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ESE634: EDUCATION-BASED COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIPS

Instructor Guidance

Week 3

Welcome to Week 3 of ESE634: Education-Based Collaborative Relationships!  Please be sure to review the Week 3 homepage for this course to see:
· The specific learning outcomes for the week.
· The schedule overview.
· The required and recommended resources.
· The introduction to the week.
· A listing of the assessments.
It is important to note that the Instructor Guidance has been developed to directly compliment the learning outcomes in each week of this course.  Supplemental resources are also included in the Instructor Guidance. You are encouraged to consider using these resources to support your completion of the weekly assessments beyond using the required and recommended resources provided on the weekly unit homepages and in the consolidated list of resources on the Course Materials page.  Thus, you are strongly encouraged to review the Instructor Guidance each week as part of your study plan. Not only does the Instructor Guidance offer you insights and assistance with the weekly topics and activities, it models effective academic writing, which is expected of you in all of your coursework in this graduate-level course.

Overview
In Week Two, you located a peer reviewed article that best represents the title of the course, focusing specifically on collaborative relationships.  You also created and provided feedback on your list of interview questions that will be utilized in your interview this week.  You also responded to Mr. Franklin’s email and provided input about your collaborative relationship.  This week you will take your interview questions and put them to use with interviews with professionals.  You will learn about your conflict management style, which is essential knowledge for future work on a team.  Finally, you will critique collaboration techniques and problem-solving strategies that are being utilized in a Student Success Team (SST) meeting.

Intellectual Elaboration

Body Language

This week we will continue to focus on communication and collaboration, and will introduce conflict and problem solving skills.  Please watch the following video to see how people, starting at a very young age, seek to communicate with each other. 

The babies in the video were able to communicate with their body language, ask and respond to questions, and express their feelings very clearly, even though listeners do not understand what they are saying!  This video, although silly, highlights the importance of non-verbal communication.  Within Weeks One and Two, we discussed elements of non-verbal communication through the use of email.  This week, we will add information about body language.  This is an extremely important skill for working on a team, especially when members hold differing perspectives and opinions.   You may enjoy and benefit from taking the following 
quiz (Links to an external site.)
, which evaluates your ability to judge facial cues and other body language. 

Conflict
Conflict is a natural outcome of groups of diverse people working together.  Conflict can typically result from the following issues:
· Goals.  Conflict can happen as a result of conflicting goals or priorities.  It can also happen when there is a lack of shared goals.
· Personality conflicts.  Personality conflicts are a common cause of conflict.  Sometimes there is no chemistry, or you haven’t figured out an effective way to click with somebody.
· Scarce resources. Conflict can happen when you’re competing over scarce resources.
· Styles.   People have different styles.  Your thinking style or communication style might conflict with somebody else’s thinking style or their communication style.  The good news is that conflicts in styles are easy to adapt to when you know how.
· Values.  Sometimes you will find conflict in values.  The challenge here is that values are core.  Adapting with styles is one thing, but dealing with conflicting values is another.  That’s why a particular business, group, or culture may not be a good fit for you.  It’s also why “bird’s of a feather flock together” and why “opposites attract, but similarities bind.”
(Meier, 2011, n.p.)
While conflict may be uncomfortable, it is not necessarily a negative concept.  Often great strides forward result from conflict.  Outcomes from conflict may be determined by the ways in which participants respond.  Kenneth Thomas and Ralph Kilmann, two psychologists, created an instrument to gauge your response to conflict as a way to better understand how different conflict styles affect groups and individuals.  Within the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI), there are 5 responses to conflict: competing, collaborating, compromising, avoiding, and accommodating (Kilmann & Thomas, 1977).  These responses are described along two dimensions, assertiveness and cooperativeness, “Assertiveness refers to the extent to which one tries to satisfy his or her own concerns, and cooperativeness refers to the extent to which one tries to satisfy the concerns of another person,” (Kilmann & Thomas, 1977, n.p.).

In the figure below, you can see the two dimensions, assertive and cooperative, and where the five responses fall along the spectrum.  Avoiding can be seen as unassertive and uncooperative, competing is assertive but not cooperative, accommodating is cooperative but not assertive, compromising is mid-range for assertiveness and mid-range for cooperation, and collaborating is assertive and cooperative.

Figure 1: Conflict Mode
Adapted from Kilmann and Thomas (1977)

Problem-Solving

When you think about conflict and its resolution, problem solving is essential characteristic.  When you resolve conflict successfully, you may “solve many of the problems that it has brought to the surface, as well as getting benefits that you might not at first expect, such as:
· Increased understanding: The discussion needed to resolve conflict expands people’s awareness of the situation, giving them an insight into how they can achieve their own goals without undermining those of other people.
· Increased group cohesion: When conflict is resolved effectively, team members can develop stronger mutual respect, and a renewed faith in their ability to work together.
· Improved self-knowledge: Conflict pushes individuals to examine their goals in close detail, helping them understand the things that are most important to them, sharpening their focus, and enhancing their effectiveness.
(UC Davis Medical Center, n.d., para. 4).  
The diverse opinions and backgrounds of people who are working together to support the needs of special education students may cause conflict, but the team often experiences numerous benefits when they are able to problem solve to resolve the conflict.  

Assessment Guidance
This section includes additional specific assistance for excelling in the assessments for Week 3 beyond what is given with the instructions for the assessments. If you have questions about what is expected on any assessment for Week 3, contact your instructor before the due date.

Discussion 1:

This discussion is based on the work of Thomas and Kilmann (1977). Please see the Intellectual Elaboration section above for more detailed information about the description of the conflict mode.  Before you can write your initial discussion post, you will need to complete the quiz (please see the required resources). For this quiz, you can either print out pages 2-5 or you could simply number a paper one through thirty and write down the letter (A or B) for all of your responses. Within the document, there is a Graphing your Profile Scores section (pages 6-7) that is unnecessary as you do not need to graph your results. After scoring and interpreting your scores (pages 8-14), you will be ready to write your discussion post.

Journal:

Your journal for the week is in response to your interviews with a special and general education professional. This journal should only be a two-to-three paragraph reflection of the process of locating and interviewing experts from the field. This was intentional so that you could spend a majority of your time conducting the actual interviews. The information that you gleaned from the interviews will be applied next week in your Week Four assignment. 

Assignment:

The assignment this week is two-fold.  It is meant to provide you with practice evaluating effective collaboration and problem-solving strategies between diverse groups of people. It is also introducing an important component of a special education program, the Student Success Team (SST).  This is sometimes also referred to as the Student Study Team (SST).  An SST meeting may be requested by a parent or a member of a school site, which is usually a teacher who is directly working with the student.
 
SST meetings can be used to address behavioral, social-emotional, and/or academic concerns. These brain-storming sessions typically include the teacher/teachers, administrator, resource specialist or other support personnel, parents and the student (if age appropriate). If the team believes that the student may have a type of disability, then a special education evaluation can be recommended at the conclusion of the SST meeting. If not, the team will brainstorm possible interventions and solutions, identify the responsible parties for the plan, and create a timeframe to check back in on the students’ progress. For this discussion, you will be watching a mock SST meeting. If you have not participated in one before, this will give you a good perspective on how these meetings are typically formatted. It is important to keep in mind that these meetings may not be as simple as it is presented in the video.  Often parents are very emotionally charged due to the concern that they have for their child. Solutions and action plans may not work themselves out as easily as presented in the video.    

Looking Ahead
In Week Four, you will be asked to revisit the interview that you conducted this week.  Look ahead to the assignment description as you may want to start composing your assignment while the information is fresh in your mind.  A portion of this assignment will also be used in your final project.  

Recommendation
The MASE program provides the opportunity for you to create an online portfolio that can be used in your career development and professional practice. Throughout the program you will have various assessments that can be included in this e-portfolio and these will be finalized in the last course of the MASE program, Capstone course, ESE699. You may select this assignment and subsequent coursework to include as artifacts. Therefore, it is strongly encouraged you save your coursework on a flash-drive (e.g., a USB removable drive) or store in a cloud-based option such as Dropbox, Google Drive, or other similar applications.

References
Kilmann, R. H. & Thomas, K. W. (1977).  Developing a forced choice measure of conflict-handling behavior: The MODE Instrument.  Educational and Psychological Measurement, 37(2), 309-325.
Meier, J. D.  (2011, May 11).  
Five conflict management styles at a glance (Links to an external site.)
.  Sources of Insight.  Retrieved from http://sourcesofinsight.com/conflict-management-styles-at-a-glance/
University of California at Davis Medical Center (n.d.).  
Conflict resolution: Resolving conflict rationally and effectively (Links to an external site.)
.  Retrieved from http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/hr/hrdepts/asap/Documents/Conflict_Resolution.pdf