SEEQS Portfolio Defense

Collaborating Productively - ʻEleu

My Understanding

To me, Collaborating Productively means being able to accomplish quality work with your group members. A good example of Collaborating Productively is to be a team leader. When being an effective team leader, you are able to listen to other people's ideas and propose your own, you are also able to get work done and do it with quality. When working in a group, effective leaders are able to make sure that the group is focused on what they are learning.

I believe that a person who collaborates productively is able to face problems and challenges that come up. If there is an unexpected change in the due date of an assignment, a person who can collaborate productively would make sure that everyone in his/her group knew about it and would be able to accept the challenge and move on. That person would be flexible and pass through those challenges to assist his/her group in producing quality work.

Presenting Stand-Up Desks

Presenting Stand-Up Desks

A counterexample of the skill Collaborating Productively would be someone who is not participating in the group work. When a challenge appears, that person would rather avoid it and not do anything about it, or panic and freak out causing everyone else in the group to do the same. Collaborating Productively is a very useful and important skill to learn in the future because with this skill, you are able to be comfortable in working well with others in your future job. For example, if you are a teacher, you want to be able to not only be a supportive and good teacher for the students, you also want to be helpful and productive when working with other teachers. When being a teacher, you are in so many different groups and you really get deeper into the skill of Collaborating Productively. Let's say that a teacher has to deal with one student who is struggling in class. If that teacher was good at Collaborating Productively, they would be able to go to that student and help bring them up. This may be by assisting them in understanding the assignment they have, or it may be just being there to help support their idea and build up that students confidence in their work. All of my teachers at SEEQS are great at Collaborating Productively and have been a great example of how one must collaborate productively.

My Growth

This year, I have improved on my collaboration skills because I have developed the skills of being able to work well with whomever I am with. Back then in 6th grade, me and my partners talked a lot and did not get any work done. Although I may have a preference of whom I would like to work with, I am still able to find a way to work with anybody. I can convey the needs for both me and my partner/group to get work done.

I believe that everyone has their own strength in a group. Rather than being a leader, an assistant, or a planner, I am able to appreciate and respect everyone's skill and voice. I think this ability is a big part of Collaborating Productively. I believe that I have been able to succeed in doing that. If me and my group/partner were to disagree on something, I could calm myself down and talk to them politely in a way that they can understand my frustrations. If that doesn't work, I would move onto our next task in that group and work on that different section of the project.

In 6th grade I believed that Collaborating Productively meant to just work well with your partner. AIl my ideas were narrowed to the example that Collaborating Productively was to just let your partner share his/her ideas about the project. In the beginning 6th grade, I was taught about the skill and basically took a tiny piece of what they told me. I just listened to the part that the skill meant to just work well with your group.

The first time that I used this skill was in my 6th grade Weather Reflection Project, this project helped me to discover more parts of the skill. We were given an assignment to be able to make a wind catcher/anemometer out of the certain materials that we had. We had to work in groups. In this project, I felt like I got my first feel for Collaborating Productively. I understood that to use this skill efficiently, I need to be able to listen to other people's ideas and propose my own. I not only need to be able to get my work done on time and with quality, but I need to be a leader who is able to make sure that the group is staying on topic and is focused on what they are learning.

Cooking for 7th Grade EQS Project

Cooking for 7th Grade EQS Project

As I got to 7th and 8th grade, I got a better feeling of the skill and collected more and more pieces of understanding it. I got the feeling that working well with your partner isn't the only piece of Collaborating Productively. I started to recognize that a special way that I always used Collaborating Productively was through being a team leader. I believe that the science labs I did in 6th grade specifically helped me notice that there were more parts of the skill that I needed to learn. In that project, I helped my group get started with their work and finish it. I was a leader who helped clarify what work needed to be done and how it should be done. I was also a leader who guided them through obstacles, such as being unprepared and nervous.

When we found out that we were going to have to finish our Anemometer project and have to present it, some of the people in my group got worried about the expectation of needing to present. Instead of complaining about why they were scared about presenting or just leaving them be and not helping them, I ended up helping them prepare. I knew that I had the skill and strength of presenting. I recognized that I was very good at an ability that no one else in my group was very comfortable in doing, so I helped them memorize what they needed to say. I assisted with making sure that my group members were following the terms and expectations that teachers want to see. When we finished presenting as a group, I was very proud of what me and my group were able to accomplish. I was also proud of myself. I was able to attach my group mates more about what the expectations of performing. I felt like I had been a collaborative group member.

This shows that I was able to help my group mates come together and present nicely. I was able to use my role as a leader to help give confidence to my group mates. Not only did I help them do their work well, but I felt like I was able to teach them a way that they too can be a leader. I showed them an example of how someone can Collaborate Productively. By being a good group member and making sure everyone is on the same page, I proved that I was able to help make my group stronger in their skills of presenting and in working as a group. I believe in that experience, I was able to step up my game in Collaborating Productively that day.

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Since then, in 8th grade, I have come to the complete idea of Collaborating Productively and am learning ways to use it in the real world. When I am in football practice, I am using the skill Collaborating Productively as well. Now that I know that I am good at using the skill when I am a team leader, I take that role in football to help me be a better teammate. For example, in my team, I am a person who is very good at running routes. I am good at memorizing them as well. When I see that other people are having trouble getting their feet set or jumping off the route, I go over to them and help. I do this because I know that if we are going to win a game as a team, I want to make sure that everyone can do their routes correctly. When in a game, if we are losing, I help bring up the mood on our side. I help cheer up my teammates and give them hope that our team can still win.

This way, I am able to use the Skill Collaborating Productively to help improve our skills, and our mindset. Doing these things also allows my group members to step more into the role of being a leader. This goes the same for school. The more I show people what being a great group leader looks like, they will be able to be better at Collaborating Productively and become new group leaders as well.

What Project Helped Me Grow

For 7th grade, we were focusing on asexual yeast budding. The purpose was to gain a better understanding of the differences between asexual and sexual reproduction. By using yeast, me and my classmates would learn that budding is an example of asexual reproduction.

Budding is a process in which a small new organism grows directly out from the parent’s body. They reproduce asexually by budding instead of by producing spores like fungi. An offspring cell forms on a parent cell. After it grows and develops, it buds off to form a new cell. The offspring cell is genetically identical to the parent cell. Asexual reproduction is typically much more rapid, but very little variation among offspring occurs. Sometimes populations grow so rapidly and potentially become too large for the environment. As a result, they may run out of nutrients. Watch yeast budding here: Budding Time Lapse.

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With my partner, Myumi, we used the scientific method which is, to create a designed experiment to see what variables can cause different changes in the yeast reproduction. When Myumi and I thought about what things we wanted to change in our experiment, like what we want our dependent and independent variable to be, we choose to add more sugar for our independent variable, and time to be our dependent variable. As we conducted the experiment, we made sure that we were both doing our jobs correctly and efficiently.

For example, Myumi was in charge of adding the sugar. I was in charge of the timing of how long it took for the yeast to bring its first bubble. As we worked together, the way we decided our jobs of who to take certain roles, the skill we used was to look at our strengths.

For example, since I was very good at reading and following procedures, I was the one who conducted the experiment and made sure we were doing it right. When I heard that Myumi was very good at observing and taking notes, we decided that she would take the job of making sure that she wrote down all the details of when the first bubble popped up, and when the yeast looked like. Together, we worked as a great team and got all of our work done.

How This Project Relates To the Skill

I collaborated productively this quarter by working with my partner and figuring out different hypotheses and developing our learning about independent and dependent variables. The way we figured out these different hypotheses and ideas was by working together to find out that we needed to make sure your work was based on what our goal for that assignment was. My partner and I needed to make sure that the hypothesis was describing, if we added more sugar, more bubbles would rise in the yeast. And that is exactly what we put. We used our knowledge from what Ms. Michael taught us and applied it to our work. But it wasn't that easy.

At first, Myumi and I were not on the same page. We were talking about different ideas. She thought that a good hypothesis would be: If we add less sugar and more water, there will be more bubbles. Instead of just arguing and fighting with Myumi, I listened to her point and tried to see if she was right. Just because it wasn't my ideal hypothesis it didn't mean that I was just going to automatically reject it. Once I listened to her idea, I told her mine.

As we listened to each other, we began to build a stronger idea for a hypothesis. It turned out that we both had a piece of the hypothesis that we ended up needing to put together. Since I thought that the bubbles just meant that the yeast particles were eating the sugar, Myumi explained that it wasn't just that. It turned out that it was a sign that the yeast was budding/asexually reproducing. When I helped her, I told her that it wasn’t that water would make it more budding but instead sugar, she understood and we came up with our final hypothesis.

My partner and I did a very good job Collaborating Productively because we are able to get all of our work done with quality and we were able to both put our heads together and teach different things to each other. We respected each other's ideas and accepted the way we both might have thought differently. We also had fun doing the experiment. We were able to find out different outcomes of the changed variables and the ups and downs of doing a science experiment. An example of this is how we choose our independent and dependent variables in our project. Myumi and I both agreed that we wanted to change the amount of sugar in each tray. We also agreed that we wanted to keep that temperature of the water the same. My partner and I were able to agree and work together throughout the whole experiment without failing or getting badly sidetracked.

I wouldn't do anything differently next time because my partner and I were able to do the experiment without any trouble, and I feel that if we did something differently, we wouldn't do the project as well as we did originally. I wouldn't want to change anything because I don't want to fix anything that wasn't broken.