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~ A blog about teaching, learning, and leadership by Jennifer Rimnyak

Tag Archives: conflict

Facilitating Learning Teams – Reflection on my Eighth Session of Leadership 1

18 Wednesday Feb 2015

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conflict, goals, inquiry, leadership, OLF, problem-solving, professional relationships, shared leadership

The eighth session last week centred around learning teams, collaborative inquiry, problems of practice, and how to facilitate, lead, and share leadership within learning teams and communities.

During our first main activity I decided to be brave and volunteer for the unknown! Each group needed someone to volunteer to be the red personality (the details of which were not disclosed before the activity), and then everyone else in the group received other coloured personalities. We each read our information (without sharing with each other), and then were given the scenario that we were a team planning our final leadership course session celebration, including guest list, budget, menu, seating, greetings, etc. It turned out that the red personality for which I volunteered was the facilitator of the group. At first I was pleased, as working on my facilitation skills is a personal goal of mine. However, I quickly realized that all the other personalities around the table were going to be very difficult to bring together and actually facilitate once everyone took on their roles. We had a snacker, a very intense time-checker, a constantly distracted member, someone constantly on their cell phone, basically every nightmarish behaviour that we have all experienced (or maybe even participated in!) during staff meetings. I actually found that I used some of what we learned in the previous session about managing conflict, as the time-checker and the distracted person were losing patience with each other. I also tried to redirect my phone user to actually look things up for us to try to make their phone use valuable to the task. I will say that it was almost exhausting trying to keep the whole ship afloat and make decisions within this group, and we only worked for 15 minutes. I did however very much enjoy the opportunity to attempt to hone my facilitation skills, even with such a difficult group!

One other takeaway from this session is the different types of questions that facilitators or team members can ask each other to resolve cognitive conflicts and move towards solutions. We looked at examples of clarifying, specifying, and exploring questions, specifically in the context of a problem of practice or inquiry question to expand or refine thinking as necessary. They were great question starters for teacher teams, but they also reminded me to focus on my questioning techniques with students when they are engaging in collaborative and inquiry-based learning in class.

Another thought-provoking session, as always, with only two more to go!

Cognitive Conflict – Reflections on my Seventh Session of Leadership 1

09 Monday Feb 2015

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conflict, goals, leadership, problem-solving, professionalism

The title of this session was “Managing Conflict”, and I think many of the course participants (myself included), came into the evening with a preconceived notion of what the session would entail. I personally was a bit apprehensive and excited to discuss this topic as I know that conflict is not something I deal with in the best way. I tend to either avoid conflict entirely when possible, which often simply exacerbates the situation, or if avoiding is just not in the cards, I tend to retreat into myself and become very uncomfortable but also unable to extricate myself from the situation.

However, I was surprised and intrigued when personal or affective conflicts were only a small part of the agenda, and that there was a much more clear focus on cognitive conflict. I hadn’t actually heard this term previously, but now I know that I have most certainly engaged in many a cognitive conflict, and always to my benefit. Cognitive conflict was explained as being a conflict of ideas or approaches in which the issues are separated from the people. Cognitive conflict is an essential characteristic of high performing groups and teams because they push each other into new realms of understanding through the challenges of differing perspectives.

We were also given a framework for facilitating cognitive conflict in a group or team, which I want to bring to my learning team this semester to encourage deeper thinking and to clarify the positions of team members. Moving into more facilitator roles is something I want to try as a personal leadership goal, so I definitely see the framework as being an applicable tool for me.

Finally, the next day at school, my department head asked me about the session the previous evening, and I shared with her the focus on cognitive conflict. It was a PD Day for secondary schools and we were having learning team meetings that morning. My department head encouraged me to try to push in our group with my new knowledge of cognitive conflict as we would be discussing some hot topics such as triangulation of data and using professional judgement in determining our final grades. I was reminded how wonderful my department head is and how much she encourages me to take on small leadership roles on our French Immersion Department. Maybe I’m not so terrible at managing conflict after all!

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