Intrapersonal Collaboration????

I was watching The Price is Right on TV the other day. Ok, I have to admit watching is a strong word; I had The Price is Right on in the background while doing other things. All of a sudden I started paying attention when Drew Carey said that a dog shown on screen was the contestant's seeing eye dog because the contestant was visually impaired. He went to his spot in Contestant's Row with the guidance of an usher, and the item to bid on was presented. It was a set of kitchen equipment. The description was given as usual, and afterwards Drew made a comment about the the number of items on stage for the contestant who was visually impaired. I have to admit my first thought was that at least nobody would bid $1 more than him, because that would just be mean. It turns out that it wouldn't have really mattered, because he got the price exactly right and won both the kitchen equipment and a $500 bonus. I wondered if his disability was not a handicap in this situation. Maybe not seeing flashy models and brand names emblazoned on these items made him able to make a more honest judgement. Maybe relying more on other senses made him listen to numbers that the crowd was yelling. Or maybe he just got lucky.
Somehow this got me thinking about collaboration. What about intrapersonal collaboration? Ok obviously it's not quite voluntary; your eyes don't have a choice in whether or not they will participate in decision making. The model for interpersonal collaboration isn't fully applicable, but could thinking about decision making as "intrapersonal collaboration" be an effective model? I'm not suggesting that anyone pretend there are little gnomes running around inside his or her body having meetings that share responsibility and have mutual goals (though that wouldn't be a bad idea for the next big Disney movie). I do think that maybe applying some of the characteristics of collaboration to our senses could lead to better, or at least more consistent, decision making. As I already mentioned, obviously this is not going to be voluntary. I think it's safe to assume that all of your body parts and senses have the shared mutual goal of your preservation. I think resources are shared in the sense that different senses work together to add to experience. For example, a very large component of a taste is the smell of a food. Also when tasting a food, you are feeling the texture with your tongue and seeing the food before it goes into your mouth. I think that this could be considered sharing resources. Next is parity. Maybe this is something that we don't have enough of. I know when I'm shoe shopping parity goes out the window. Too many times I've given my eyes more say than my feet and gone home with a pair of shoes that I regret wearing after an hour or two. The next characteristic is shared responsibility. Maybe this is like parity. We try to leave tasks up to one sense when they are best shared by many. For example, I know I often try to do math problems in my head. I know I am capable, but if I used my hands to write the process down I would be more likely to consistently get the correct answer and I would most likely save time as the process would become more efficient. Finally is shared accountability. I think this is another one where the failure to work together can be judged as inadequacy of one sense.
It might not be perfect, but this idea of thinking about internal processes as intrapersonal collaboration could be helpful. Considering what every sense brings to the table could help a person make better and more well rounded decisions.

Is it Really Parity?

I really enjoyed the Virtual Choir video that Dr. Delaney sent out this week. The question she posed is a good one: is this collaboration? So to consider this question, I thought about the characteristics of collaboration offered by Friend and Cook. Some of the characteristics were obvious. It's obvious that this was voluntary, the shared goal is the production of this video, and there are some shared resources. In this case though, there is a clear leader and creator of the project, and he does not share decision making processes, he takes all responsibility of the failure or success of the project, and he is most likely doing more work than the other participants. There is no parity because he has veto power. If he doesn't like someone's video, he could just leave it out of the final project. This made me wonder about a live choir or band. In a live choir, all members are held responsible for success or failure. The choir only sounds good if everyone in it sounds good. In a live choir there is also more equal participation. This recording just required one good take from each member, but a live performance requires consistent quality.
That leaves the question of parity. Is the conductor of a band or choir really equal to all the members? I think that this really depends on the context. For example, a high school choir teacher definitely has authority over all the members. A church choir director, however, might be leading the group, but the group members have trusted the conductor to lead them. In a high school choir, the members are obligated to stay for the semester or whatever the duration of the class may be, but if a church choir member is unhappy, he or she may leave the choir at any time. But even if the choir director doesn't have the power to control the singers, are they really equal? I think that it really comes down to the attitude that the director and the members take toward each other. If the director believes he or she is in control, there will not be parity, but if he or she has the attitude of equality, there will be a chance of parity.
This really made me think about the implications of parity and equality. I know the idea is to leave any existing rankings out of the collaborative task, but is that always possible? Even if you know that you have equal decision making power in the meetings, does it really matter if it's on your mind that you don't have that equality outside of the meeting? I guess what really made me think of this was a conversation I had with a special education teacher. We were talking about why some students were on the general course even though a trade school track would suit them better. The teacher told me that the teachers do not have the resources or support to complete the due process required to bypass a parent objection, so they usually do not even try. Even if it would be highly beneficial to the student the teachers just go with what the parents want. Even though they are supposed to be equal, in this case the teachers' decisions are greatly influenced by the knowledge that the parent basically has this veto power over them. I think that while in theory it is great to be able to leave our rankings at the door and honestly collaborate, more often than not, the powers that are supposed to be ignored end up playing a huge role in the interaction.

Take Responsibility

On the wall of all the rooms at my preschool there is a sign that says "Take responsibility for the energy you bring into the room."
A passage we discussed in our small groups this week was about the way we think about IEP meetings. The passage basically asserted that IEP meetings are often full of conflict and that we need to be realistic about that fact. We started talking about this and decided that if we let parents know from the beginning that conflict in an IEP meeting is not an indication of failure, that they might run more smoothly.
I started thinking about this, and ended up at the quote that I read on the wall five days a week. I think this idea is really applicable to IEP meetings. It may sound a little counterintuitive that acknowledging conflict is a way to take responsibility for the energy you bring into the room, but conflict does not have to mean that there will be a big dramatic fight. In the case of an IEP meeting, preparing for a conflict would also mean being prepared to resolve that conflict in a manner other than fighting. Coming in with the expectation that everything should run smoothly because you both have the student's best interest in mind and clearly have the exact same plan is a really good way to be disappointed.
Maybe if we acknowledge that there are going to be conflicts, but keep in mind that we both want what is best for the student, we can take responsibility for our energy. If we are confident about facing conflicts with respect and maturity and let the parents know that is our mindset, we will only bring the best energy into the room. We can only hope that others also take responsibility for the energy they bring into the room.

Students and IEP meetings

While working on the assignments for class last week, the question came up as to whether a girl, Nicki, should be included in her own IEP meeting. I answered no without hesitation. Obviously this girl was too young, and would only stand to have her feelings hurt or disrupt the process. After class last week, my opinion on that has changed.

While it does make sense that some children would be too disruptive to stay for their entire meetings, it also makes sense that a child should not be excluded simply because of his or her age. After all, should the teachers and parents really be saying anything about their child that they wouldn't want the child to hear? He or she almost certainly almost knows about the difficulty he or she is having in class as well as that the parents and teachers are meeting to talk about him or her. Personally I think I would prefer to be in the room so that I could hear firsthand that those involved were working to help me rather than just to criticize. 

Legally children who are 14 and older in NC have to be included, but from kindergarten age through thirteen, who should stay in the meeting and who should either be excluded or be excused after a certain point? I think that there are a lot of factors and questions to consider, and that there is no one size fits all answer to the question of which children should stay in the meeting or how long they should stay. Here are a few of the questions that I think would be helpful to consider:

• How fully does the child understand his or her disability?
• Does the child have significant behavioral problems that would disrupt the meeting?
• Will leaving the classroom to attend the meeting disadvantage the child?
• How will the child react to necessary criticism? 

I think there are many other important aspects to consider when making this decision. I know that it was mentioned during the chalk talk in class that the discussion of weaknesses might hurt the child's self esteem or feelings. The response to this was that parents and teachers could easily word the necessary criticism in a manner that is not hurtful for the child. This brought up a really good point, that maybe even if the child is not present, we should act like he or she is. This would probably lead to a more respectful tone overall in the meeting. 

After giving this issue much thought, I still don't have an answer to the question of whether or not a child should be included in his or her own IEP meeting. I do, however, know that whenever the question comes up in my career I will make sure that I come to the most appropriate answer for the student that I can rather than answering based solely upon the student's age.

Respect

The conversation we had last week about respect really got me thinking. There were so many different perspectives, and all of them made sense. It made me think of something that happened recently at the preschool where I work. Enrollment is up significantly this year, and the director hired two new assistants to help the teachers out. One of the assistants used to be a second grade teacher, and as a result was really interested in teaching the children manners. She took every opportunity to make sure they said please and thank you, and made sure that they asked politely to be excused after snack or lunch. As far as she was concerned, she respecting the parents by teaching the children to be respectful. Unfortunately, she wasn't thinking about respecting her lead teacher. She was only the assistant, but her lead teacher is a flexible and patient woman. The lessons on "respect" were interrupting and undermining the lead teacher of the class. A child would tell the lead teacher that he or she had finished snack, and the lead teacher would say ok, and tell the child to go throw his or her plate away. The child would get up from his or her seat only to be stopped by the assistant saying "wait, you need to ask 'may I be excused?'"
The teacher felt completely disrespected and powerless in her own classroom to the point that she talked to the director, and the assistant decided she didn't want to work there anymore. In this situation, there was room for a lot more respect than was actually given. The assistant teacher did not respect the lead teacher. If she had simply asked if it was ok to teach the children more about manners and run her plan by the lead teacher, there almost certainly would have been no conflict. On the other hand, the lead teacher waited for two weeks unhappily before talking to the program director, and in that time told all of the other teachers and assistants how unhappy she was. This was not respectful of the assistant teacher or of the situation itself. Finally, by quitting when confronted rather than attempting to work better with the lead teacher, the assistant was again not respecting the lead teacher. By this point things were probably past repairing, but not even trying showed that she didn't have respect for different methods, and that things were not going to work out.
Like in the Crucial Conversations reading this week, it can be hard not to get worked up when someone calls you out for something. In this situation, the only "calling out" was done by the director of the program and was not intended maliciously, but only to make the program better. I think in most cases that we feel "called out" this can easily be the case. We feel like we have to defend our ways, like the assistant did when she left, but in reality if we take a step back to think about where the criticism is coming from it's likely that we'll see our own faults.

8/22

In the reading this week, one sentence stood out to me more than anything else. It was the testimony of a former graduate student about working in a school where collaboration was more present. The graduate student said of the job "I work even harder than I used to, but now it's fun."

This statement really made me reflect on my own work experiences and think about the effect collaboration or a lack of collaboration has had on the experience. I started thinking about my job at a drop in gym day care center.  We are the bottom of the totem pole, and none of the management of the gym wants to spend any time or money to improve the facility. There is no collaboration between the managers of the gym and the daycare, and as a result it is miserable to work there if there is a maintenance problem. It will take weeks to fix, and even that may only happen if enough parents complain. I then thought about my job at a preschool, where there is a lot of collaboration. Today at work, a two year old boy tripped and fell down the stairs. He wasn't hurt, but the teacher called his mom to let him know. They both share the goal of protecting the boy's well being, and the mom was appreciative to hear about the fall firsthand rather than through gossip. This is just one small example of the kind of parent teacher collaboration that goes on at this preschool. I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed a job as much as I enjoy this job, and have never worked harder to make sure that I'm doing my job well.

In this positive collaboration environment, the characteristics of collaboration are very evident. For example, many of the parents volunteer to teach "specials" such as Spanish, drama, or even yoga. These parents are not compensated, they provide these specials out of a genuine desire to create a positive school environment for their children and other children. These parents bring their knowledge resources together with the school's resources to create an effective environment to teach these subjects to the children. Through these collaborations a great sense on community and trust has developed in the school. I think that this has created a really positive environment for these children to grow and learn.