My Appreciation to Peers & Professor

     I would like to take this time to thank all of my peers and professor for allowing me to have such a great experience in this class. There has been a collaboration of thoughts as we have learned together what it takes to be a team working toward similar goals. We all have different experiences, yet we all care and have a passion to help support children and their families as best we can. We are all working toward that big goal of completing our masters in varying specialties. I have received support from peers and professor throughout our discussion boards and feedback from the professor on graded work. All of which has been helpful. This class marks the time in my degree where I will be splitting off from the big group and will be finishing my classes in adult teaching. I look forward to seeing familiar names as I move forward. For those of you that I will not see again I wish you well in all of your goals. I have decided to continue with my blog even after I have completed classes at Walden as a means of continued communication, anyone that I have had any classes along the way has my address. Go forth and do wondrous things my friends!

Toodles, Jenn Pore`

Adjourning is Such Sweet Sorrow

           Saying good-bye can be so very sad. This week I am to reflect on my experiences of when a group that I have belonged to has disbanded. I will admit that I have belonged to some groups that I was relieved when they ended. The most emotional group and I think a great example of a successful and fruitful group was the group of peers that I went through my student teaching class with. The professor was awesome! She new her stuff and was excited and passionate about sharing what she new. The college had a preschool on campus for students and staff. Our classroom was just across the hall from the preschool. It’s been over 7 years since we all went our separate ways but I still think of them often. We shared information, experiences, fears, tears and laughter together. There were about a dozen of us that earned money through out the class and we traveled together to a CAEYC conference in Anaheim and a trip to Disneyland all in the same week. We traveled together in a small bus from the college, told stories and sang the entire 11-hour drive. What a magnificent time we had! The day before we were to drive back home I received a call that my daughter had gone into labor 3 months early and that the baby was going to be delivered. I was recently divorced and living without electricity in order to survive and be able to have gas money to get to classes. Every single one of those women put their money together bought me an airline ticket, drove me to the airport, gave me what they had left for food money and a big group hug. Never have I experienced such humanity. To this day I tear up when I think of what wonderful people they are. Had I not moved away I am certain that I would still be in touch with some of them.

            I have no doubt that the reason the class/group was so successful is because we were all very much of the same mind. Yes, we were a very diverse class but we had the best interest of children in common and it proved to be a great group of people that learned together, supported each other, and we cared what happened to one and other. I anticipate that to some degree I will experience a similar experience when I graduate from Walden. Even though this is a different type of communication and not in person, I have many peers that have been in almost all of my classes over the last year. That is a long time to interact and not feel a loss when it is over. I expect that it will be bitter sweet. I am excited to be nearing the end of this long journey and to finally have earned my masters. I believe that to be successful that we must keep moving forward. In moving forward our classes together will end and I will genuinely wish each of my peers good will. It is an honor working with such dedicated people for such a wonderful reason. I will let my positive memories give me strength when I may have a tough day.

Jenn Pore`

Choose Your Battles in Order to Win the War

            This week we are asked to share a couple of strategies that I have learned to use in order manage or control conflicts. Our text (O’Hair, 2012) states that there are 3 strategies to solve conflict management and those would be: “escapist strategies, challenging strategies and cooperative strategies. This week my boss had accidentally left my credentials off my name when presenting an employee tree to the State during our site review. It really hurt my feelings because it made me look like a nothing on paper. I knew it was an over site and I chose not to say anything. By the end of the next day the review panel had brought it to my bosses attention and it had been corrected. I am so glad that I had not whined or pouted, it would have made me look pretty small.
             I have come to learn this week that one of my standards, choose your battles, would fall under the escapist column. I’m okay with that because when I use this choice it is generally because I have evaluated the situation and environment and have decided that it is not the time or that a bigger picture needs to be considered and I chose to save my energy for the bigger conflict. Sometimes it is more important to loose or forgive on a few small battle hills in order to win the war.

            Another of my all time strategies falls under what I now know to be a cooperative strategy and that is compromising. I think of compromising as a very respectful and useful form of dealing with conflict. Early Childhood professionals have been using it for years. When we offer children two choices to accomplish a task that we want them to do. We are compromising on the fact that we may not get our first choice but we are modeling cooperation and teaching decision-making skills simultaneously. Another aspect that I like about compromise is that everyone gets something that they want. Everyone likes to feel that they have been heard and that there wants and needs have been heard and validated, compromising is a good way to accomplish that goal.

Jenn Pore`

O’Hair, D., & Wiemann, M. (2012). Real Communication: An Introduction. Bedford/

     St. Martin’s, Boston, New York.

Communication Perceptions

            This week we had a fun and enlightening assignment, which was to take a test on how we perceived ourselves as listeners and communicators. Even more interesting was that we had to have two other people that know us, take the same test answering as how they perceive us. What I found surprising was that the scores were very similar. I had expected that maybe the others would score me tougher than I had scored myself. As it turns out our scores, as I mentioned were very similar with their scores seeing me as a better communicator and listener than I had rated myself.

            After this weeks reading I have come to realize (thankfully) that I very rarely engage in self-denigration. Most of the time I would have to say that my assessment of myself is more around the level of self-adequacy. I have made a conscious decision to be gentler and kinder to myself. This assignment has given me some important feedback. I chose my husband and a peer from work that has attended many meetings with me. The feedback I received tells me that even though I may feel a little nervous when I speak at meetings or trainings (I just taught a class last night on suicide prevention with a group of 24 in the class) that I do not appear nervous. That in itself has boosted my self confidence. I have not read the evaluations yet (fear of negative comments) but I would like to think that I will be able to read them and accept the criticism. I actually now believe that some of the evaluations may even be positive. The other way this weeks lesson has helped me is of course the reminder that as an EC professional my behavior and how I see myself can affect the children. If I appear hesitant or unsure of myself how is that going to inspire the children to speak their voices?

Jenn Pore`

Different ways of communicating?

           The question of the week is: Do I find myself communicating differently with different people and groups? I most certainly do. The first three categories of people that I thought of are family, peers, and clients. After putting some thought to the question I realize that I even communicate differently with the same people based on the circumstance. The first example that comes to mind is my grandchildren. I adore the ground they walk on and I believe that my manner, voice, body language, actions, and the fact that I tell them how much they mean to me ensures that they are aware. There are times when I am able to be with them in person, which is awesome! There are many times that I cannot see them in person so we Skype, text, send photos, face book, and talk on the phone. With each one of these methods there are inherent problems and advantages. To be even more specific as far as strategies I know that I choose subjects carefully with particular members of my family. Such as with my dad. I stick with comfortable natural topics that are not going to get him started down an ugly conversation. I love to listen intently to make sure I hear and understand that my grand’s want to tell me about their lives.

            With peers the subject and setting are pretty much set for us. Occasionally we have a personal conversation but for the most part the topics surround the weekly topic for class or a particular client. The communication (I hope) is always respectful and generally is focused on fact-finding, problem solving or validation of our understanding of a concept or situation.

            When communicating with clients these too can look very different. I have many different strategies or approaches that I use with children, which rely on the feedback that I receive from the child. Depending on the situation and how the child responds to me, determines whether I speak, sit and listen, put on music, introduce my dog or offer a means of drawing for example. In the excerpt from her book (Gonzalez-Mena, 2010) lists some things that teachers can do and one of them is “Recognize your own patterns of nonverbal behavior. Most of us are unconscious of these until we meet someone who doesn’t fir our patterns. Consider that even though your own way may feel right, normal. Or good doesn’t mean that they are in any way superior to another person’s nonverbal behavior patterns.” For me this equates into the reminder that it isn’t just about me miss-reading someone else’s non-verbal cues but that I need to be aware that I may be giving out non-verbal cues that are being miss-read.

Jenn Pore`

Gonzalez-Mena, J. (2010). 50 strategies for communicating and working with diverse

     Families. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

            

Body Language is only part of a Conversation

            I found this weeks assignment to be a lot of fun and very enlightening. I must cconfess that I cheated just a tiny bit. I asked around for some suggestions of half hour sitcoms that were not aggressive, rude or violent. I was very little television and I specifically do not watch the news. I did not want to be caught off guard by watching something that was violent or negative. So, having said that I watched an old episode of Frasier. There appeared to be three main male roles and two women who were involved more than other characters. One man clearly appeared to have a job at a radio station with one of the women. The rest of the show had the characters in a home and at a coffee shop. Maybe the other women is one of the two middle age men’s wife, because she is always at the house with the older man (dad, uncle?). There is a lot of body language happening in this show, along with lots of facial expressions. I was told it was a comedy but to watch it without words it appeared to me that these people were angry a lot.

     So, after watching again I realized that there is a lot of sarcasm in this show. I was right the one guy (Frasier) was a radio host and one of the women (Roz) was his producer. The older man in the house was his dad and the second women was a lice in physical therapist/house keeper. The second middle age man was Frasier’s brother. The show really was cute and I have watched other old episodes and have really enjoyed it. Turns out all of the arm flailing and expressions were to add to the humor of the show. I miss guessed on the physical therapist/house keeper completely. Which makes me feel better because I felt sad that she seemed to always seem to be on the outskirts of what was going on. It really brought attention to the fact that just paying attention is not enough. If we don’t really listen and hear what is being said we stand to really misinterpret and misunderstand what the other person is attempting to tell us. 

Communication Styles

     Hello to my new and long standing classmates. The very first person that came to mind as someone that demonstrates competent communication is my husband. He is a true wordsmith. He has the ability to bring out any emotion from his readers that he wants to. As much as I appreciate his ability to make anything sound professional I can not say that I have the desire to be like him. Yes, he can write a book and publish wonderful meaningful poems. However, he has the need to correct others when they speak, he appears to have the need to hear speech as correct as he writes. I get that when I am writing a paper or report for example that it needs to be professional. For my own comfort I prefer to have some down, relaxed time and that includes not being perfect and on task. I feel it just goes to show that there are probably as many kinds of communication as there are people.

Jenn Pore`