Contributing to my Learning and my Learning Community
This is the first semester that I feel like I really have a collaboration team. I can't express the relief I felt when Tosha reached out and we started our group. We quickly added Samantha, Mistee, and then Robyn. I am in a different circumstance than most because I am taking one course at a time and so that has resulted in me needing to find a new team almost every semester. I think we embraced the purpose of having a collaboration team, to give each other guidance, feedback/feedforward, help to expand our ideas, encourage, and sometimes just clarity on assignments. We are all from completely different areas in education but all have strengths and insights that are different. They have been critical in giving me a different perspective and pushed me to go further in my work. This was a huge advantage. I typically can readily identify problems with APA style but I recognize that as feedback only. I really had to push myself to find feedforward to offer, but I did. I even offered to look again at one of my team members' work because I felt like I could offer more after reflecting on it. We ultimately were able to collaborate on our assignments although we were very challenged in everyone's schedules, myself included. We found a process that worked for us by having google links to our documents and the occasional ZOOM call when needed. I also texted team members quite a bit to rally collaboration times and check on team members that weren't responding via email. We are still working to tweak all giving feedback on the same document instead of individual feedback on each person's document. A win for me this semester was that I had prepared my assignments much earlier than in previous semesters so I could get that collaboration but also be available for others. I did read everything recommended, watched all the videos and class meetings. I collaborated and revised or offered revisions on all assignments presented to me.
Challenges for me this semester was that I was again never able to attend the class session live because of my teaching schedule. I always watched them back, sometimes multiple times. I made a special effort to read most of the entries on the discussion boards and circle back so that I could get a good perspective of the entire class since I couldn't be in the breakout sessions of the class. I did miss one deadline for giving responses but did go back a day later and add some responses. This is probably my greatest area of weakness, giving (what I consider to be valuable) feedback on the discussion boards. Although I have improved tenfold since I began this program, I continue to improve my knowledge and understanding so that I can contribute in a more worthwhile way to my cohort.
In my specific collaboration group, I felt I was a key contributor in initiating conversations and feedforward, checking on the members of the group and making myself available for any last minute revisions for those that also had extra challenges in having limited time to get assignments done. As a whole, I believe each person added some great value in initiating different tasks.
I feel as a team member, I met all the key contributing factors. As for supporting factors, I missed one response deadline but did end up contributing a day later. I feel very strongly that I deserve an 88/100.
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