Thank You

A common "sign" the children use at my school is "thank you." Those are two very important words to teach our young children as they recognize the kindness and help they receive from those around them. I want to say "thank you" to all of my colleagues from this course as we have learned about collaboration and communication in the Early Childhood field. Thank you for all of the support and feedback you gave me as I learned ways of becoming a better communicator. I hope many of you will be in my next class: Developing People and Leading Teams. I'm really looking forward to the next few classes which focus on administration, management and leadership. Good luck to everyone!

Adjourning

This week I learned about the five stages of team development. These states include forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning (O’Hair & Wiemann, 2012). The final stage, adjourning, is when a project or task has come to an end and the members reflect on their experiences together. When I think about a time when I had to leave a group I think back to when I was a summer camp counselor. I spent the entire summer living and working with 25 other college students as we became very close. When our “mission” came to an end it was a strange feeling having to say goodbye now that our goal was accomplished. Before leaving camp, we hugged, prayed together and agreed to stay in touch with each other and made plans to come back to visit periodically. This group was especially hard to leave because we were practically each other’s families since we lived away from our family and college friends for 10 straight weeks.

I imagine the adjuring stage from this program will look quite different than back when I left my role as a camp counselor. When we finish with our master’s degree we will all feel relief, excitement and will probably be proud of our accomplishments. I would like to share contact information with my colleagues so we will be able to continue communicating once the program is over. It’s always very helpful to have multiple contacts in your field. Adjourning is an essential stage of teamwork. These closing rituals are important for continued communication and support.

Resource

O'Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2012). Real communication. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's.

Conflict Management

Knowing positive ways of solving conflicts is essential for any teacher or administrator. In the early childhood field there are a lot of different people who are working together to do what they think is best for the children in the program. Classes are made of up teachers who serve students from all different types of families, homes and backgrounds. There are bound to be some conflicts arise between parents and teachers from time to time.

I have experienced a few conflicts over the years in my role as a teacher. A time that especially stands out was when one parent was very upset that their child continued to come home talking about how another child was mean to her. The child the girl was talking about was a student with special needs. My co-teacher and I were working very closely with the student with special needs and keeping in very close communication with the student’s parents as we worked to get him support from the local school district. While we worked very hard to eliminate problems between this boy and the other students, it was impossible to prevent all of them. It was especially frustrating to me speaking to the parent who was very upset because there was only so much information I could give her about the little boy. I did not feel like I could give her details such as the fact that he had special needs.

From what I’ve been learning in this course I know that when people are upset, they usually want to be sure that they are heard and understood more so than they want the problem to end. I know that I could compromise, making steps to help her feel better. I could let her know that I would put her child in a separate group whenever possible or pay closer attention to the interactions between the two children. I could repeat back what she was telling me so she know she was being heard and letting her know a little bit of the situation from my observations/perspective.

Colleagues- do you have any other ideas for how I would solve a conflict like this in the future? I look forward to reading your examples as well. 

Who Am I As A Communicator?

Part of my assignment this week was to take three self-surveys evaluating my level of communication anxiety, verbal aggressiveness and listening profile. Then I chose two people to take the same tests to evaluate myself through their eyes. The results were as follows:

Communication Anxiety

MY RESULTS

MILD- “You reported that you feel a bit uneasy in some communication situations and somewhat more confident in other contexts. Communication does not seem to be something you worry a great deal about. “

HUSBAND- MILD

MOM- LOW

Verbal Agressiveness

MY RESULTS

MODERATE- “You maintain a good balance between respect and consideration for others’ viewpoints, and the ability to argue fairly by attacking the facts of a position rather than the person holding that position.”

HUSBAND- MODERATE

MOM-SIGNIFICANT

Listening Styles

MY RESULTS

PEOPLE-ORIENTED- “You empathetic and concerned with the emotions of others. This listening style helps you to rebuild your relationships, but it can interfere with proper judgment because you tend to be very trusting of others.”

HUSBAND-PEOPLE ORIENTED

MOM – PEOPLE ORIENTED

I would still like to have a colleague evaluate me in these areas but I did not have a chance this week. Instead, my mom and husband were able to evaluate me. I was surprised to learn that we all thought my listening style was people-oriented. I was also surprised that my mom ranked my communication anxiety as low. I’m glad to know that she can’t sense when I have a little anxiety at times and I hope others feel that way too.

The information I learned from this activity will help me as an early childhood educator because I can be more intentional about not being verbally aggressive and using other skills that will enhance my communication with children, families and colleagues. 

Communication and Culture

It’s interesting to reflect on my adult life vs. my childhood/teenage years and the people I’m surrounded by. I would definitely say that before I was in college I mainly associated with people who were from similar cultures as my own. A lot of my friends were from my church or from my school and we all lived in close proximity to one another. In grade and high school it seemed like many people did not want to be different. In many cases they may have been but did not want to highlight it.

Ever since I was in college I have been meeting and working around people from many different cultural backgrounds. I associate with people who practice different religions, are of a different socioeconomic background, age, sexual orientation and race than myself.

In some ways I communicate differently with people from different groups and cultures. I tend to ask more questions to someone who I don’t know very much about. As an early childhood educator it is important for me to work on being an effective communicator with everyone in my program. Some tips for workers in this field include:

• look at situations from the eyes of the child/family you serve
•  withhold judgment on families and work to get to know them
•  ask questions, learn names and show respect to all families and children in your program

Homework = Watching TV!

This is my second week of the class Communication and Collaboration in the Early Childhood Field. My assignment this week was to watch an episode of a TV show that I do not normally watch but without sound. During the episode I made predictions about the characters’ relationships based on how they were communicating. Then I watched the episode with sound to see in what ways I was and was not correct.

I chose to watch an episode of “The Millers” which is a show I had never heard of before. The show started off with two men talking together in a coffee shop and watching a yoga class that was going on in the next room. One man begins smiling and waving to a young woman in the yoga class and soon they are waving and making faces at each other. Soon the class ends and the young woman and an older woman leave the class talking. The men walk over to them and suddenly the young woman looks upset at the man she was smiling at and immediately leaves the coffee shop.

As I watched I assumed that the two men were friends and the man who was smiling at the young woman was the son of the older woman. It seemed like both of the men were single because they were focusing on a few different women throughout the episode. They would flirt with the women by smiling at them from a distance and then approach the woman and talk very close to them.

During one part of the episode the mother was at a doctor’s office. She was telling something to the receptionist and the receptionist looked like she was feeling sorry for the mother because she had a concerned look on her face and at one point put her hand on her heart.

After I watched the episode with sound, I discovered that I was correct about a few things and incorrect about others. I was correct about the relationships between the characters. I was able to tell their roles and relationships because of their nonverbal behaviors including eye contact, facial expressions, proximity to each other and hand gestures.

If this were a show I was familiar with I would’ve had some past knowledge about how each of the characters’ personalities. Watching a new show without sound I made assumptions that were not always correct. This translates into the real world too because it’s important to not rely solely on assumptions without sufficient information. 

Competent Communicator

This week I began my first week of school (at work) and I also started a new class in my grad program. We're talking about competent communicators. The first person that comes to mind when I think about an effective communicator is a teacher I had when I was in middle school. I think of him as one of my favorite teachers because he found a way to make the content that he was teaching fun for the students. He was passionate about what he was teaching, gave good eye contact and was funny. On a personal level he was honest and showed that he cared about the feelings of each of his students. He took time to really get to know us. He was one of the teachers that inspired me to become a teacher myself. While I have different communication styles, I hope that some of what I learned from him has shaped who I am today.