6165 Communication and Collaboration, Week 8

During the past 8 weeks, you and your colleagues forged a collaborative learning community; you shared information and insights with each other and supported each other. As you prepare to move on into your specializations, take a minute and think about how your colleagues have supported you, how you have supported them, and what you wish for your colleagues as they continue on their professional path. If you wish, share your contact information so you can stay in touch and continue to encourage and support each other as you move through the program.

             

            During the past eight weeks I have had the opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions to a wonderful group of colleagues.  I hope that the comments and feedback I have given them have encouraged them to think more deeply about their discussion posts.  I have appreciated my colleague’s comments and questions on my posts, as they have enabled me to see situations from a different perspective.  I would have to say that the most thought provoking insights I received from this group of colleagues were the personal situations/experiences, which really helped me to understand alternate points of view and to consider how it relates to other situations.

I still enjoy looking at blogs of previous colleagues and sometimes leaving comments, as I have found significant value in the input of my peers throughout this program.  I plan on keeping this blog after the completion of my degree and my email address is jill.stein@waldenu.edu for anyone who would like to keep in contact.

6165 Communication and Collaboration, Week 6

This week you read about the five stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Consider the adjourning phase for several of the groups in which you have been involved. Think about which aspects of the groups made for the hardest good-bye. Are high-performing groups hardest to leave? Groups with the clearest established norms? Which of the groups that you participated in was hardest to leave? Why? What sorts of closing rituals have you experienced or wish you had experienced? How do you imagine that you will adjourn from the group of colleagues you have formed while working on your master's degree in this program? Why is adjourning an essential stage of teamwork?

I can definitely say that it has been very difficult to leave high-performing groups, and I still remember all of the emotions that were involved each time.  The most difficult group to leave was the first high-performing group that I was a part of as a teenager, my 4-H club.  I was on the board with a few other teenagers and we worked extremely hard get the club to where it was, and we even started a mentorship program.  We had the club running very productively and recruited more members than any other year.  It was a bittersweet experience because we were ready to move on but unsure if the club would be as successful in the hands of a new board.  Every year we held an event called Achievement Night, where part of the evening was spent saying goodbye to the old board and welcoming the new board.  It gave anyone in the club an opportunity to say thank you, retell a story of a time when someone helped them and what it meant to them, then included a photo montage of the past year.  It was so touching to hear how we helped and impacted others, I have never forgotten it and it was over twenty years ago.

              I would like to keep in touch with the group of colleagues that I have formed through the process of obtaining my master’s degree, and I think that technology allows us to do this successfully.  A blog, email and social media are wonderful, easy tools to utilize for the purpose of staying connected with others.  I still enjoy looking at blogs of previous classmates and commenting, it is a way for me to learn something new and stay connected with other early childhood professionals.  Adjourning is an essential stage of teamwork because it allows for closure, a chance to say goodbye, and an opportunity to celebrate the team’s successes. 

6165 Communication & Collaboration, Week 5

Think about any disagreements, or conflicts, you have recently experienced or are currently experiencing at work with a supervisor or colleague, or someone in your personal life. Share at least two strategies you have learned about that might help you manage or resolve the conflict more productively, and why these strategies might be effective. For example, could you suggest a compromise? Could you look for a broader range of solutions to your disagreement? Could you use some of the principles of nonviolent communication or the 3 R's to better help you resolve this conflict?

One conflict that I experienced recently is within my personal life.  My husband and I are in the process of moving across the country, and we left our condo in San Diego yesterday to head to Washington, DC.  After reading the resources for this past week I feel that I have applied some of the strategies.  One of the articles I read from the Center of Nonviolent Communication suggests not just saying “no,” but instead thinking about, processing and even discussing it if possible with the other person with whom you are communicating why you cannot say “yes.”  I used this strategy as we were working on getting all the things done for our move.  I was very busy and my husband asked if I could do something else, instead of just saying “no,” I stopped myself and thought of why I could not say “yes.”  I told my husband why and he responded “ok, I can run a different errand if you need more time.”  The communication was very pleasant and he came up with an idea that I had not thought about. 

Another strategy that we used was compromise as we decided on only driving one of our cars across the country so we could drive together.  Since we will not have our household goods for over a month, we needed to work together to figure out what we had to take and what would fit in the car.  We picked out our “must haves” which included my laptop to be able to keep up with school work, my husband’s uniforms for his job, room for our dog and our everyday clothes.  After we figured out how much room was left in the car we had enough room for both of us to have a small box of our own things that we didn’t necessarily need but that we wanted to have with us.

Gary Baran & CNVC, 2004, 10 Things We Can Do to Contribute to Internal, Interpersonal, and Organizational Peace. Retrieved from http://www.cnvc.org/Training/10-steps-peace

O'Hair, D., Wiemann, M., Mullin, D. I., & Teven, J.  (2015). Real communication (3rd. ed). New York: Bedford/St. Martin's.

The Center for Nonviolent Communication. (n.d.). The center for nonviolent communication. Retrieved from http://www.cnvc.org/