Post-Meeting Reflections

Here are the individual reflections for the meetings during fall quarter. Summaries are below:


Design Meeting 11/11/11

We spent two hours together. We started with a personal reflection about why were are here today and why we are part of SUSTAIN. We ended with some concrete principles about the time we will be spending with the students in the classroom.


Prompt: What we learned today:


Faculty

• Many of us felt energized about the developing design
• Many of us recognized the discipline necessary to both release our own expectations of the meeting and of SUSTAIN itself and to trust the process of collaboration.
• Some felt their understanding of SUSTAIN grew during the meeting. We seemed to share a greater vision.
• we felt appreciated and heard in the meeting

Design Meeting 11/21/11

We spent another two hours. There was both faculty and students with us. I have summarized the reflections below by group, but I don't want to imply that the groups have anything but an intent to function as a whole for the good of the students, faculty and community members.

Prompt: What made you nervous today?

Faculty 

• As we started talking about the time in the classroom together, many of us noticed our own and other's tendency to want to focus or protect something about our courses and had a hard time focusing on the goals of SUSTAIN as a whole. 
• The exercise of developing questions helped many of us see the power of overarching ideas. 
• Fear of not having enough time
• Worried about making mistakes and insufficient room to fix these mistakes 
• Teacher as answer giver vs Teacher as question asker
• How are we together? Talking too much, not interjecting, not listening enough, too personal, not respecting "leader" roles? Are my stories useful?
• Enjoyed talking about the classroom 
• Worried about own life/family responsibilities
• Learn for others
• Several reflected on the need, use, or audience of the reflections

Students:

• Reminded us that students can do much of the integration we are striving for
• noticed the faculty's propensity to focus on assignments versus the questions
• The question of how to be in the group, when to interject, when this student's input was needed or valued
• TIme crunch was apparent, both in the meeting and in the approaching need to design SUSTAIN
• Understood the need for collaboration between faculty and the difficulty of doing this. 
• nervous for students who might be confused by inexact assignments or the need to do an assignment for two different faculty. 
• The reflection felt a bit like this: being asked to write and not understanding why or what for.

Design Meeting 12/1/11

What is prominent in your mind as you think about SUSTAIN?

Faculty

• Too much to do and not enough understanding of the configuration in the classroom time
• The emergent learning process is exciting
• Reexamining the needs around the first week of class
• Recognizing the need for flexibility while remembering that change is hard for students and faculty.

Design Meeting 12/5/11

This meeting was big. There were faculty members, community members, Upper clansman and SUSTAIN students. 

What did we learn today?

Faculty

• we want and expect more of ourselves: More prepared, more creative
• We feel the pressure of time
• Emotion was high: anger, sadness, frustration. Appreciated the capacity we have built to have conflict and to accept emotion
• Attention to the status of the individuals in the room. Different people have different freedom to state needs. Students, Lecturers, professor, community members
• recognized our own development and change through participation in sustain
• This isn't just figuring out something about integrated classes, it is accepting all of the aspects of each other: other commitments, emotional responses, and mistakes
• Learning about our own responses: a desire to fix a problem instead of recognizing the need to design these things into SUSTAIN
• Appreciate the reflection process
• Uncomfortable with so many unanswered questions
• when emotional issues come up we want to recognize they are probably "our own" and not the "other's"
• Many more emotional issues in the meeting
• recognition of the different ways of being in the group
• We have to work out issues between us with tolerance, self-reflection  and communications

Students

• learned to be reflective about what the goals of the first week were
• Learned faculty are people too
• This difficult design takes time
• Able to observe the process and reflect

Community members

• The recognition of the anxiety about the ambiguity and the need to keep the end goal in mind
• A need to collaborate and communicate is paramount

Design Meeting 12/9/11

We made a mind map of the needs for the first few weeks. 

Faculty 

• We should have started earlier in this part of the design
• Feels like we are working nicely together
• Letting go of some course specific requirements
• Room for everyone in the process
• inspired and terrified
• Too much focus on the individual courses and not enough on the programatic issues