Collaborating Productively is a very important skill to know for anything you do. To me, this sustainability skill means to work together with a group of people to achieve a common goal. Knowing when to lead and when to listen is also really important when you Collaborate Productively. When working with a group there are certain things that you are good at and other things that your group members are good at. This is something that is necessary to know because it will help cause less conflicts and your group will be led in the right direction.

A good example of someone who Collaborates Productively is someone who understands their role in a group and takes ownership of it. If they know that they can be a good leader sometimes, they may want to help their group stay focused and on task, guiding them in the direction to success.

I have grown a lot in my skills of Collaborating Productively. When I first came to SEEQS I understood what this skill meant, however I was not the best person for group work. Due to COVID, we were online so I hadn’t actually interacted with anyone in a while so my social skills weren’t the best. I struggled to communicate with my group members and I wouldn’t try to take leadership when it was needed. Later on in the year I got a better understanding of what it meant to Collaborate Productively through a science bottle rocket group project where I worked with three of my classmates. This taught me that I sometimes need to take the role of a leader when it comes time to do so.

In 7th grade I started to use Collaborating Productively outside of school. I was in a small community of LEGO animators and we would sometimes have collaboration projects that we uploaded to our YouTube channels. This helped me understand how Collaborating Productively could assist me in my future.

Now I think I have a complete understanding of this sustainability skill. Although I still have not perfected my leadership skills or my ability to collaborate with my peers, I understand what it takes to successfully Collaborate Productively.

The Natural Resource Project was a project where we had to work with our group to make a presentation. We each had to research two different types of natural resources and give an example for both of them. We put all our information on personal slides and then the technician put all our slides together.

Before we started this project we learned about natural resources. Natural resources are from earth and can either be renewable or nonrenewable. We learned that there are different kinds of natural resources such as plants, animals and metals. 

The first step of this project was to assign roles to each of the members of the group. These roles included the Facilitator, (Someone who keeps track of time and makes sure everyone is on track), the Technician, (Someone who organizes all the slides and puts them together as well as any other technical things), the Director, (Basically as the name says. Someone who directs the project and moves it forward.), the Materials Manager, (Someone who gets all the supplies needed to finish the project), and the Participant (Which is everyone. Someone who participates in the activity.) I chose to be a technician. The next step in this project was choosing the two resources we were going to research and present about. My table mates and I all talked about what resources we would do in order to not take the same ones. I chose to do Animals and Plants. 

The next step for this project was to work on our slides. We were prompted to choose an example of each of the resources we chose, so I chose fish for animals and trees for plants. On our slides we were prompted to include pictures with captions as well as some boxes of text that went into detail about our examples of our resources. 

The second to final step of this project was for me, the technician, to put all my group members' slides into one big slideshow. I did this and then my group practiced for our presentation. The final step was to actually present our slides as a group to the whole class. As the technician I had to screen-share the slideshow with all our work to the TV.

Overall, our presentations went pretty smoothly (No errors or glitches), although they could have been better. I had a lot of fun with this project, but I think some of my group members may have struggled a little with it.

The Natural Resource project relates to Collaborating Productively because we had to work with our peers to get a presentation done. If someone didn’t pull their weight, this affected the whole group because we wouldn’t have a full presentation and it just reflected our group as a whole. To complete this project we needed to make sure that we all collaborated to make sure we didn’t choose the same resources, and we had to make sure that all of our slides looked nice for our final presentation. This shows Collaborating Productively because we had to all work together to get our final slideshow done. We had to discuss our strengths and weaknesses in order to assign roles to ourselves, AND we had to remember our roles and do them accordingly. 

A good example of how I Collaborated Productively with my group was when we were presenting. When we were in front of the class there was no room for us to quit. We all understood this and mutually tried our best to make our presentation good. This is sadly one of the only examples of how I Collaborated Productively with my group in this project.

This project has a lot of counterexamples of Collaborating Productively. Probably the one that I need to work on most is communicating with my group. For this project we needed to communicate with each other outside of school so we could remind and help each other with our slides and put them together. I wish I could say that we communicated with each other throughout the whole process, but we didn’t, in fact some of us didn’t even finish our slides. Because of this, I want to work on communicating with my group next time I have a project like this.