Thinking of some communities of practice that I would be interested in participating in was easy, especially since thinking about it made me feel really guilty.  I started my job two and a half years ago.  At that time, the local COP known as PCCP (Pike County Care Partnership) reached out to me.  They meet the first Tuesday of each month.  This group is composed of local organizations and businesses that are all considered to be community resources to help individuals and families in need.   There are mental health professionals, physicians offices, food banks, housing organizations, the local health department, the county social service offices, etc.  I was excited to join!  It sounded like such a good way to meet each month and to share information about how best to help the members of the community that I work in and the families at my center.  I have never been to a single meeting... not one.  There just doesn't ever seem to be enough hours in the day and I always feel like there is something that I should be doing at the center.  This is so silly.  I could really learn a lot from going to these meetings and by participating in this COP.  I also have so much that I could offer.
     One COP that I found while researching was the United Way of Central Missouri.  Most of us are familiar with the united way.  However, I did not know that our local United Way created an Early Childhood Advisory Committee.  The purpose of this committee is to support and promote early childhood programs and initiatives in central Missouri.  One of their goals is to identify gaps in services and needs in the early childhood community, which is one of my passions!  I also saw that they want to provide "Born Learning" materials to all low income families.  I was really interested in this, because I had never heard of this program.  The "Born Learning" program looks like something that I would be interested in for my own community.  It is a series of workshops to meet parents where they are and shows them how to use every day moments as learning moments.  I would love to be part of this Early Childhood Advisory Committee!
     I also discovered, while researching, that Missouri has a COP called the Missouri Coordinating Board for Early Childhood.  This board works to ensure that early childhood program's services are comprehensive.  The vision is that "all young children in Missouri are safe, healthy, and capable of reaching their full potential".  One of their missions is to ensure equal access to the necessary resources that result in implementing effective and sustainable early childhood programs.  This all sounds right up my alley!
     The conversation of job opportunities is a very frustrating one for me.  I love my job.  I am currently the director of a center.  I would maybe like to move up into administration one day, when my administrators retire, but for now I am happy doing what I do.  However, I badly want to start teaching online early childhood courses to college student.  I search constantly for job openings.  I find them (rarely) and I almost have the needed Master's degree and I already have a lot of early childhood experience.  However, I do not have experience with teaching college courses.  Even community colleges look for experience teaching college courses.  This brings about the age old dilemma... how does one get experience when they can't get a job without experience???!!!  This is a huge frustration for me.  I know that I could do it and I know that I have a lot to offer others entering into the early childhood profession.  You guys let me know if you have heard of a place in which I can get my foot in the door! 😕😕😕😕😕

                           Groups!

     This week, we took at look at the five stages of team development: forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning.  After learning and reading about these stages, I then took a closer look at the adjournment stage and reflected on some of the groups that I have been in and what occurred or did not occur during the adjournment stage.
     I do feel that the higher performing groups were really hard to leave, mainly because trust, respect, and relationships had been built in those groups, which is why they worked so well.  However, I do think that in many of the higher performing groups that I have been a part of, many of us were excited that we had reached our goal, but were not ready to split up as a group.  This often led to my groups deciding to set and pursue a new goal.  We saw that we had worked so well together and this led us to work together on other things instead of adjourning.
     I have left many groups before they ever got off of the ground, and this was easy to do.  I have been in groups in which I didn't agree with the goal that was set.  I may not have been able to deal with so many individuals in a group pursing their own individual goals.  Many times, I have not been able to get past the storming stage and have felt that I didn't want to be a part of a group that seemed to operate in this manner.  Leaving groups that never get past the storming stage has always been very easy for me.
     When I think about closing experiences in groups, I feel like the groups that end in a celebration are the ones that are most memorable for me.  When in groups, you are working very hard to reach a goal.  When that goal is reached, there should be a celebration to mark the fact that the goal has been accomplished.  This is a great way to adjourn with happy and positive memories.
     I feel bad saying this, but I have never had a hard time with adjourning from any of my degree courses and I don't feel that adjourning from my Master's will be any different.  I have never attended any of my graduations and I have never really met any of my fellow students or teacher's face to face.  This makes it very easy to not develop relationships and to not feel as if the others in this same group as me really play a part in my experience.  I am sure that it would be much different if I had actual in-seat classes.

     When reading through other blog postings of my colleagues this week, I find it interesting to hear so many say that there really isn't much conflict at their jobs.  My job feels like constant conflict.  I supervise a group of about 15 other women.  The conflict is rampant.  However, mostly it revolves around who is getting the most break time or office time.  Most of these teachers and aides are stuck in a classroom the entire day.  We are always so short staffed, that break time and office time has really become some kind of myth or legend that is often spoken of, but rarely seen.  While one group is "trapped" in their class, they imagine that the other group is in the teacher's lounge relaxing and really having a great time and getting lots of lesson plans and work caught up on.  This causes conflict between the classrooms.  They keep a close ear and eye out to see just how many minutes each person gets in the teacher's lounge each day and it is normally the subject of most of the complaints that find their way to my office.
     I have tried several different things to remedy this.  I tried doing scheduled break times and scheduled office times.  This was a huge pain because I would spend hours each week trying to figure out a schedule to ensure that each person got two fifteen minute breaks and also an office time.  Then, we would have call-ins and/or people quit, which always threw the schedule right out of the window.  I have even tried having volunteers come in just to give breaks.  No solution that I have seems to last more than a couple of days.  I have tried to convince the classes that their colleagues were in the same boats, but they didn't believe this.  I have tried hiring extra help for the afternoons to relieve staff and get them more office time, but those afternoon workers never stay more than a few weeks.  I have tried moving people around and re-arranging work schedules... nothing ever works out.
     This is frustrating to me because it seems so petty when I compare it to the other things that I have to do every day.  When I have parents coming to me because their child has been molested and I am meeting with children's services and police, and then teachers come in complaining that they only got a ten minute break instead of a fifteen minute break, I almost snap at them.  However, I try really hard to remember that it is not petty to them and that they do deserve to have office times and breaks.  I have just kind of started avoiding the topic and telling them just to do the best that they can do.  Until we can get fully staffed, there isn't a lot that we can do.
     After reading the course material this week, I feel like the answer and solution lies more with the staff members than with me.  They are looking to me for an answer that I don't have.  I need them to work together in order to realize that they are all in the same position.  I wonder if I need to have a meeting and have all of them communicate with each other and work together to brainstorm possible solutions.  Then, it wouldn't be so much about who wins and who looses, or who is getting their way.  Instead, they will be working together for a solution in which everyone is a winner.  If I can get them all communicating and brainstorming a broad range of solutions, then new ideas and solutions could arise from this conflict.  Who knows?  Any ideas?

My Communication Style

     Wow!  This one really worried me this week.  I have often been told that I am intimidating and aggressive and this is not something that I am proud of.  I have worked on it a lot and have gotten a lot better as I have aged.  I had my husband, son, and a coworker all take this assessment to see how theirs compared to mine.  I did this because my husband knows me better than anyone on this earth, because my son and I constantly but heads and he states that I am intimidating, and because I wanted to get a perspective from a coworker.
     When I did the self assessments, I got a 44 on anxiety, a 66 on moderate, and a 39 on listening styles.  The anxiety score shows that I have a mild anxiety in some situations and that I am at ease in others and that I don't worry a great deal about communicating.  This is true.  I have spent a lot of years trying to refine the art of communication and I have gotten rather comfortable with communicating effectively.  However, I do get nervous when I have to speak to those that I don't already know well and don't have relationships with.
     The score of 66 put me in the moderate range of verbal aggressiveness and said that this showed a good balance between being respectful and arguing fairly.  It shows that I can attack the facts, rather than the person holding the facts.
     The score of 39 on listing styles did not state which group that would put me in.  Reading through the groups, I feel that I would fall between a group one and a group two.  I am very action oriented, which people can find intimidating.  I am also people oriented, which can cloud proper judgment. 
     Much to my surprise, all three people taking these assessments had scores very similar to mine.  Some of them varied by a couple of points, but I was still in the same boxes.  I learned more by talking to these people, especially my son.  I couldn't believe that his scores for me were not way different than mine, since we disagree so often.  I asked him how this could be, since he always states that I am so intimidating.  He said that I intimidate him because I am so smart!  That really made me laugh out loud.  I am apparently not intimidating to him because I am aggressive.  Rather, he knows that I am going to be tough to argue with because I am no fool!  His teenage manipulations won't work on me.  That really gave me a tickle!  He also always tells me that I don't ever listen, yet his scores did not reflect this about me.  When I asked him about this, he said that what he means is that he can't ever get me to change my mind.  What a little scamp!  My husband and coworker both stated that I am a very strong communicator, but that I am also very kind and very fair.  That made me feel good.  My husband said that people are intimidated by me because I am a good communicator and this leaves people feeling unarmed and worried that they will not perform at the same standards that I set. 
     I am glad that these three feel that I am a good communicator.  However, even my own boss has told me that people find me intimidating.  I want to be a real tough gal communicator, but this does me no good if I am unapproachable or if people are intimidated by me.  My communication goals are to 1. Soften up, 2. Listen more than I talk, and 3. Soften up!

     When I think about different culture groups that I am around, I have to admit that there is really not a wide variety of cultures that I am exposed to.  As a child, I was rarely around those of other cultures.  I live in a very rural town with all white residents.  It always has been that way.  Most of the families are pretty similar.  Of course we are all different, but there is not a wide array of diversity.  I work about 40 miles away and closer to the city.  Where I work, there are people of other languages, ethnicities, languages, etc., but still not anything like the diversity found within cities.  I was going to have a friend of mine (who is African American) watch my eight year old son, but I was very worried.  I figured that he would be like, "Oh, so that is how black people take out their trash"... or, "Wow!  Black people eat chips, too"... or many other things like this.  Not that he has been taught anything negative about other ethnicities, but he has never been exposed to those who are different than him.  It would be a wonderful learning experience for him, but I didn't want to put my friend through that!  My childhood was much like that.  I had no clue how people from other socioeconomic statuses, religions, ethnicities, sexual orientations, etc. lived because I was never able to build relationships with people from other cultures because my town is so rural, Christian, and white.
     I do talk to people from other cultures differently.  I talk to children in a louder tone and in a very sing song voice.  I constantly touch them, pat their backs, and rub their arms and backs as I talk to them.  I have some Christian friends that I don't cuss around and some fellow cursing friends that I cuss like the devil around!  I am open and honest with my husband, but not so with others.  I am a professional business woman at work and I use a lot of logic over emotion.  When I am with my family, I use more emotion than logic.  I have a loud, boisterous friend and I notice that I get loud and boisterous when I communicate with her.  I think that we start learning at a young age (from our experiences) the different ways that it is considered to be acceptable to communicate with others.  We also catch on to the ways that others wish for us to communicate with them and also we learn what seems to be effective.  This means adapting the way that we communicate, based on who we are communicating with.

 

 
       This week, the assignment was to watch a segment of a show with the sound turned off and then watch it again with the sound turned on.  I decided to watch part of an episode for Fuller House.  My children have been watching it and I had yet to see an episode.  So, I turned off the volume.  The character of Kimmie entered the house with a really good looking man.  I tried really hard to figure out what they were talking about, but I couldn't.  The man's facial expressions showed a lot of confusion and showed that he felt like what she was saying didn't make a lot of sense.  Kimmie goes upstairs and DJ walks in.  She face shows shock that someone is in the house, but then she smiles and sticks her hand out for a handshake.  I could tell by the exchange between the two that they were making introductions.  DJ talks to this man and I can tell that she is telling him to follow her upstairs.  The man seems confused and I could tell that there was some mistake made; that DJ had made an incorrect assumption as to why the man was at the house.  He follows her upstairs to the bathroom and starts to take off his shirt.  She looks horrified and shocked and puts her hands up to tell him to stop.  When I go back and watch it with the sound on, I see that Kimmie brought this man home from a dating service to meet DJ.  DJ had called a plumber to fix the toilet and when she walks into the room, she assumes that this is the plumber.  Although I could tell that there was a huge misunderstanding from watching without sound, I really didn't know what the misunderstanding was about, until I watched with sound.  I was amazed at just how much I really could pick up without the verbal aspect.  The verbal communication helped to really fine tune my understanding and provide greater detail, but I pick up the basics of what was transpiring, just by watching facial expression and body language.

Effective Communicator
     When I think of a person in my life that I feel is a wonderful communicator, I think of our Human Resources consultant at work.  I find that I think of someone that is better at certain things than I am.  This woman is always fair.  She is always calm.  She listens well and waits until someone is done talking.  She even jots things down as you speak, so that she can remember to come back to things that you have said after you are done talking.  She is kind and she remains objective.  Most of all, she can speak very calmly and never lets emotions overtake her.  I think that this is what I struggle with the most.  I often become very emotional and this causes me to behave in ways that make me completely ineffective as a communicator.  Once I become emotional, I have lost any ground that I might have had to be able to communicate effectively.  This woman that I speak of never becomes emotional.  She is kind, calm, fair, unbiased, professional, unemotional, and listens very well.  These things are all things that I feel make her a very effective communicator and someone that I would like to be able to model when I need to communicate with others.