Collaboration

Collaboration is the seventh of eight unit standards of Medgar Evers College- MEC Education Department. The department under this standard expects teachers in training to “work effectively with other constituencies by seeking out others’ ideas, valuing multiple points of view, and building cooperative relationships”. These expectations are relevant as a teacher trainee because it is important to learn how to create a learning environment and how to reflect and assess ones’ teaching and its impact on learners to name a few. The department expects me to develop a raport with the learning community.

As evidence for the Collaboration standard, I am submitting a power point presentation from one of my education foundation courses Introduction to the World of the Learner EDUC 102 WID2. I completed it in the spring of 2010. It was a group assignment. My evidence speaks to item 7.5 of the Collaboration standard which requires a teacher trainee to “value others ideas and points of view and recognizes that there is power in combining ideas.”

In order to complete this assignment our professor provided certain instructions for us to follow.  At the beginning of the semester we choose a group to work in and continued to work with that group throughout the semester. There were a total of five groups. Every group was given a topic related to something in the educational field.  Our assignment was to find information on democracy in education. There was not a wide variety of information online in relation to our topic, so we combined what we learned during the course. Working together was not the easiest thing in the beginning, but we agreed to disagree and to find some common ground in order to have the best presentation. Technology and passed experienced played a large role. We brainstormed before we did the first draft and edited. We found appropriate pictures for our presentation and copied it to the power point presentation. We placed the bullets in the order we agreed on and proof read everything. We meet the Saturday before our presentation to make all the final adjustment and do a mock presentation and gather any other additional information. We decided what each person was going to speak about because there were twenty slides and four of us we divided them equally.

We received an exemplary grade for our presentation. Our professor was very impressed with our power point. The grade we received and the fact that we impressed our professor proves that we learnt how effective it is to work with each other and value others ideas and recognize that there is power in combining ideas. I as a teacher in training am now open to different ideas from my colleagues in order to give my very best at all times.