Reflecting through the use of blogs has been an important practice in our class this semester. Discussions have also played a large part in getting us to synthesize information. Reflection and discussion have really been the primary ways in which we have unpacked what our readings and guests have to tell us about designing effective change. On Wednesday, discussion about reflection took center stage for a while.
Quite a bit of this post is what I gathered from our discussion yesterday. I can only know for sure what I thought and think about the reflections. However, I can know with some certainty what others thought, based upon comments from the discussion. I guess this is a caveat.
Talking about reflections in class on Wednesday tied in really well to the material from Senge on personal and shared discipline. Turns out our personal visions for reflection were diverse, and we were not all aware of the shared vision for reflection. Some of us thought the process was supposed to be more structured and planned while others thought there was more room to maneuver with our posts. It wasn't clear at first how commenting was supposed to work or if we were supposed to look a bit to the week ahead. Some of us chose to write more formally, others chose to be more informal. One of us chose to write from the point of view of a rabbit. It seems like we each had a unique way of viewing the weekly reflections, and this is, well, reflected in our blogs. However, it isn't that our blogs are each so very different that shows a discrepancy among our personal visions and the shared vision. That's perfectly fine. What tells me that there was a gap between the visions is that we all but said it on Wednesday. There are two points from The Fifth Discipline that stand out to me when I think of what could have been better about our reflection-writing.
First, we never really answered the question that, according to Senge, addresses shared vision at its "simplest level." (Senge, 192) I don't remember our answering "What do we want to create?" That's probably the reason that there was so much confusion on Wednesday. Some people thought our blogs were supposed to address the week's prompt unless we had a "more awesome" idea, as one of us put it. The idea, in my mind, for why we wanted to maintain blogs was that it would be a way to extend the discussion outside the classroom. It would be a way to show Prof. Arvan that we were thinking about the material outside of class, and it would allow us to express our opinions and ideas in an alternative form. I guess I saw blogging as a fun alternative to writing research papers or something of that nature. What I wanted to create may have not been what others wanted to create, which may have not been what our professor wanted us to create. If we had answered more clearly, or at least revisited as a group, the question of what we wanted to create with our large network of blogs, I believe we would have been more successful in establishing a shared vision.
Going along with that, I think the blogging experience would have been more favorable if we had each firmly established our own personal vision for blogging. I think, from the comments on Wednesday, that a lot of us were concerned with knowing Prof. Arvan's vision for the blogs. We wanted to know how they would be graded, and not knowing that very clearly, in my opinion, caused us to not take as many risks. Some of us would have more often deviated from the prompt if we were sure it was encouraged. I think sometimes we just did not have a good sense of our vision for blogging. None of us are seasoned bloggers. I would say that our "personal mastery" is higher than it was fifteen weeks ago, but it still isn't extraordinary. Senge says that for people with high personal mastery, "a vision is a calling rather than simply a good idea." (Senge, 132) Maybe if we each had more of a vision rather than an idea for our blog, we would have all enjoyed the experience more.
I think we could have done more, but we did quite a bit as it is. A lot of this has to do with this course having a lot of "firsts" involved: first time for blogging (most of us), first time for the course, etc. Given all of those firsts, I think we have ended up with some fairly nice products of our experience. Maybe we didn't design as much effective change as we wanted to, but there's still time for us to reach more of our vision for the class. We still have one or two more posts to write, some of us have a multimedia project to finish, and my group is working on a survey and proposal to get a mentoring program for ANTH 143 going. It took us a while to get personal visions to line up with the shared vision, but I think it has happened here near the end of the semester. I would have liked it to have happened earlier. I would have liked for this ANTH 143 project to have come into focus before Thanksgiving break, but it didn't. So now, we work the best we can with the time we have this semester and maybe next semester, too. So long as we don't let reality bring us down too much, maybe we can achieve our vision for this class after all.
4 comments:
his is a good post. It sums up nicely where we are and from where we came.
On my side of the equation, I was quite ignorant at the start of the semester. I hadn't taught at all for 3 years and in my prior teaching I didn't have students use blogs. So I didn't know what barriers/issues we'd confront. Some perhaps can be anticipated in advance. Most have to be experienced. In particular, there are a lot of things I take for granted from blogging a lot that you guys didn't. But I had to see that to understand.
I'm wondering how early in the semester you could have articulated a personal vision for the reflections. What would that have been based on? I do gather that Wednesday's class was something of an Aha! for many in the class. I'm not sure that could have been designed very early in the semester. In one way it actually shows you've learned a lot, which is a good thing.
One other point, which may show why personal mastery is itself not sufficient. It appears that the class discussion was necessary. People had not reached these conclusions on their own. I don't know why, but if you have a thought on that I'd be very interested in hearing it.
Yeah, as with anything, there are going to be some unexpected obstacles the first time you try it out.
I think after a few weeks, we could have articulated more of a vision for the reflections. Maybe after 5 weeks, just to throw out a number. There was a point in the middle of the semester where someone mentioned that we needed to comment on each others' posts as part of the reflecting. I had already been doing a bit of commenting, but I would have done more if there was more of an idea of how it would work or what was the point. I think that it's one of those things that maybe around the time of the office hours on blogging we could have discussed.
Finally, do you mean that personal mastery itself, as far as figuring out blogging, was not sufficient for getting on board with the shared vision of reflection? If so, my thought is that it takes connecting everyone's personal visions to make the shared vision achievable. We may have all gotten better with reflection as the semester progressed, but we needed to have a legitimate discussion together to figure out how to make the connections.
Yes, you got the meaning of my comment. But I still don't understand why it didn't happen spontaneously. So, to borrow a Mary-Ann Winkelmes term, I don't know what is transparent for you guys and what isn't.
I really couldn't agree with you more that setting up some objectives both as a class and as an individual with blogging would have definitely helped. I remember in the middle of the semester we also got a conversation going about establishing some class goals, but we never got around to it because of the craziness of the class project planning.
Still, there is still some overall thing to take from this despite not having goals in our class. Looking back on it and seeing how important they would have been (as I know a lot of my classmates and I talked about not knowing the theme of the class or where it was going), how can we carry this on to other projects effectively?
AKA, as you know, I always like to ask, " OK, what is a way of implementing this strategy realistically?" For example, when starting a project, spending even ten minutes talking about what we would want to get out of out and what we want to accomplish. Sure, this could seem a little cheesy, but it would be well worth it don't you think?
Also, I thought I would leave my response to your post in a place you would be sure to see it:
I am so glad you enjoyed reading my reflection. I think what made this piece so much more engaging was that instead of running with the first thing in my head that I wanted to write about, I thought to myself, OK, now what would be the most effective way to get across what I want to? Sure, this was more difficult that going on with my ramblings, but at the same time it was worth it. Not only was it better writing, but I think this piece did a better job of trying to help other people find what they care about – or get better at it. :)
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