This is a paper about my team learning experience. You will need to read all the instructions closely and you will need information from me.
You will find the instructions, template and a PPT that explain the assignment in the file box.
Team Learning Individual Paper
[Name]
Trinity Western University
Team Learning Individual Paper
Critical Reflections on a Team Learning Experience
In this paper I will critically reflect on my small teams experiences in terms of growing its capacity to share the developmental work of leadership to improve its performance. The subject of this reflection is my experience as a member of a team of students formed to work through seven days of team learning exercises for The Learning Organization course at Trinity Western University.
My teammate is Scott Liu, Cheukyin Ho, Li Li, Olivia Zhang. I am Thomas (Zhifeng Yang)
Day One
In day one, we talked about Jacobs procrastination problem. Today out note taker is Olivia Zhang and Scott Liu, Cheukyin Ho, Li Li, Zhifeng Yang is our Al coach. Our meeting went well, except for the fact that it was the first time the group discussed our own problem, it took us a little time to get familiar with each other. The questions we ask Jacob is:
1. What are the things that make you want to procrastinate?
2. What things do you often procrastinate on?
3. Have you ever thought about the causes of procrastination?
4.What have you tried to do to solve the problem of procrastination?
5. Have you been adhering to these improvement methods
The solutions we have is:
1.We can break down projects.
2.I believe sometimes the reason why we delay completing the homework is because we are afraid of the size of the project. To minimize this trepidation, try to break down the project. Break up homework into multiple parts to complete.
3.Try self-encouragement and rewards, envisioning the benefits of not procrastinating. Like positive psychological cues.
4.Set a timer or sticker to remind you what you should do today.
Day Two
Today we talked about Thomas (Zhifeng Yang)s problem which is losing weight. Today our note taker is Scott Liu and Jacob Cao, Olivia Zhang, Cheukyin Ho is our Al coach. The questions we have for Thomas is:
1.What are your current eating habits?
2.Have you ever tried to have a healthy diet with less calories?
3.Have you ever tried to do exercises to lose weight?
4.Do you eat junk food a lot?
5.What is the biggest problem for you that stops you from being healthy?
Solutions and Additions:
1.Whenever you want to eat fat prone foods, think about the determination to lose weight and the impact of being fat.
2.Different from giving up starch, carbohydrates, reduce sugar is not to eat sweet things, reduce drinking bubble tea aerated drinks and other ways to reduce sugar intake to achieve weight loss.
3.You need to make sure you get a good quality and length of sleep every night. Because lack of sleep increases your appetite the next day, making you want to eat foods high in sugar and carbohydrates, which can lead to weight gain.
4.Exercise burns energy, although eating less can reduce the bodys caloric intake, excessive dieting will lead to insufficient caloric intake of the body but will form a fat prone body. In the process of weight loss to improve the bodys fat burning, fat burning efficiency needs to be achieved through exercise to achieve the effect of energy consumption.
5.If you can keep a healthy diet and go to gym a lot, you will notice the difference, that will motivate you to keep on.
6.You will attract more girls or even boys if you have a nice body shape, which could make you become popular and help you build confidence.
Day Three
Today we talked about Cheukyin Hos problem which is How to be confident in presentation. Today our note taker is Jacob and Thomas, Li, Olivia Zhang, Cheukyin Ho is our Al coach. The questions we have for Cheukyin Ho is:
1.In what situations will you be comfortable while doing a presentation?
2.Are you afraid of speaking up or just being nervous that other people will laugh at your pronunciation?
3.What is the biggest problem with public speaking?
4.Where to give speeches, you won’t feel confident?
5.what should you prepare before your presentation?
Solutions and Addition:
1.Try to find your comfort zone while you are doing a presentation, take myself as an example. I do feel nervous while I am doing a presentation, however, standing in a corner of the room and looking at someone I am familiar with will help a lot with my nervousness.
2.Dont be afraid to speak up, people wont care about your pronunciations, most of the English speakers would have their own pronunciation that relates to their first language.
3. Some of the speakers may feel not well prepared or embarrassed when in public. Its possible to overcome by practicing the ability to speak in public or increase experience by participating in more similar activities.
4. make your speech verbal and visual. practice your content or use the slides to support your presentation. use slides to memorize.
5. Before the speech, you can practice several times, you can do auto suggestion while you feel under pressure, believe that you can succeed and overcome all obstacles.
6. some people will be overly attentive to the eyes of the audience and start to get overly nervous, but in fact, you just need to face forward and focus on one point and then enjoy your speech.
Day Four
Today we talked about Scotts problem which is How to Manage My Emotions. Today our note taker is Jacob and Thomas, Li, Olivia Zhang, Cheukyin Ho is our Al coach. The questions we have for Scott is:
1.How do you release your pressure or negative emotions?
2.How do you feel when you are super upset or angry?
3.How long is it going to take to return to peace?
4.?Emotions will have a greater impact on yourself or will it also on others?
5.How do you find your peace?
Solutions and Additions:
1.Try to take a rest, especially a good sleep. A sleep with good quality might help you to recover from the negative emotions.
2.You may also listen to some relaxing music to help you release the pressure.
3.Go outside, do some outdoor exercises, and enjoy the sunshine.
4.You must know there is no one who would like to hear or know your shit things. You should be able to solve them by yourself.
5.Improve problem solving skills- as your ability improves, your emotional state will change when you encounter the same solution. ‘
Day Five
Today we talked about Olivias problem which is How to deal with insomnia. Today our note taker is Thomas and Jacob, Li, Olivia Zhang, Cheukyin Ho is our Al coach. The questions we have for Olivia is:
1.Do you usually stay up very late?
2.Do you usually have a lot of things going on in your mind before you go to sleep?
3.what do you do during insomnia?
4.How is your diet and emotions every day? These are the critical factors that would affect your sleep.
5.What do you usually do before you go to sleep?
Solutions and Additions:
1.Try to empty your mind before you go to sleep.
2.Create a good environment for before getting asleep, if possible, by reducing the lights or the voice within the room.
3.Do exercises before going to sleep.
4.Dont stay up late, once you build this habit, it would be hard to quit. And you will find it would be a struggle to fall asleep.
5.Think about sleep related words or images if feeling hard to fall asleep.
6.You can try listening to some lullaby when you can’t sleep.
Day Six
Today we talked about Primes problem which is How to improve on communication. Today our note taker is Olivia and Thomas, Jacob, Li, Cheukyin Ho is our Al coach. The questions we have for Prime is:
1.What should we do to improve focus?
2.How to respond more quickly to others in group collaboration?
3.How to reduce errors when speaking in foreign language?
4.What are some problems we encounter when talking with strangers?
5.How to deal with having too much reticence?
Solutions and Additions:
1. Need to find a good theme first unified everyone is fighting for the same goal
2. This requires listening carefully to the other person’s point of view, rather than just expressing your own
3. Manage your own emotions. For the sake of clear communication and your own personal wellbeing, its important to manage your emotions and express them appropriately in context.
4. Ask for feedback. Asking your peers for their advice on improving your communication skills can help you better understand how you are coming across in your work environment.
Day Seven
Dont have yet.
The Leadership Tools
Developing a team as a learning organization is a complex endeavor. To allow for deeper inquiry, I shall focus on my teams effort to improve its performance in terms of how I shared the leadership work of developing as a learning team. According to Ancona, Malone, Orlikowski, and Senge (2007) this work requires four core leadership tools: (1) relating, (2) sensemaking, (3) visioning, and (4) inventing.
I will describe these four core leadership tools and reflect on my teams development, in terms of our use of Ancona et al.s (2007) shared leadership tools, and how I could improve further.
Relating
Sensemaking
Visioning
Inventing
Conclusion
References
Ancona, D., Malone, W. T., Orlikowski, J. W., & Senge, P.M. (2007). In praise of the incomplete leader. Harvard Business Review, 85(2), 92-100.
Garvin, D. A., Edmondson, A. C., & Gino, F. (2008). Is yours a learning organization? Harvard Business Review, 86(3), 109-116.
Team Learning Individual Paper (IN)
This paper is your critical reflection of a sequence of team learning experiences. A critical reflection paper is an essay form that asks you to critically apply theoretical knowledge to your own experience. In this paper you will apply ideas about learning organizations to your experience of a team-learning situation. It should be scholarly, in the sense that you draw ideas from the literature on this topic, and also personal, in that it is a reflective form of inquiry into your own team learning experience.
What is the writing process?
The writing process will be iterative, meaning that you will write the paper throughout the course. We will begin the writing process together at the end of each class to build our team individual learning template.
The first half of the process will be simply your daily reflections on the in-class team action learning practice sessions. Starting with Unit 8, the paper will incorporate reflections on the weeks resources and the in-class time will be given to working on your team power point presentation.
How do I structure my paper?
Structure is a reflection of your thinking. In learning how to structure your thoughts it is helpful to use an organizing pattern to guide your inquiry. The course topics, texts, and discussions have been put in place to support you in sequentially writing a complex, highly structured paper. The structure is set for you. So, your task is simply to follow the structure and work through the process of reflecting critically on the course ideas presented and applying them to your team learning experience.
Structural outline:
1.Introduction
2.The Seven Days of In-class Reflections
3.Resource Reflections from Unit 8 through Unit 11
4.The Leadership Tools and Critical Reflections on Team Learning
a.Relating
b.Sensemaking
c.Visioning
d.Inventing
5.Conclusion
The Leadership Tools [APA Level 1 Heading]
A critical reflection of the development of a team as a learning organization is still a very broad topic. To solve this problem we will further narrow our inquiry. So, for this paper, we will narrow the focus of your reflection to how your team develops its shared use of the requisite leadership tools needed to reinforce team learning.
Using Ancona, Malone, Orlikowski, & Senge (2007), we briefly establish how their ideas relate to creating a learning organization/team. Then, you will summarize and critically reflect on the authors four core shared leadership tools. We conclude this section with a transition sentence that signals to the reader where we are going.
Specifically, begin this section with the following paragraph (as written here):
Developing a team as a learning organization is a complex endeavor. To allow for deeper inquiry, I shall focus on my teams effort to improve its performance in terms of how we shared the leadership work of developing as a learning team. According to Ancona, Malone, Orlikowski, and Senge (2007) this work requires four core leadership tools: (1) relating, (2) sensemaking, (3) visioning, and (4) inventing.
Then briefly define in one paragraph the four tools using the writing guide below:
Ancona et al. (2007) describe relating as [write a description of this concept and remember if you include a direct quote dont forget to add (p. #)]. [Write a critical reflection in a sentence about what you think about this concept one sentence]. Sensemaking refers to [write a description, and again if you include a direct quote dont forget to include (p. #)]. [Write a critical reflection of what you think about this concept]. Visioning is [write a description one sentence]. [Write a critical reflection of what you think about this concept]. Inventing is [write a description]. [Write a critical reflection of what you think about this concept].
End this section with the following one sentence transition paragraph:
I shall now turn to reflect on my teams development, in terms of our use of Ancona et al.s (2007) shared leadership tools, and how we could improve further.
Critical Reflections on Team Learning [APA Level 1 Heading]
Begin the second part of the paper with a brief description of the sequence of team learning exercises that you experienced. There is no analysis or commentary in this section; your objective here is to simply summarize what you experienced. This will then allow you to reference these experiences in the following sub-sections without the need to describe repeatedly as you reflect on your experiences in more depth.
Relating [APA Level 2 heading]
Reflect on three critical questions: 1) How has the team developed its capacity to establish trusting relationships and co-create the results it truly desires? 2) What relational challenges persist? 3) How can the team improve how it relates?
Key Resource: Katzenbach & Smiths (2005) article; Lencioni (2013) video.
Sensemaking [APA Level 2 Heading]
Reflect on three critical questions: 1) How has the team developed its capacity to made sense of things together? 2) What sensemaking challenges persist? 3) How can the team improve how it makes sense of things together?
Key Resources: Lundbergs (2004) article, specifically, Figure 4; Judge (2011).
Visioning [APA Level 2 heading]
Reflect on three critical questions: 1) How has the team developed its capacity to clarify what it really wants to co-create? 2) What visioning challenges persist? 3) How can the team improve how it clarifies its vision, mission, and values?
Key Resource: Casadesus-Masanells (2014) article.
Inventing [APA Level 2 heading]
Reflect on three critical questions: 1) How has the team developed its capacity to create new ways of doing things, solve problems, and turn visions into reality? 2) What inventing challenges persist? 3) How can the team improve how invents?
Key Resources: Simons (2005), chaps. 2-3.
Conclusion [APA Level 1 heading]
The closing section of your paper should tie all the above sections together into a satisfying conclusion, remaining question(s), or final recommendation(s). How? First, restate your thesis at the beginning of this section. Then, in an orderly fashion, summarize the core points you have explained in the body. Lastly, bring your paper to a close with a statement about the importance of the topic, a future looking question your paper raised that you feel is worth further inquiry, or you may choose to sum things up with by making a practical recommendation, or several, for others.
SUBMISSION
At this point in your writing process you will prepare and submit your final draft.
What are the technical details?
?Length: 8 pages.
?Content Format: Double-spaced, APA style for works cited, include a title page, and use a heading to clearly divide each section of the paper.
