Speakin Arms: A Self Analysis

There have been many instances where I have collaborated in this course, one being peer reviews. As I shared my work with others, I started to notice trends that provided insight on how I analyzed works. I realized that I was already looking for patterns in works and suspending judgment, which were skills I had learned in my previous courses. However, there were steps of the analytical process that I needed to strengthen. These steps included pulling out significant parts and making the implicit explicit. Growing up, I have always struggled with absorbing information when reading, and this semester proved to me that that this hindrance would not magically disappear. When reading sources, I struggled to find main ideas or quotable instances,

Collaboration: In a community of learners, students work together in teams, partners, or groups. This allows students to gain social skills and increases students’ motivation for the project. Students share ideas and gain a new understanding of the content.

Teacher Collaboration measures the degree to which teachers engage in constructive dialogue that furthers the educational vision of the school.

The most recent topic that our textbook covered that I was surprised to learn about was my specific conflict style. The conflict style that I realized I was using the most is avoidance. I realized this when thinking back on the arguments I have had and how I handled them. This was something that surprised me because I never realized that I used avoidance as much as I do until I started studying this chapter. The next topic I was surprised to learn about was self- disclosure and how many times people have “violated” the principles of self-disclosure. Mainly the principle of turn taking, this is very simple concept of waiting your turn before speaking. While this is an extremely simple principle people violate it on a daily basis which surprised me to think

Throughout my academic career, most of the courses I’ve taken were self-disciplined and few projects I was involved with involved teamwork and collaboration. Despite this, my classmates and I would always have group study sessions to do homework and to study the night before a big test. My best examples of collaboration are from my experience while playing varsity basketball.

This is why I also employ the constructivism technique of collaborative groups in my classroom to give students the opportunity to discuss ideas with their peers and make reasonable conclusions about what they are learning. My classroom is arranged with student desks placed in small groups, which allows students to direct their attention to the front of the room when needed, yet they can turn and collaborate with their peers during group work.

When I first read through the sample piece, I didn’t know where to start or what was the most important to focus on. I had to read the sample piece again and take some time to differentiate the aspects of the paper. The strength that I chose was: the heading for each topic is a great way to inform the reader and organize your paper. The weakness I chose was: some of the paragraphs lacked enough detail. Both of my choices actually went hand and hand with the other teacher’s comments. They were most very similar, but my answers lacked the right evidence to why I thought what I did. The teacher’s responses always had questions embedded as well as a plan of action for the student to do. This is something that should always be implemented into

Throughout this project, I found that working through the Standard Agenda to solve a problem was an effective way for a group to decide upon a solution. Even though our group was unexperienced using the Standard Agenda, we were able to use each other’s strengths to improve the quality of our discussion about the issue of rising college tuition. Looking back to previous projects, I can see how our group has grown to better understand the methods of effective group work. While there were both beneficial and impeding forces at work in the task and social processes, I feel that overall our group had a successful problem solving discussion.

 I like how you had stated that you had a negative understanding collaboration back when you were in school. I can agree, that I had similar negative experiences with collaboration and force collaborations felt like the group was paddling Upstream; although, the tasks were completed the effort that was needed it was exhausting. I found collaboration that is not forced and with individuals passionate about an end goals, seem to run smoothly, are fun and flow.

The teacher allowed students to work cooperatively in groups to discuss problem solving strategies. Students appeared to be very much engaged in learning through interaction with peers. The first grade teacher was very active in using the think-pair-share strategy to promote thinking and oral communication. During her writing lesson of editing a sample story, she asked students to think about what corrections they thought needed to be made, then asked them to share their thoughts with a partner. I thought this strategy was very much appropriate and effective for promoting students’ language acquisition, especially for her class of early intermediate language learners.

I am confused once again, my understanding of Part B was to analyse the key themes in the readings package and then compare and contrast how well this aligns with practice as discussed by our interviewee and then Part C was to propose reasons for the similarities and differences and then discuss the implications and put forward recommendations.

Collaboration is when a student contributes to a group’s joint intellectual efforts through work ethic, leadership, and service. The artifacts I’ve chosen will come from my Honors English class and my Physical Science class. The artifact from my Physical Science class a video/ rubric from an in class bottle rocket competition that I participated in along with my friend Jacob in October 2015. The artifact from my English class is a rubric from a book club project completed in January of 2016. The purpose of the bottle rocket project was to display our understanding of velocity, and determine what factor could keep the rocket in the air the longest. The purpose of the book club project was to display our critical thinking skills and effectively

I have found in the past that it is sometimes difficult to create questions about certain chapters in a reading for the purpose of discussion. Therefore, I was uncertain as to the expectation for the format that the discussion questions are to be contrived as related to the topics introduced in the various publications.

Participations in small in-class groups which purpose was to accomplish a task assigned to us by our Professor, were the most powerful learning experiences for me. In developing common focus, as stated in Gitterman and Germain (2008), members need to establish group rules and also remember to “build on one another’s contributions, identify and focus on salient collective themes, invite expression of differences” (p. 174), as well as welcome opinions which are contradictory or different from the majority.

“Through collaboration, ideas can be shared, new and better strategies can be developed, problems can be solved, students’ progresses can be better monitored, and their outcomes are evaluated effectively.”¬ (Lee, 1996).