Spring 2024
Instructor: Kelly Swindlehurst, PhD
Final Grade: A
Course Description from Syllabus:
This course applies leadership, adult development, action research and collaborative theory to the practice of collaborative consultation in school, home, agency, and other professional settings. Participants will engage in personal reflection, journal techniques, case study and applied approaches to understand and apply research-based skills in collaborative consultation, including interactive communication, group process, conflict resolution, and facilitation and team building. These collaborative skills and attributes will be analyzed at the personal level as well as at the team and organizational levels. Throughout, we will also consider the ways in which language, culture and implicit bias may influence collaborative interactions among school and other professionals and their peers, family and community members with whom they interact. Additionally, we explore the ways in which collaborative process may be optimized to enhance outcomes for children and youth with and without disabilities, their families, and other constituents within schools and other organizational contexts.
Course Reflection/ Impact:
When I signed up for this course, I was very excited to be learning about collaboration as I had just started working at a new school. I was eager to learn techniques to work productively with others and to find new ways to handle conflict resolution with co-workers and students. This was also my first course where I had meeting via zoom every week with classmates and I was excited to connect with my professor and peers.
In the beginning of the class, we spent time reframing our ideas on what effective collaboration means. It is often a term that is thrown around when talking about a group of people working together, but there are many important components of collaboration that team members should be aware of. Friend & Cooke in their book Interactions: collaboration skills for school professionals, mentions that collaboration is voluntary, requires parity among participants, is based on mutual goals, depends on shared responsibility for participation and decision making, sharing resources and accountability for outcomes (Friend & Cooke, 2020). These are components that I try to keep in mind when working with my team at school in order to be the most effective. I also strive to teach my students these components when they are working in groups.
One of the big projects that I completed throughout the course was my team analysis project, which then lead into my applied project. Through these projects, I was able to take a look at how my core team at school functioned and try to find ways to be more productive, share the wealth, and organized. I started with the team analysis project where I was able to rate my team on the areas of the presence of defining characteristics of collaboration, effective collaborative teaming process, positive interdependence, interpersonal skills, monitoring and processing of group functioning, and individual accountability. From this process, I was able to find that my team has a lot of strengths considering it was a new team, but there were always areas to grow and improve. This project led me to do more research on collaborative teams and their benefits. In a peer-reviewed reading by Hayley Weedle, they "found that teachers engaging in better quality collaboration had stronger student achievement gains in math and reading. Similarly, a quasi-experimental study of Title I schools showed that supporting teacher teams through explicit protocols, distributed leadership, and stable school-based settings (e.g., more time for collaboration focused on improving instruction) was connected to stronger gains in student achievement” (Weddle, 3). This led me to focus on the areas of positive interdependence as well as processing and monitoring. I then created a survey for teachers on my team to fill out that contained the same questions that I self reflected on for my team analysis project. From the data I recieved, I created a presentation with a break down of the data and possible solutions moving forward in order to address any areas of concern. I presented my findings at a team meeting and we have been working towards our new goals and ideas since then.
I also took a lot out of doing the case study reflection. For this assignment, we worked with our teams in the class. We each brought a scenario that has happened to us within our professional lives where there was conflict that we wanted assistance in how to repair, what we could have done better, and how to navigate through similar experiences in the future. Prior to the case study, we talked about how conflict can occur within schools and appropriate ways in which to navigate through it. In a reading by Alan Sharland, we learned about negative responses to conflict, such as competitive and avoidance, as well as positive responses that include ways of learning, connection, and insight (Sharland, 2014). I was able to bring in an ongoing situation that I had with a paraprofessional that was in one of my classes. I was able to talk with my team mates and go through a conflict resolution procedure with the group. I was able to acknowledge that I handled the situation using an avoidance stance, but wanted to find ways to repair the situation in a way that was beneficial for everyone involved. It was wonderful to get some outside advice from others within the educational field who have been through similar experiences. It was also very informative to be on the other side and help them figure out their conflicts. Through doing this, I got a lot of tools on how to navigate through conflict at my school with colleagues or students. It has also helped me talk to students and help peers get through their conflicts.
Through the class meetings as well as readings, I was able to take a lot of information and implement it into my day to day interactions with colleagues and students. I have been able to help my team become more organize and cohesive. This has helped us all be on the same page and provide a united front. This course as also help me work with students and help teach them the importance of teams and how to work effectively within groups. This course has also helped me find ways that the special educators and paraprofessionals can be more productive within my classroom as well as ways to stay connected about helping students while they are outside of my classroom.
References:
Friend, M. P., & Cooke, L. (2020). Interactions collaboration skills for school professionals. Boston Pearson Education.
Weddle, Hayley. “Teachers’ Opportunities to Learn through Collaboration over Time: A Case Study of Math Teacher Teams in Schools under Pressure to Improve.” Teachers College record (1970) 122.12 (2020): 1–40. Web.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/016146812012201204?journalCode=tcza
Sharland, A. (2014). Conflict as an opportunity. T + D, 68(7), 60-64. Retrieved from https://login.ezproxy.uvm.edu/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/trade-journals/conflict-as-opportunity/docview/1628555136/se-2