This reflection describes the process of a group work on the article ‘Inquiry-Minded Schools’, written by Rallis (2000). As a result of this group work, this article was presented yesterday to the participants of the course number 14008. In my reflection, I will relate to the following points: my personal experience with such kind of assignment, the process of executing the assignment, the product and its presentation and finally, my insights to the discussion part of the presentation.The assignment was to choose an article for the further reading and the presentation and to check in a shared document what students chose to work on the same article, thus forming a group. Being an elementary school teacher and knowing the benefits of group work, I am still not a big fan of it due to such issues as losing control over my lesson and pupils or seeing only few pupils working and others just talking. Truly speaking, I was afraid of being a member of a group by myself, because I am used to work alone and rely on my pace and level of responsibility and in this assignment, not only this responsibility is shared, it creates dependence. It is important to notice that you depend on people that you don’t know, all you have is their names, phone numbers and email addresses. May be because of this fear to be dependent and not to succeed because different people work differently, I was the first to gather these email addresses and writing the first introductory letter with the article’s subtopics and request to choose who presents what. I did enjoy these people’s appreciation for my initiative. The process included such stages as: dividing the article, preparing the slides, sending the slides to a person who collected them, approving the finished presentation, sending them for S. comments, correcting the presentation (which in our case was complete reorganization of the presentation, since we needed to translate it into Hebrew and sufficiently shorten it.), approving it again and then sending it for the final check. All these stages were accompanied by waiting and for me it is very difficult, since I like to finish tasks on time. The actual presentation was especially traumatic for me, because of the technical issues I had with my Internet connection. The participants of the group did not hear me; moreover, I missed the whole presentation, trying to connect from another computer. This is why, I would like to write that the discussion part of our presentation surprised me in a very positive way when I listened to the recording. I liked that many participants were active; it means they were interested in the topic itself and in the way, it was presented. I liked Y. comment about the school’s responsibility in Israel, which “by the end of the day” deals with grades and then S. sentence that despite the pressure from the Ministry, the schools may have meaningful processes if they want to, such as schools from the article that I wanted to present. Their inner accountability is strong. They choose to take full responsibility for their processes by reflecting on them. For example, Uncas School in U.S. whose pupils achieved high results, but the teachers could not explain how and why. Why are these results higher than those from a year ago, may be the evaluation is different?
To conclude, this assignment and its final presentation were not easy for me, but I learned that I have organizational skills, I am grateful to my group members and I really enjoyed the article. I presented its inquiry strategy to my school’s principal, since we have external Meitzav this year and it may help us. Bad experience may be much more meaningful and teaching than the good one…
Written by Yulia
