Teaching And Learning Plan Reflection At Centennial College

Teaching and Learning Plan Reflection
Look Back
This event took place at Centennial College from January 26, 2016 to February 9, 2016. The purpose of this event was to get together with my assigned group and create a teaching and learning plan to teach Aboriginal elementary school children about the importance of hand hygiene. My team was made up of five team members.
Elaborate
The elements of group process are to start and finish group assignment effectively while working with group members. The phases of group development are forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Kelly and Crawford (2013) explained that forming is the introduction of each group member and formation of boundary, storming is the identification of different
views and conflicts, norming is the process to achieve group negotiation and cohesiveness, performing is the actual beginning of group work while maintaining effective relationship with each of the group members, and adjourning is the completion of group task and termination of group relationships and its evaluation. The contract development involved writing the goals of the group task, what each person in group was responsible and the consequences if that person was not able to finish their part of the assignment and finally each group member had to sign it saying that they agree to the contract.
The end result of the teaching and learning plan was adequate to achieve group task. We were able to complete the assignment within the time frame and each group member also participated to teach peers from a different group. My group members felt that we achieved the intended results of our group goals.
Analysis
One key issue from this group experience was dealing with the different types of personalities in my group such as, a criticizer, passive one, detailer, controller and pleaser. Beebe, Beebe, Redmond, Geerinck, Salem-Wiseman (2015) described the that a criticizer is someone who finds faults although he or she supports group task, a passive person is someone who goes along with everything happening in the group, a detailer is someone who focuses on the details, a controller is someone who wants to be in charge of everything, finally a pleaser is someone who wants to please everybody in the group. Group dynamic is figuring out the behaviour of the group as a whole and the relationship between group members (Koizer et al., 2014). The reason why it was difficult because I had to deal with an each personality
in a specific way and it became a problem when I had to focus on the group goals.
The dynamic of my group was diverse, but it helped us to come up with creative and resolving ideas to successfully complete our group task. Group process was difficult at first because I did not know each group member work ethic or how each member would act in a group setting. Throughout the group process we had different types of conflict management styles such as, accommodation, competition, compromise and collaboration. Beebe et al. (2015) expressed that accommodation is a lose-win approach to conflict, competition is a win-lose strategy to conflict, compromise is a lose-lose or win-win approach to conflict and collaboration is a win-win solution. My group had to use these conflict management styles and tried to put aside our differences so we can focus on group goal. The impact of group process had on our group performance was significant. An example of this was when we had to find a song that we can sing to Aboriginal children so they know how
long and how to wash their hands, we couldn’t agree on picking a song or singing the alphabet to them. This in turn impacted our identified group goals because we were so focused on such a small portion of the whole task. We wasted a large amount of time arguing that when we could have worked on our presentation or other part of our goal. Some of my values and beliefs have changed and some have been reinforced now that we have completed the teaching and learning plan. Kozier et al. (2014) mentioned that values are what you view as what is right or wrong and beliefs are known as one’s view of reality of what is true or false. Something that has changed for me is that, I learned that people who are quiet in groups, they care but they don’t voice their opinion. So they need someone to periodically engage them if they are okay with what is happening otherwise you will get no contribution from them. This group process has changed my perspective towards the silent group members because my first impression of them was that they do not care and will not put much effort into the group project but now I leant that I should be non-judgmental. I realized that there will always be interpersonal differences with others but I have to remain professional in order to achieve group work. As a group, we identified the social issue is to teach Aboriginal elementary school children about the importance of hand hygiene. The elements of our teaching and learning plan had addressed that we are going to educate these children effectively and innovatory on hand hygiene. We educated them about why and when it’s important to wash hands through hand washing and hand sanitizing.
Revision
Two revisions to the teaching and learning plan that would improve future teaching sessions for our target population are actively engaging children in learning plan and using different visual media to facilitate teaching plan. We will get children involved with the topic of hand hygiene by asking the children questions before our presentation and ask questions after our presentation to see what they learned. There are elements of our teaching and learning plan that I would need to change to address the social issue. Aboriginal elementary school children will be given questionnaires about the topic of presentation and will be encouraged to participate in demonstration of hand hygiene. We will also try power point slides and videos that will show them how to wash their hands. We can also try using pictures of Aboriginal children in our presentation so the children could relate to shown picture in order to encourage them to use proper hand hygiene. After the presentation, we will ask the kids the same questions, we asked them before the presentation, so we can see if they had learned something and/or if we need to go over some the information.
New Perspective
The thing that has changed or has been reinforced for me by completing this teaching and learning group exercise is that teamwork is important. I noticed that I wasn’t stressed out and wasn’t worried about how much time I had left to finish this project. We all had our assigned parts that we had to work on and we finished them successfully. The group contract guided and motivated to focus on individual’s contributions to achieve the goals of our group. While some of my other group members are good at gathering important information, I am good at putting all the information together and use of American Psychological Association to prepare learning plan. When we all completed our small individual tasks then got together so we can go over what we have completed to see if we could make any changes. It was nice getting a fresh pair of eyes on each other’s work. Team work was essential to complete this project.