Decision making? uhhhh such a pain in neck within a classroom full of students

Honestly, last Monday's class was frustrating and tiring. Each and every one had more than one "wish". Coming to an agreement regarding the midterm and the kind of requests we had was a chaos. First of all we all wanted to be heard and our wish to be granted. Everyone was speaking at the same time, and we were not being that realistic with what we wanted. Some students got so frustrated that they wanted to leave, or withdraw totally from what was going on. The way we were going on, made us waste lots of time. At the beginning we had some one to write on the board, and we needed more of a leader to actually lead and direct our opinions and ideas. Afterward, when we realized that we were not achieving anything with the way the debate was going, we finally got a real leader, who did take the matters into hand and pushed us to wake up, be more realistic and come up with something fruitful. The interaction between the group and the leader was high. He made sure that we all were heard one by one, and that we all agreed on the final terms. It certainly facilitated the process, and it allowed all of the students to contribute and make decisions. There was definitely conflict and at times screaming was necessary :-) We all had different issues to address. The problems each of us had with the exam were different, so was difficult to please us all. Finally we came up with the list of changes that we wanted professor to consider for the following exam. Compromise and collaboration definitely took place. We bargained and negotiated with each other on the terms, and we made sure that every one was heard. The professor made it clear that if only one student disagreed to any change, that term would have not been included on the list. So I believe we all felt we were equal and we had the power to change things around even though the majority agreed otherwise. And of course Accommodation took place. I couldn't be selfish, I had to accept terms that I did not agree with, and I had to give up terms that I wanted to be included in the list. The New terms will be applied to all of us, so I did not object everything I disagreed with. It is difficult to please every one and I thing we all realized that. i would have not acted any differently. Even though I knew that if I was the only one to disagree, I could have changed things around, I wouldn't have done it because the exam is not only for me, it is for the whole class. We had to let loose sometimes. But at the end we came up with a good list, I believe, and within the time constrains.

saving an egg, bad times ;-)

-I must say that I enjoyed the egg drop activity in class. my favorite part was the actual dropping, what a mess. I believe that in my group we had a good experience. Surely we did not go through the planning steps formally, but we covered them all pretty much. At the beginning we had an objective, to create a contraption which would have protected our egg, when it was dropped. We had to come up with a sketch of our idea. I should say that three of us tried our drawing skills :-) We came up with many ideas, and each of us tried to convince the others about his own idea. And we all were aware of the time limit.
-The hardest part, and the one I think we didn't take the trouble to go over was, to find out what each and every one of us was better at. We all felt confident on ourselves.
-As to being careful of the possible failure, we all were. I must admit that I have probably gotten my group attention at least 20 times by saying, what if the egg falls on this side or on that side and break. Since that 3 of us came up with different ideas, we used them while building the contraption.
-We thought, we had picked the best plan to make our egg unbreakable. What we did not do was specifically allocate roles, since we did not get to know what each one of us was good at. We all invested in holding the egg, and making sure it did not break ahead ;-) But yeah we all got to hold a bit of tape, or a bit of straw. Anyways it did not go that bad, it was fun. Plus our egg did not break, it just cracked a little.
-And of course we thoroughly followed the last step of planning. We constantly checked how the contraption was coming along. we made sure that the egg fitted inside. And the last adjustments were done using the tape to make sure that the egg wouldn't have moved.

I would say that we as a group did a very good job, because all of us got involved, and even though we had fun, we took the contraption making seriously. I guess if we would have known each others skills better, we could have done a better job.