November's Monthy Review

Vince commented on groups 1 and 2.

Despite different approaches, the challenge of meeting deadlines for the assignments, and the mounting task of building upon each preceding project towards a culmination in our Program Demonstration, the most essential component was the commitment to complete what we had begun together.  This does not mean that there weren't some great highlights. We started the month both extremely excited to see the work of our Program Design had come together in the last days of October. We are also excited today about the final Program Demonstration coming together in these last days of November, showing how it all came together. We even shared in our Program Evaluation an appreciation for the critique of our peers, mentors, and our professor as they challenged us with points that could improve our work and help us to become better adult educators. Yet through it all, each of us has had many personal challenges to battle this semester. For instance, we had each taken nine credit hours of class on top of already demanding challenges of work and life. That proved to be a persistent shared fight.

Vince's November Monthly Review

I'm not sure this month's lessons were that much different than the previous months. We've had our ups and downs as a team, for me at times this month maybe even more downs than ups. However, as I reflect on this month's work in EDAC634, it seems that one word comes to mind, and that one word makes all the difference—perseverance.

So for this month's review, I thought I'd share some of my favorite quotes on perseverance. They have proven time and time again to be important truths in challenging endeavors, and they depict as well our work throughout this last month in particular.

Troy’s November Monthly Review

Perseverance is also the overall one word description for November for me as well.  Whether it was technology issues, conflicts in schedules, starting a new contract, or personal barrier, I too had to overcome and persevere.

The program evaluation and the program demonstration was a great “check in learning” and opened my eyes to where and how I’ve developed since August.  I have grown as a future adult educator and the assignments for November reflect.  The design of the class was set up this way and it works for us to have this self-reflection about ourselves and students and future adult educators.
 
As a sign and demonstration of teamwork and working together after some initial friction, I am “piggy backing” on Vince’s quotes.  I couldn’t summarize the month any better than what Vince already has.  He has definitely become a great teammate and asset to me as a student in EDAC 634.
 

Quotes

We began enthusiastically in the realm of ideas, but in the end this quote displays what mattered:  "In the realm of ideas everything depends on enthusiasm... in the real world all rests on perseverance” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Sometimes doing our best ends in failure, but true success can be seen in the words of Winston Churchill: "It is not enough that we do our best; sometimes we must do what is required.”

A couple more quotes round out this perspective of perseverance:

•    “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.

•    “You never know what's around the corner. It could be everything. Or it could be nothing. You keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then one day you look back and you've climbed a mountain.”  ― Tom Hiddleston

October Monthly Review

Vince Commented on Group 2 (Spiritual Learning) and Group 4 (Indigenous Learning).


This last month has seemed like a whole semesters worth of learning rolled into one month. First with the program reviews at the very beginning of the month and then writing the Program Design paper. During the course of events our team experienced some real challenges and even some difficult conflict to work through. But we focused on the task before us and spent some time working through all if it with Dr. Chang and we are really proud of what we were able to accomplish. We thought we'd share with you some of what we experienced and what came out of it. We know some of it occurred in the last days of September, but felt it would be good to share where we came from at the beginning of the month.

 

In General Terms What Happened

During the course of the program review, as we were hoping to be in the wrapping up stage of our work, we discovered a few areas that needed to be addressed that put some real strain on our team and made our projects fall short of what they needed to be. So we stopped and spent some time in dialogue. Should we submit them as they were and hope they slipped by or that maybe not everything would be caught or chance that one or both of us would take the fall for what was in our group project, or do we come forward and talk with Dr Chang to figure out a strategy to get to what would be in our whole groups best interest? We decided to ask Dr Chang to help us figure out what we needed to address to fix these problems.

Both members of the group learned from each other and despite some initial friction, the overall goal of helping each other learn was accomplished. The intent of each person was realized after the initial friction and in the end, both members learned a lot on several levels.

We didn't fix everything before we submitted our work, but we did tackle the biggest problems and figured out a strategy for handling others moving forward. What follows are paragraphs rewritten from our email dialogues with one another and Dr, Chang that summarize our outcomes.

About Program Investigation

This requires students to review a program, not to review a paper that introduced a program. If you find a published paper which introduced a good program, you can Google this program, interview the people who are responsible for this program, and collect the first-hand resources about this program. In a published paper, the author usually collected data about this program based on his/her research agenda. He/she may neglect some important features about this program that you are looking for. But you can use this published article to supplement your review of the program.

We were able to address some of the issues in this area, but what remained caused us to have to redo work when it came time for our Program Design, You'll see some comments in our Program Design paper about this when reading it.

About Citations

It is not easy for us to know all the details about APA. However, we must take APA seriously. It is not acceptable to write whole sentences and parts of paragraphs used verbatim without quotes, citations, or references in the paper. This is a problem of principal and ethics. It is also one of the criteria used for judging whether the work is professional or not. We are going to put our papers out there live on the internet. Think about this scenario on a personal level: Maybe there is someone who wants to check out what we have done—the good, the bad, and the ugly—from novice to professional. So they check our work on internet. They could use a tool like http://www.plagspotter.com/ and put in the url of our work, and can easily find out if we commit plagiarism or not due to improper citation or not giving citation at all.

About How to Synthesize a Variety of Resources

 
Sometimes students use one source as their primary source and cite a huge amount of ideas from it, which can be problematic. When the majority of the thoughts are someone elses, even if it is paraphrased, why would anyone write it and not just hand in the source instead? When you quote some ideas, you should quote according to your own research purpose and add your own original thoughts. When I wrote my program introduction, I looked at the web site, read tons of interviews and blog posts, looked at news articles, and landed on three primary sources for my background that I could use, that way I wasn't using only one source to generate my paraphrases. I had enough ideas floating in my head for original expression about what I was writing about. If I had time, there was a lot better stuff to draw from than I even was able to put into the paper.

About Commitment

 
Our academic work needs our commitment. We need to invest our time on it in order to gain as much as we can within one semester. School can't be done in our spare time. In fact nothing in life, not even rest or play can be done in our spare time. We either actively engage in life or passively respond to it. When we passively respond to it, we always take the easy way, the shortcut, and the route that gets us through what we are doing.

On the same lines of commitment, if you’ve committed something, such as a family vacation, then you have to do two things. Be prepared to work ahead on school work and projects and deadlines as well as communicate effectively to the rest of the team. These two things were learned the hard way when one of the team members went to Florida (primarily Disney World) during the first week of October. He didn’t plan ahead nor did he communicate to other team members or Dr. Chang his vacation plans, which effected the group project.

Summary

Our team knew that avoiding all of this would have been the easy way out, but we also knew we wanted to learn all we could from the class, so we made the decision to address these mid-course. It wasn't easy, and it did take a lot of time, but we feel proud of the results. We know that there is still great room for improvement, but the improvements that no one else my see are the greatest improvements. So when we did the Program Design, we were in much better shape to build on our previous work, and we understood better what we needed to focus on moving forward. Much of our Project Design summary ended up in the text of the paper as we described how we sorted through our past work to make decisions about what was important to our design.

Thanks for reading! Hope there is something helpful here for others! 

Troy and Vince

September Review 634 - Group 3

Vince commented on groups 1,2 &4

Up until a couple of weeks ago, Group 3 was made up of only one of us. Over the past couple of weeks we have had to map out and begin the process for our first assignment. We took some time to get to know one another and our sense of what was important for the projects that we would be working on together. We mapped out some assignments to begin investigating and laid out some tasks to ensure that we could meet the impending deadline for project one. Given Troy's need to travel in his job, we felt email would be the best medium to communicate. We divided up the assignments into each of us reviewing a project to study and do a write up of as our first priority. The initial assignment looked like this:

• 9/23/2014 - Submit Program Options/via email
• 9/24/2014 - Chose Programs - Troy # 1 Vince # 2
• 9/25/2014 - Write Program Review for Selected
• 9/28/2014 - Submit Work to One Another
• 9/29/2014 - Edit/Review each others Work
• 10/1/2014 - Finalize Revisions/Review & Add Elements We Want to Apply in Our Program Design
• 10/2/2014 - Include main features of Selected Program in Table
• 10/3/2014 - Troy Write Title Page and Intro - Vince Write Application Section/Conclusion and References
• 10/4/2014 - Each Revise and Edit (Troy 1st then Vince) - Finalize
• 10/5/2014 - Submit to BlackBoard (Troy) and Blog (Vince)

Challenges

Sticking to the time frame of the assignments and task has proven to be a challenge, while balancing our jobs, family, and multiple classes. These missteps lead us to bottom line a few of these tasks by boiling all these details down into what was absolutely essential for the first assignment. We adjusted to having initial program reviews due by the end of Wedensday10/1 at the latest. We continued to use email to send our ideas back and forth to one another to help us keep abreast of what we were working on.

What We Have Learned

Since we were both new to Adult Education and not currently working directly in Adult Ed programs, we found it difficult to set goals in advance while still needing to understand what it was that we were supposed to put together. Not having a clear context in which we would apply a program also made knowing what kind of program we wanted difficult. This has proven to be the biggest challenge but continues to help us be flexible in making  a more informed focus for our project design. In the process of the first assignment, we began to gain some perspective about the overall purpose of our programs design, in order to ensure that what we selected for the program review would contribute to our overall work, we agreed to focus on leadership development through transformational learning, seeing that it could provide the best umbrella for designing a project that would be useful across a wide spectrum of potential applications and settings. 

Although each of us has a long history of work in Adult Educational, we are both new to the academic study and understanding of the discipline. We are both committed to work that is transformational and focused on equipping and engaging adults in opportunities that improve their lot in life. Both of us find many of the ideas inherent in transformational learning  to be a deep resource for the kinds of work that we would like to be involved in the future and that help make sense of many of the most rewarding learning experiences we have encountered in the past. We honestly each feel a little overwhelmed with all we are learning and experiencing but are looking forward with thinking through and learning how to apply these concepts and ideas.

What's Next

After finishing our first project together, we are getting a feel of the best way to work together and are beginning to have a feel for what our joint focus will be. Over the next week and a half (by October 8th) we will finalize the program focus and goals and map out assignments for the remaining work. We will also add in conference  call style check points other than using only email to add better communication to better meet developmental deadlines.

Vincent Stults' Individual Summary/Review

As we were selecting our topics for this class, I wrote: "Since I am new to the academic study of adult education, and educational theory in general, the impact of transformational theory seems to be a deep well and full of useful insight." As we begin our group blogs, and start the first steps for starting our projects, I am finding that the water in this well is most certainly deep. I have found it challenging to know where to begin even finding a program to evaluate, let alone designing one based on this theoretical framework. Even though there are a lot of commonalities among those who claim, or who are put in the category of transformational learning, there is also a great diversity found in methodology, focus, and in approach as to what the nature of critical reflection is all about. So not only is there a challenge in mapping out the timeline, tasks, and responsibilities necessary for the projects, it seems like I am one among many in that dark room with the elephant, trying to describe what it is we are examining, but finding I am only able to describe it with the parts that I can feel right in front of me. With a little more light and some dialog, I know we continue to press forward, and it seems that we are beginning to make headway. So the next step, after submitting our paper which reviews a couple of transformational learning programs, is to narrow our focus, and solidify what type of program we would like to design.

Troy Rector's Individual Summary/ Review

Week 1 exposed me to my fellow students.  Definitely inspired and glad to see that there is a wide range of backgrounds in which we all come from.  That allows greater discussions and different perspectives on topics.  This class has such a diverse background that it would be impossible for us to not learn from each others previous experiences.  

Weeks 2 and 3 were pivotal for me to understand concepts and ideas on how learning is different for adults and how society plays such a huge role to adult learners.  These weeks exposed me to concepts of the adult learner that I really didn't anticipate before the course started.

Weeks 4 and 5 were the beginning of learning theories and concepts.  Definitely learned a lot in these weeks with the academic labels for different types of learning.  Although I have probably learned and experienced nearly all of them, I didn't necessarily know the technical terminology and the grounded concepts of each.  Also learned the educators and experts who developed or coined these terms for the learning theories.  

Week 6 was dedicated completely to transformational learning theory.  This helps me (and Vince) because we've dedicated our project to this type of learning.  This week gave us the groundwork and foundation on this particular learning and allows us to move forward and research more away from the textbook.  

Overall, I knew I would be exposed to academic concepts of learning and I would myself learn and grow.  Although some of the info can be dry and not exciting, the way the discussion posts are organized and the interaction with fellow students keeps it interesting and allows us to learn outside of the textbook.