Good Luck

As the course draws to a close I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my fellow colleagues and instructors. I have learned a lot from each one of you and have grown in my professional development and growth. While some of us will depart ways here as others continue on together for the remainder of our journey my hope is that each one of you acquire the knowledge and skills you are looking for and use them to promote change in our early childhood field. I would love to keep in contact as we embark on the remainder of our journey, so if there is anything I can do to support any of you please feel free to contact me via email at heidi.doughty@waldenu.edu . I wish each of you the best and good luck in all of your future endeavors.

Team Development

I have to be honest and say that right now, even though I have spent all week thinking about it, I cannot think of a group that was hard for me to leave. I learned something from each group I was a part of, based either on how much harder I had to work to make up for those that didn't or who I didn't think would work but yet they did. I gained different insights from a group project than those given by the teacher of the class as we often had to go beyond what we knew. Group experiences that I can recall were not positive experiences for me, except when I could be a part of a group of my choice in which case I was a part of a group I was friends with, so there was no good-bye stage.

For this Master's degree program, as each course closes, I have thanked each group of colleagues I have worked with and wished them all well. I believe that I will continue to do this as each course ends bringing each of us closer to completion. I think the adjourning stage of team development provides closure but unfortunately for me a lot of the groups I was a part of never fully made it through the five stages and members were just grateful to not have to work with each other any longer.

Conflict Resolution

As I thought about this post, I thought about a parental conflict I had the third year I taught. The parents did not believe I was in the right profession as a teacher, believed I was singling their child out, and felt their child could do no wrong. As I reflected back, I realized that some of the nonviolent communication methods mentioned this week by Dr. Rosenberg may have helped. However, it lead me to question what do you do when you are speaking to someone who is not willing to budge or compromise at all and nothing you say or do changes the other person's stand? I like the idea of the 3 Rs and the nonviolent approach that Dr. Rosenberg described this week and I am going to attempt to implement them in the communications I have from here on whether in my personal life or in my professional life. What I have learned this week will change how I approach communication with others, however I am just not sure about others I communicate with who are not willing to compromise.