Team Building and Collaboration, Part 1

This week in “Team Building and Collaboration”, we learned about the five stages of team development:  forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. These stages are an importance for the team to grow where they will be functioning together effectively and achieve success.

For this blog assignment, I will focus on the “adjourning” phase when the team has completed a project and is getting ready to leave each other. I believe all groups are hard to leave when you have established a good team that has worked effectively together. The group I participated in was our group of pre-k team teachers last year. Some of us have been together 16+ years and have established a close bond. Due to the budget cuts for pre-k, our group was split up because some of the pre-k teachers couldn’t afford to take a cut in pay, which forced them to resign from pre-k and move up to other grades or retire. Breaking up a team can be very stressful for all involved. At the end of last school year, during our post planning, the team had their last luncheon together where we shared tears and many memories together as we are getting ready to depart and go our separate ways in the early childhood field.

I anticipate that I will experience sadness as well as joy when I adjourn from the group of colleagues that were formed while working on my master’s degree. I will experience sadness because some of us have been together from the first course, and I hope we will continue to keep in touch as we go on our journey in the early childhood field. We have shared many stories, ideas, and insights that created closeness even thought we don’t know each other personally. The joy I will experience will be because obtaining my master’s degree will be another stepping stone I have accomplished in my careerJ.

I think adjourning is an essential stage of teamwork because the group will get a chance to analyze all the ups and downs they have shared in that team, and use this information in other groups in the future to help build effective teamwork.

Nonviolent Communication and Conflict Management

For this week's blog, our assignment was to think about any disagreements, or conflicts we have experienced and share the strategies we learned that might be helpful and effective in managing and resolving conflict more productively.

I can recall an disagreement that happened my at my job concerning our Christmas pre-k party. It was time for us to have our Christmas parties, and we were making preparations to send home newsletters to the parents about what to expect concerning the parties. Some of our teachers wanted the parents to attend and some didn't. We have always had parents attend our Christmas parties, but this year some teachers had a change of mind due to us having an early release day. I was unaware of this change until a parent asked me why we wasn't having a Christmas party for the pre-k children.

Since pre-k is an important time in a child's life, I feel like parents should have every opportunity to be involved in their child's learning experience and extra curriculum activities, so I wasn't in agreement with the other co-workers about not having parent to attend the Christmas parties. Therefore, in order for me to approach the other teachers about this conflict, I had to come up with a strategy and quick.

In the text, "Real Communications", when we engage in conflict by debating the issue at hand, we exchange more ideas, reach better decisions, and foster stronger, healthier relationships (O'Hair & Weimann, 2009, p. 214). The strategy we always use is cooperative strategy, that way we can produce a solution that will benefit everyone. Also, the 3Rs are used in order to be an effective communicator in resolving the conflicts. We have to be mindful to be respectful, reciprocal, and responsive to each other differences through communication.

As educators, we have learned how to be more effective communicators as it relates to conflict resolutions by calling team meetings to discuss certain issues we may have concerns about. This has allowed our pre-k program and staff to be successful and one big happy "family".

Reference:
O'Hair, D., & Weimann, M. (2009). Real communication. New York:  Bedford/St. Martin's.

Who Am I as a Communicator?

When you are communicating with someone, try to be a very effective communicator because you never know how someone is watching your communication skills and reactions.

This week in Communicating and Collaborating in the Early Childhood Field course, we were able to examine our own communication and listening styles, dispositions, and skills, as well as getting someone else to evaluate you. It was amazing to see how a family member and a colleague perceived my communication skills mostly the same as I did myself.

The insights about communications I gained this week is to never take communication for granted, and how not to make assumptions and perceptions about a person by their outer appearance. As an educator, it is very important to reach out to our children and their families we serve with effective communication skills. We need to make an effort to build a friendly network, especially  to the ones that we perceive as being "different" from us. When we exercise good communication skills, we will develop the abilities to communicate in a better constructive way.

Communication and Culture:

In an increasingly diverse economy, I come in contact with cultural diversity by interacting with colleagues in the school, my neighborhood, and my workplace. The United States is known as the melting pot nation, a place for people of different backgrounds to come together and ultimately grow together. Unfortunately, from language to food to religious practice, cultural traditions are still around us. I read in one of my daily bread books about hospitality:

Whether we inhabit a home, a college dorm, a prison cell, or a military barracks, we can welcome others as a way of showing our love for them and for Christ. Hospitality is making room for people in need. –David McCasland

When involved in a diverse community, I have a tendency to communicate differently with people from different groups and cultures other than my own. One of the most culturally unresponsiveness situations I find myself in is communicating effectively with my children and their families who speak another language; mostly in my area- Spanish. I have learned some beginner’s Spanish words, but I still can’t speak it well enough to communicate effectively. I find myself using a lot of hand gestures, using different objects to identify what I’m talking about, or if the communication is still not effective, I resort to a translator, which makes me feel terrible because I wasn’t able to supply the needs of the children and their parents.

As an early childhood professional, in order to communicate more effectively with my children and their families there are three strategies I will use. Among these are:

1. Understanding and acknowledging that we are from different cultures and backgrounds.
2. Become other-oriented by developing appropriate knowledge and understanding of the Hispanic culture and how they communicate.
3. Have a translator on standby when conducting parent conferences, special activities, or to translate newsletters, or any other important information.

* Here is a quote I would like to share by Bernard Baruch:

“We don’t all come over on the same boat, but we’re all in the same boat”

Communication Skills: Language, Nonverbal, Listening

Television Episode:

The television program I watched was an episode of “Martin” titled, “You’ve Got a Friend”. As I watched this episode on mute, I saw a variety of different nonverbal expressions and body languages that showed hand gestures, smiling, hugging, disagreement, eye contact, confusion, and hostility. The character’s relationships seemed to be an off-and-on togetherness.

After I watched the episode with the sound on, I realized the true meaning of the various expressions, and body gestures. It was exciting to see how my assumptions of their nonverbal behaviors of what were actually going on was so different from hearing the verbal communications.

I believe my assumptions would have been more correct if I had watched a show I knew well. But from watching this episode, I have learned that communication is not always straightforward. You can make the wrong assumptions based on messages communicated through body language and facial expressions.

This assignment was also great because I was able to put myself in a deaf person’s position, and see how difficult it is to read lips, and understand what a person is saying verbally.
　

Competent Communication

The person I chose that demonstrates competent communication would be my Pre-K Administrator. I chose him because when I need help or advice about something concerning my students and parents, I can go to him without being afraid or intimidated. He demonstrates effective communication skills and partnership with his employees by showing us trust and a mutual understanding that respects us professionally and as human beings. Throughout the years, we have learned that being able to communicate effectively with our parents will nurture the growth and learning of the individual child by sharing information, insights and concerns. It is a necessity and not an extra to exhibit good communication skills to our parents as well as their children.

I would definitely like to model my communication behaviors after my Administrator because our staff loves him, and we have a better working atmosphere among us.

Professional Hopes and Goals

As an early childhood educator, I hope to be an effective culturally responsive teacher when I work with children and families that come from diverse backgrounds. In order for me to be effective, I will strive to make learning more appropriate and teach the "whole" child, by taking each child's strengths and challenges into account, and plan and develop the curriculum and environment accordingly.

One goal I would like for the early childhood field related to issues of diversity, equity, and social justice would be to set the foundation in early childhood for every child to grow up in a world free from bias and discrimination, and be able to learn in an positive environment that will promote academics success in their lives.

I would like to thank Dr. Morgan and my colleagues for a successful learning journey in this course of "Perspectives on Diversity and Equity". I wish that each and everyone of you will continue to fulfill your goals in the early childhood field, and strive to promote equity, and social justice in an increasingly diverse nation.