetings or projects entirely in English even for karaoke.

Subsequently, during a meeting with Mike Rees, we were told that he expected us more professional activities. But a significant decrease in the motivation of the group was felt when we set up new activities.

After various feedbacks we realized that we needed to better articulate our goals for upstream then adapt the achievement of our activities. Mohamed and Maxime prefer the expression while Natalia and Joris want to work on understanding. From the moment we have rehabilitated our activities in line with our objectives, the group seemed to be better integrated into the exercises. But they required a lot of preparation time and generated few results.

At a meeting with Mike Rees, we then chose to separate the groups into two pairs to use this year to test things. Maxime will work with Mohamed and Natalia with Joris. This choice was made according to the objectives we had in common or not. The pairs will each work on their side and define their goals with the new language manager. The official language is therefore modify his role, he now has two pairs manager and not a single group, including a pair that does not integrate. At this this new configuration, we felt that all member of the group were more in their place as before.

ACTIVITIES:

Earlier this year, we continued on methods of learning acquired in the first year, our business was based on pleasure, such as: do karaoke, watching TV English, talk English, see all series and original version films. Our aim was also to integrate Natalia in the method of language learning in school, and the concept of self learning, this is why we took our time at the beginning, and we continued on our habits of first year. With hindsight, we do not regret taking the time saw that after 2 months, Natalia began to take initiatives by them even to the choice of activities we did. We are a GAIA project, which represented a constraint for us in our language learning, especially in the first half, during which time we all work together, given the context of the project, and the complications of customer contact, and clearly we cannot regarding the project. We have not successfully met the challenge of integrating English in our project, however we managed to find articles relating to corporate relocations and the U.S. Army in English, and we have exchanged groups, in order to have an "English touch" in the group. This work also represented the beginning of our professional learning of English. In addition, meetings of advancements in English were also a good opportunity to practice English in a professional context. At the end of December, and during an appointment with Mike, we learned that it was time for professional activities; he should reframe our learning, and turn to new activities. After this meeting, we decided to develop tools to integrate professional English in our project. For that, we started to make our agendas in English, beginning of each session, we made a synthesis of work done and work done in English. The head of organized English words quiz 5 professional start of each session. The secretary was once a month a report in English. We also made simulations of job interviews and simulations of conflict in a professional context. These simulations allowed us aside to practice English in a professional context, to realize that the learning objectives in our group were totally different from one person to another, and we don ' had not properly explained the objectives of each group earlier this year. By redefining the goals, we found that NATALIA JORIS want to work and their understanding as MOHAMED MAXIME and their expression. We then tried to make simulations in which Mohamed and Maxime speaking, while Joris and Natalia watch, and at the end of the observers are communicating to return. But arguing we realized that working together when we have different objectives is complicated. For this reason, and after consultation with Mike we decided to divide the group into two.

INDICATORS

Throughout the project, we have been having many difficulties to find some efficient indicators of progress and all the more so since we have taken a lot of times to understand the difference of language and personal objectives were important so much so we have chosen to split the team in two parts according to the advice of Mike REES. At this moment the role of the language manager changed and it was his responsibility to find the indicators of progress, but not only also for motivation, efficiency… which were of two sorts. Indeed, there were the indicators specific to everybody according to his personal objectives in terms of language that we had been formalized previously during a meeting between the language manager and the others members of the team project. But the group has also needed global indicators to create team cohesion and to make sure that the entire team was going in the good sense to reach the learning team goal. Then the language manager also should find out some common activities and therefore the indicators adapted to them.

So, concerning the global indicators, some instances of motivation indicators were the number and the duration of time speaking when we made project meeting in English, essentially on Wednesday afternoon. To measure the efficiency of certain activities like vocabulary tests for example on everyone, the language manager sometimes made some unexpected exams with words that had already been tested during a previous test. However, if we tried to implement some global indicators of progress like the spontaneity to answer to an unexpected question for the expression for instance or for the oral comprehension, the ability to resume the day agenda or some technical discussion, it was difficult to build some indicators that corresponded to every member of the team so much our expectations and objectives (and so the motivation’s ways) were different.

Thus, we have ended up building specific indicators of progress for everyone according to his objectives. Concerning Natalia and Joris who wanted to improve their oral and written comprehension, we have established this kind of indicators:

 The number of reports to the dictionary in function of the length of the document

 The number of keywords that have been grasped in function of the duration of the oral document

For Mohamed and Maxime who essentially desired to improve their spoken English according to their professional project, here are some instances of indicators which concern them:

 The duration of time speaking and the number of latent periods in response to a question

 The wealth of the speech that is to say the number of different words during a document synthesis

As a conclusion, we can resume our work in terms of indicators in this way. At the beginning, we have set up indicators which were quantitative that is to say they were not precise and scientifically quantified. Then, we had meeting with Mike REES as we went along we started searching more accurate indicators. And when we have split our project team in two parts, we have focused on adapting the indicators specifically to the objectives of the two groups while maintaining team work cohesion, especially by finding motivation indicators and common activities to be sure nobody was left behind.

CONCLUSION

As a conclusion we can retain three major lessons of the work during this year. First, the objectives that must be defined as soon as possible both personal (intrinsic) and due to the group collaboration (extrinsic) and help the colleagues to formalize them. Then, and even if it takes a lot of time we have to frequently make feedbacks nay to provoke them to prevent any dangerous unspoken. Lastly, we have to settle three kinds of indicators: - Indicators of progress that must enable to measure the progress of everyone during the work and also the team’s one. - Indicators of motivation to measure if everyone feels involved in the project and find in it satisfaction according to his personal objectives. - Indicators of efficiency to check if some activities are more advantageous than others. The goal of such a measure is to create a virtuous circle around skills, implication and evolution. That is the step we have tried to lead during this year within our GSI group but also with different formations’ students.