Contribution to my Learning and the Learning Community

During the eight weeks of these two courses I have learn so many things that will help me in my future as an educator. I feel that I am starting to put the learning process and its many concepts and ideas together and I have begun to see how everything is starting to fit together. This has given me a very satisfying feeling.

In our course EDLD 5304 we have been learning the importance of having a clear “WHY” inserted into our thinking about our projects. To produce passion and a sense of urgency in our students, we need to reflect upon, to understand, and to really know the purpose, causes or beliefs that drive us to be successful as educators. At the same time, we need to target the hearts of our students before we address the minds. We had the opportunity to refer to and reflect upon Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning. This taxonomy looks at learning from three domains: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor. This taxonomy and its concepts should be incorporated when we develop learning environments.

For our project, involving the implementation of an e- Portfolio, we defined the milestones to reach, identified vital behaviors according to the Influencer book’s four key strategies, and, finally, we used the six sources of influence to help team members and students change their behaviors. Ultimately we succeeded in our e-Portfolio implementation.

Additionally, we developed an execution strategy following the 4DX model. We focused on our Wildly Important Goal, defined lag and lead measures, developed a scoreboard to track our successes and created a cadence of accountability, involving creating regular and frequent meetings to focus on our goal and its progress.

Finally, we learned different tools to become self differentiated leaders, capable of addressing the resistance and anxiety that occur when launching new innovations. As educators, it is also crucial to become self-directed individuals who can define boundaries and be in touch with ideas and emotions of others without being dominated by them. Using empathy in conversations and focusing on objectives, and not emotions, are keys to having successful interactions.

For EDLD 5317, we were asked to write an article and to submit it for publishing. This has been an interesting experience for me since it is the first time that I am actually writing a piece with the goal of publishing in mind.

I learned that the process of publishing requires following different steps that must be taken into consideration.

First we had to determine to which publications we wanted to submit. We looked at the publications’ editorial policies and their contact information. I looked through stories that the publication have published before in order to get an idea of their writing style. The next step was to choose a topic. This was a little difficult at first, so I decided to talk about my experience in my project’s implementation. Research and writing came afterwards. I tried to familiarize myself with the type of work accepted by my chosen publication. Then I start writing the article. I developed a rubric so that my peers could have a way to analyze and to review my draft and I am currently working on, and incorporating as much as possible, their comments in order to improve the article.

I had the opportunity, as part of a team, to also complete 2 chapters of a podcast. Our team decided to talk about the two books that we were reading in the EDLD5354 class and how we used models found in these books in our e-Portfolio implementation. It was a really helpful experience to share knowledge and to learn from others on the team. As a result, we were much more confident in our second podcast.

Being part of a support group has been great. All the members in our group support and help each other, and we effectively addresses as a group issues of concern to different individuals as well as common concerns. We met once a week and we talked about our projects, planned our podcasts, and discussed and answered our questions. The members of my group were: Naima Bagot, Angela Upshaw, Herman Bibbs, and myself.

Given what I have stated above, I feel that I deserve a score of 90/100