Decision making in a large group = Chaos

After our 1st midterm, In class we had an activity to decide what we were going to do for the next test. With about 80 or so students in the class this was easier said than done. There was complete chaos with people yelling at each other back and forth. During the activity I handled this conflict in two different ways; collaboration and avoidance. In the beginning of this activity I tried to collaborate with the other students to try to incorporate my ideas with the ideas of others. But it seemed like for the 1st ten minutes everyone was disagreeing with each other and nothing was being accomplished. Since collaboration wasn't working I decided to just use the avoidance method. I just sat back and hoped that my classmates would be able to get something done. I did this because I felt without me speaking it would be one less person to argue and it would allow for easier communication. Since now I know the results I would have chosen to divide the class into smaller groups first and then give suggestions from those groups. I think this would have been better because the groups could have communicated ideas first and figured out what they liked and didn't like and then they would all pass the ideas to the front. I think this way would have been much faster. It would have prevented people from the back of the room arguing with people in the front.