Thank you

As we near the end of this class I would like to say thank you to my colleagues. Thank you for your insights, encouragement and support through your comments. I have enjoyed reading your posts and comments, I have learned a lot from all of you. I wish you all the best and hope to see you in other classes.

Groups

It is usually hardest for me to leave social groups. I feel most connected to the individuals in these groups and knowing that we will not be meeting or seeing each other regularly usually makes me sad. In these groups we have already gone through the forming, storming, norming and performing stage. Knowing that we will not be doing things together anymore makes adjourning hard. The hardest group for me to leave were my friends in college. We were all international students and a great support for each other. In time, we came to realize that we had a lot in common even though we were from different countries. The similarities in our cultures were amazing. We often ate together and had discussions about several issues that concerned us. We tried to help each other as best we could in every aspect of our lives. Of course there were disagreements sometimes but we always worked them out. We had a closing ritual of sorts after our graduation. Our friends and family all gathered together and some of them prayed for us, we celebrated completing four years of college with speeches and a cake. Afterwards we all went out to a restaurant and had a meal which served as a celebratory and farewell dinner. I also gave everyone in the group a personalized letter of appreciation which I had written to them. I imagine I will probably adjourn from this group by thanking individuals for their contributions. Everyone has helped to make this experience a more enriching one with their contributions and advice. Adjourning is important because it helps to bring closure and sometimes helps you to look to the future and the next thing instead of living in the past. Adjourning also gives you a chance to look at your successes and failures as a group and possibly how you can improve next time (O'- Hair & Wiemann, 2012).



Reference:

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

Conflict Resolution

I recently had a disagreement with my boss about the way I discipline some of my students. He thinks that I can be a little harder on them. Two strategies that I have learned to help me manage disagreements are to:

listen to what the other party says and give feedback telling them what I heard. This way I can ascertain if I understood the message the way they meant it.

to take the win win approach (Conflict Resolution Network, n.d.) in which sometimes both parties can have their needs met satisfactorily without having to necessarily compromise on anything. In this case I asked my boss if he could come in and teach my class for a day so I can see exactly what he would like me to do in certain situations. This way I can implement some of his strategies and we can talk over things that I might not feel comfortable employing in my class.


Reference:

Conflict Resolution Network. (n.d.). CR kit. Retrieved from http://www.crnhq.org/pages.php?pID=12#skill_3