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Reflective Practitioner Portfolio,Teryl Cartwright
Track: Regular CCT
Date: May 13, 2013
CCT 602 Creative Thinking taught by Professor Delores Gallo and Professor Luanne Witkowski
Creativity is..."a newspaper used as an umbrella." Creativity is also deliberate play. Through exploring creative persons, processes and products, I learned to practice using and evaluating my own creativity by seeing from various perspectives and by making new connections. My goals of becoming a more original, flexible and fluent creative thinker were realized as my creative expression improved individually and within a group throughout the course. As a culminating project, I chose to highlight three concepts helpful to me in a metaphorical treasure hunt for creativity--a treasure I hope to continue to seek, find and share with others. The exhibit link to this teaching module is as follows:
Quest For Creativity
***The summer after CCT 602 I wanted to create a "5 Whys" app that included a second tier of questioning. Although I didn't have the technical skills to fully accomplish my idea, the following link shows some of what I had intended:
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Skyewriter/2624875
CCT 616 Dialogue Processes taught by Professor Olen Gunnlaugson
To start learning about dialogue, I had the privilege of interviewing Harrison Owen, founder of Open Spaces, for my first Master's program research paper
Dialogue Artist Harrison Owen.doc. From there this class focused on the four fields of conversation and the processes required to move toward higher modes of speaking into generative connections through and beyond dialogue. With my classmates, we applied Theory U to our workplaces, posts and between each other in assigned, paired "coaching conversations" and I learned that dialogue can be more than the actors' lines in a play.
CCT 618 Creative Thinking, Collaboration and Organizational Change taught by Professor Jeremy Szteiter and Professor Allyn Bradford
I have really enjoyed learning how to be creative in a real team. By concentrating on project oriented teams, I have experienced the truth that "real teams have a common purpose, urgency and fun." Collaboration, that mutually accountable leadership which trusts each other whether one is stepping forward or back, evolves into systems thinking and then becomes the interconnected web of organizational change. Admittedly, my own workplace is currently chaotic and in need of the
Wisdom of Teams and the
Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, but I have started to use concepts learned here.
Reflection on Leading a Leaderless Team.doc
ED 630 Engaging Students in Critical Thinking taught by Professor Erin Polderman (Transferred from Carlow University for core course CCT 601 Critical Thinking)
Teaching to the test has created rote memorization by students and didactic teaching by teachers. Even as employers beg for graduating students to have critical thinking abilities and techniques, as yet little time is devoted to this specific topic in the schools or the workplace. People are being asked to think without being shown
how to think. Although the emphasis of this class was the idea that changing an individual teacher's teaching methods can work to change the whole current public education system, I did learn how to fit critical thinking skills, philosophies and applications into any content area--including Biblical studies
(UMC Moodle Class Using Critical Thinking).
ED 8601 Writing Across the Curriculum taught by Professor Mary Dickinson (Transferred from Carlow University for elective course ED 621 Teaching Writing in the K-12 Classroom)
Imagine creative nonfiction that not only shares knowledge and conclusions, but allows personality and imagination to be expressed as well. Multigenre writing is one way to achieve this objective within content teaching. The follow exhibit helps define this method:
Writing Across Curriculum Module 5.doc. In this class I learned multiple writing applications for teaching any subject and I developed several writing rubrics that I could use--not for grading, but for my own self-improvement or for my students’ own appraisals of their writings.
CCT 619 Biomedical Ethics taught by Professor Mark Robinson (used as substitute for Phil 501 Foundations of Philosophical Thought course)
While I've used elements of each CCT class in the workplace, this applied philosophy course was the first specifically taken with a pre-determined goal on how to use it. By focusing on how to make it into a Bible study, the course allowed me to examine my own philosophies of bioethics before working with a team to develop a framework to share the course. Interestingly though, the content of the graduate class was not transferred to the new class as much as the evaluative and discussion skills that were learned.
Welcome to the Bible and Bioethics StudySeptemberSessions.doc
CCT 670 Thinking, Learning and Computers taught by Professor Jeremy Szteiter
The most ironic thing about this course is that it is the one that taught me to be a better person. Although I had the idea that I would be given technological background and tools to enhance my teaching and learning, the theories, the implications and the thought provoking readings were what I came to appreciate. This course was much more to me for a variety of reasons; learning is not all about the material, sometimes it's in the social aspects too. Since I had to give up my fiction writing during CCT to devote my best to the degree, my second opportunity to create fiction gave me great joy. This time instead of a play like in 602, it was a twenty minute freewrite speech of the future--done after mulling two days over the readings and notes I had for inspiration (only two words were changed from the original).
Week 6 Post reading response 1.doc
CCT 692 Processes of Research and Engagement taught by Professor Jeremy Szteiter
In this class, the struggle was allowing "me" to be in engage
ment. When you've been taught not to write "I" in academic work, it is a hard habit to break. This was the class in which I finally started putting together my own vision of creativity. I was encouraged to share this at my workplace (church) and the attached workshop document is an example of my activity based teaching style.
REAL Creativity Workshop.doc This was probably the one class in which I tried the hardest to write authentically as me and for me, to not try to impress or build the wall as a teacher. Thank you to the professor for letting a writer for once
not write to the reader. The reason for this authenticity crossed over from the the computers class. A fair warning--taking 670 and 692 together was a marathon sprint for both student and instructor--worth it, but
much harder in some ways than taking these last four classes below in my final semester.
CCT 655 Metacognition taught by Nina Greenwald (used as a substitute for CCT 651 Advanced Cognitive Psychology course)
"Thinking about thinking" led to unexpected paths. While the content rich readings actually influenced my thesis, the activity based class really helped shape a very diverse class into a fruitful learning experience. Even if using problem based learning sometimes seemed frustrating to stop with the lesson instead of finding and doing the solution, I am extremely grateful for this chance to push myself beyond my normal divergent thinking. I have to admit listening to my more analytic classmates and discovering some fellow creatives was a good balance--sometimes my other classes were tilted too much to one side over the other. The following was a fun graphic to express my thinking process:
CCT655CartwrightMindmapmetacognition.pdf
CCT 688 Reflective Practice taught by Professor Jeremy Szteiter
This was my fourth and last class with Professor Szteiter and I am grateful to have had so many opportunities to learn from him. The surprising thing about this course was that it was even more self-directed learning than the Synthesis course. We didn't adopt many of the reflective practice tools and models as we created and tried out our own. The following is one of the exercises to explore our thinking process and our response to change.
ReflectMarch9.docx
CCT 693 Action Research for Education, Professional and Personal Change taught by Professor Peter Taylor
I also came into action research with the wrong idea from the title. I pictured engaging research as going to primary sources rather than books for our action. Truth is, the research is not only to get those you are studying or hoping to help to join in the process, but it is also action research into yourself. My topic was "constituency building," an elaboration and expansion of one of the smaller tools within the cycle. I feel I grew a lot here--it was as my classmate Hardeep put it, "changing with change" not just "dealing with change."
693Cartwright-A7-FinalCopy30April2013.doc
CCT 694 Synthesis of Theory and Practice Seminar taught by Professor Peter Taylor
This class was a hybrid of a hybrid. First it was a combination of online students and face to face. Then, making it even more unique, it was added to the same time/place as the face to face and online CCT 692 class for the semester. This dynamic started with having the online teaming and the face to face teaming. We had only one online 692, so we in 694 felt a responsibility to make sure she wasn't too isolated when (as always) there are some technological glitches and inadvertent exclusions from those in the physical class. The semester then separate us by actual class so we adjusted and buddy partnered in new ways again. Writing workshops, dialogues and letting partnerships share in and impact our thesis projects were all special benefits.
Why CCT for me:
The Thing to Do
Exhibits