Week 8 - Final Farewell

To my colleagues,

I just wanted to take this time to say "THANKS" to everyone for such a wonderful experience. I have learned a great deal about effective communication in the field. We must understand how truly important it is to communicate clearly to the children and families of who we serve. We must build trusting, strong relationships with those families that we encounter and we must be the example and show them how to build strong, trusting relationships with others.

I have been supported by my colleagues in many ways but the most important is the fact that I was never judged and could speak openly and comfortably and voice my opinions without any feelings of criticism. I really appreciate everyone's support and honest feedback to help me to improve my communication efforts.

I hope that I have been as much support to you all as you have been for me. I hope that you were all able to learn one thing from me the way I have learned many things from all of you. I am truly very grateful to have had such a tremendous experience in this class and am looking forward to moving on to my specialization and hope to have some familiar faces along this next journey!

Week 6- Team Building

I found the five stages of team development to be very interesting. I think that with all the stages combined together in a positive way this makes for a creative experience. I can remember being a part of a group for a final project in my undergraduate studies. We went through many ups and downs to get the final product completed. After being a part of a group project I realize how important it is to have an effective leader that knows how to take control and delegate responsibilities in an effective manner. Our leader struggled with many of the responsibly and needed some guidance along the way but once she took control and got a grip of her job and how to perform it effectively she was able to produce an effective project. I think that the final stage which is the adjourning stage becomes difficult only when you have an effective finish product. If you are working on a project that is not effective sometimes this can make the adjourning stage a relief and you feel a sense of stress removed from you when it is over. But I really felt saddened in my group class project during the adjourning stage. I felt stressed during the storming stage of our project but we did weather the storm during this stage and we came out learning much more than we knew going in. We were really all sad to say goodbye because of our learning and growth process. We developed strong bonds and in many cases lifelong friendships because we were able to work so effectively together and learned so much at the same time.

I feel that high-performing groups are very hard to leave because we develop a rhythm or a flow that becomes comforting to the group and allows us a sense of belonging and accomplishment, this becomes hard to let go of. It is not always easy to find a group that is highly productive and everyone works well together, where personalities can mix well and things get done easily. I think that forming a group is an extremely challenging task, and to form a highly effective group sometimes seems impossible. So when this is done of course it is hard to leave that sense of security in knowing that things will get done the right way.

I found the group in my undergraduate days of college a highly effective group and once our project had ended I felt really saddened that we would not have the convenience of meeting together all at one time showing off our collaboration skills. Giving positive feedback on researched and established information. And a few of us from that group I still have not heard from after college and I really miss that time that we spent effectively. We learned some valuable time management skills that I really enjoyed while we were part of the group and I have never really been able to regain even after trying on numerous occasions. Once our group experience had ended we all kept in touch for a little while after that but many of the team members fell off and we never stayed in contact but a few of us are still friends today and we try to meet frequently. But after the project was completed we had a little celebration among us to celebrate our success in the class because of our team efforts.

I think that many of the people that I have meant along the way of this master’s degree program will be great contacts in the future to help me stay informed and growing in the field of early learning. I think that adjourning from this group may be difficult because we have established such great bonds in many cases. I have learned so much from so many colleagues in my classes and have been inspired even more by the professors that I have encountered. The end of this journey will be a bitter sweet experience and as I get closer to this point I am beginning to get excited. We still have a little ways to go and I'm looking forward to the remainder of this ride.

 

 

Conflict Resolution

Again this is another trial run, I posted this assignment last night on my new blog page www.kerebaenglish.blogspot.com due to some computer issues while attempting to post this assignment

Week 5 - Blog Assignment

I very rarely run into situation that require conflict resolution due to the fact I am easy going and go with the flow and find ways to navigate situations even when they are not very favorable for me. But in the rare ocurance I run into a conflict I like to address it right away and try to find a reasonable way to resolve it before it escalate

I recently had a disagreement with my husband about my son. My son is 6 years old and has recently started kindergarten. He goes to school in our new neighborhood and he is only going to school for half a day kindergarten, therefore his hours are from 12:30 to 3:20. I think this is such a drag and a waste of time. We both work an hour away from where we live and we are stuck to get him back and forth to school around our work schedules. My husbands schedule changes everyday so this makes the job even more challenging. I insisted to my husband that we take my son out of that school because it does not make much sense the way we are needing to travel and inconvenience ourselves to take him to and from school. I asked my husband to allow me to home school my son which I can do from work and keep him with me another year and allow him the one on one training and guidance through me and my instruction. My husband argues with me each time I bring this up and it truly makes me so angry. He thinks that my son is losing more social skills by being taught another year by me but I totally disagree. I think he is getting another year of vital one on one teaching instruction.

The conflict resolution strategies that I decided to use with my husband are "Consider Options and Alternatives, which " (O'Hair & Wiemann, 2012, pg 240) I think I gave him some other choices such as finding a school for my son that is closer to my job so I can easily pick him up rather than traveling over an hour to pick him up from school and then needing to go back to work in the evening to close. We both weighed our options and with the few choices that we have we are still in the waiting process to find out which plan works better. We have also decided to compromise "to give up a little to gain a little" (O'Hair & Wiemann, 2012, pg. 241) We are both willing to compromise with each other once we get feedback from all the other schools we have applied for and we are also looking into the home school element this way we will have all resources handy to try to decide on an option.