Collaboration

I understand that collaboration can be hard. If you go with your best friends, you find yourself goofing off, if you go with people, you find annoying you also get no work done, sometimes you find yourself having to carry the whole group or in contrast, having nothing to do.

I believe that the best way to be collaborative is to simply listen. Personally, I feel like I always want to step up and be a leader and take charge of the group although now I am more conscious of leaving others’ ideas out and pushing for mine. Therefore, I believe that I need to improve on my own collaboration skills personally. When you listen to others and get to know them, you then understand their strengths and assign them to productive roles within the group improving the success rate of the project.

In English at the start of the year, I had to work in a group of four people to create a news segment production for a project. I had one friend in my group who I knew I could work well with. The other two I didn’t know very well. As I had written the script for the news production, I decided to stand up and take charge of the group. I assigned people their roles and told them what to do. For my friend who I knew well, this plan worked well. For the other two people I didn’t know as well I feel like I brushed their ideas past me. They didn’t feel included in the group as much as my friend and even though they had a role to play. We decided to reconsider our plan. I decided to ask the two what they wanted their strengths were. I then assigned them to slightly different roles and then we all worked on happily from there. The finished project didn’t turn out too badly. At the end of the day, the whole group was happy with what we produced. I believe that listening is the key to collaboration as when everyone is included everyone feels motivated to produce their best work.

Learner Agency

Learner Agency is to learn the way you want to learn things so you can better understand what you are learning. Put simply it is freedom in the way in which you want to learn. Learner Agency is important because when you can take charge of your learning you have more choice and are more motivated to produce you best work and care about your learning. I have experienced learner agency when I had the choice of picking classes that I want to do next year. Basically I had choice in what I wanted to learn and it encourages me to keep improving in my studies always.