Contribution to Learning and My Learning Community (EDLD 5302/5305)

Group Members for EDLD 5302: Eboni Mitchell, Stefanie Vaughn, Anna Akuretiya, Christopher Aebig, Claudia Rios

Group Members for EDLD 5305: Eboni Mitchell, Kary Magliolio-Harnica, Stefanie Vaughn, Jennifer, Anna Akuretiya, Maria Carrasco

As educators, regardless of our field, we see the power of collaboration every day within our learners. Now only do our students learn for us, but us too from them. We see how they battle through adversity and respond to challenges they are presented with. Within EDLD 5302 and 5305 I was reminded of the power of collaboration, again finding myself as the student, or more appropriately, the learner. My collaborative groups met weekly, Wednesday evenings for 5305 and Thursday evenings for 5302. The discussions varied for session to session as one might expect, but level of comfort we had with one another grew in various ways throughout. As a group, we began to understand the way one another operates and could see the connections each member was able to make to their profession. As the only math teacher, I tended to view things with a bit of an analytical lens, however, within my groups I was able to view things through a completely different point of view, learning about education in the medical field as well as how the education system looks outside of the east coast (I am from/teach in the suburbs just north of Philadelphia).

Fortunately, the majority of the group members in my 5305 group coincided with my 5302 group, so we were able to further build our connections not just with one another, but with the courses. The “Growth Mindset Plan” being one of the earlier assignments in the semester had a strong impact on our outlook for the work we faced moving forward. The more we discussed and went further in depth with the COVA model, the more comfortable we felt sharing our personal journeys through the courses and taking risks. The idea of productive struggle was certainly evident at times but only lead to more success as we moved forward with our meetings. Additionally, each group member came with different past experiences. For myself, this is my second master’s degree, and I must say this program is quite different than my first. However, I did have some experience with literature reviews, so this was something I felt confident sharing out about early. With my group, we looked through my past literature reviews and compared/contrasted what Dr. H was looking for in comparison to what was expected from me in the past. I also had some experience regarding the idea of the growth mindset, as this was one of my school’s themes over the past few years and I had some professional development experience with it.

Being able to work with group members that were in both courses allowed us to truly intertwine the content and focus on learning. In a new program, we were learning the ropes of the courses, organization wise, while also tackling our ePortfolio and Innovation Plan. My groups decided to use GroupMe as a primary way of communicating from day to day, which served almost as a stream of consciousness. I felt that having this open dialogue was an effective way of keeping one another in the loop and an efficient way of sharing ideas. This also allowed us to more effectively plan out our Zoom meetings to ensure that we were making the best use of our time. For certain activities, we broke into sub-groups where we felt having similar backgrounds would be more beneficial. For example, when developing our Implementation Outlines, Anna, Eboni, and myself (all in the field of elementary/secondary education) worked together to loosely plan out the 24 months. At the same time, Stefanie and Kary, both in the medical education field, created their timeline. Although working separately, we were able to then come together and compare what we came up with and provide one another with feedback. Similarly to when I shared my literature review, we viewed each other’s ePortfolios as Dr. Bedard did in class, as well as going through examples from Dr. H’s website to get some ideas and familiarize ourself with their appearances, layouts, and content.

Looking at collaboration outside of my specific groups a bit, the discussion boards were a great resource to connect with one another with a more focused conversation. They allowed us to voice our opinions on the COVA model, growth mindset, and what it means to be an innovator. Again, with the various different backgrounds we all enter with, the parallels were noticeable from field to field. With this said, I do think at times I could have participated more actively in conversations that lived in the discussion boards. To no one’s fault but my own, I tend to stick to being a reader and self-reflector at times when it comes to larger settings, rather than voicing (typing) my responses and thoughts. I do feel that within my group I went outside of my comfort zone to voice my opinions and provide feedback to other members. For these reasons, I believe that I deserve a 92/100 EDLD 5302 and a 46/50 for EDLD 5305. I see that there is certainly room to grow moving forward, but I am happy with and encourage by my contributions and the leadership roles that I took on within my two groups.