Christy’s Reflections

McGuire VA Medical Center, my place of employment, is an institution that necessitates and encourages education. This institution requires employees to take 40 hours of on line education annually.  The employer encourages individuals to advance their level of education by achieving advanced degrees. This is accomplished by allowing the employee time off from work with compensation while providing for transportation to the educational site. Limited funding is available for tuition.

Barriers that exist at my institution vary by the level of employment. The higher level of employees, dentists or dental hygienist, has continuing education requirements to keep their licensure thus more courses are available for them to take. The dental assistants, which are at a lower paying level, do not have these requirements therefore not as many courses are offered at the job site or in the community.  Another barrier for education can be time because many of the courses are offered on the weekends. Finances can be a barrier especially for those employees who earn less, especially if the courses are not be paid for by the institution.

After 31 years of employment at the VA hospital I have seen a change in the demographics of the employees at the dental clinic. Employees initially started at a young age and worked until retirement, but today you see employees starting at an older age. An example would be the dentist. They have served our nation as military dentistry for at least 20 years, retired and now are starting a second career at the VA hospital. Typically theses dentist will only work 10 years before retiring, therefore the training and knowledge that is required for acclimate these people to our institution to treat this special population will have to be repeated often. The lower salaried employees do not stay with the VA until retirement. The reason seems to be that the positions in the dental service are stagnant and with no opportunity for advancement. Today’s employees are single parents that need an opportunity to advance and increase their salary.

At our hospital we are treating the newly wounded solders from Iraq and Afghanistan. They receive their initial treatment in the fields of war, transfer to Germany and then to military hospitals in the United States. Eventually, they arrive at the VA Medical Centers for the completion of their long term medical care. The problem that exists is that when they arrive at the VA hospitals; the medical staff does not know what kind of treatment the patients have previously received. The globalization of medicine has created a solution to the problem. Technology has found a way to make all the medical records available to all the VA institutions. This allows for through and more complete care to be given to the patients.

My home situation is a fortunate one. My spouse is supportive of my desire to expand my education. He is willing to help with the house hold chores. He also spoils me by cooking dinner thus allowing me to do my reading assignments, write blogs and papers. Without his support returning to college would definitely be difficult. My largest personal barrier would have to be being out of school for thirty years. It is taking an extra effort to learn the new form of writing papers and making myself stick to a schedule for reading material and papers.

It is hard to believe that the semester is almost over. I have had so much fun rediscovering learning, studying, participating in projects that time just passed me by.  The last three weeks i have taken the time to work on the final paper  because i wanted to take my time so that once i had an idea down i could explore further  and see if there was anything else i wanted to say. Writing this paper was an overview of everything i had learned.  It put everything into perspective and it all made sense.  When you learn a concept you are not always sure how to use it. but by the end of the semester  i realized how the  puzzle pieces fit together and hopefully will be able to utilize this information.

I have a job interview in a week and the topic of the lecture that was chosen for me is “Teaching Strategies and evaluation in Dental Hygiene Curricula”.  As a part of the lecture i plan to utilized the some of the information that i have attained in this class the show one aspect of learning and that will be the learning in groups . I am thinking of ending with this information because i am most familar with it and hopefully will end on a strong note.   wish me luck.    Thank you Dr. Carter for all you have done and the encouragement you have given me to keep trying and push forward.  I plan to proceed with the masters program and hopefully do well.   Have a nice summer. Talk with you in June.

this past week we participated in assignment #3, which was facilitation of a group.  We all liked our topic, “How to stop contributing to your boss’s and your own ineffectiveness”.  One of my responsibilities was to summarize the presentation. I feel like i need alot of work presenting up in front of the class, so i wrote out a summry and tried to memorize.  soon i realized what i needed to do was to be comfortable with the information and then i would be more comfortable talking about it. So i practiced presenting to my dog. poor thing, she looked so confused.   When i actually sat down with my group i was go excited about the topic i just jumped right in. I totally forgot to state our purpose, what i wanted to accomplish, etc. My mind just assumed that everyone was thinking like i was. Fortunately, one person questioned me and then i got back on track. so i do not feel that this was not my best accomplishment in this class and i realized i do need more work.  I just need to forgive myself and move on.  I will say that i am happy with myself because i have not waited until the last minute to work on my paper.  thank heavens it is almost finished, which gives me some relief.

Communication!  Can be a wonderful thing if everything goes as planned but, when misunderstood can cause many problems.  My team experienced this problem last week.  On April 13th each team choose what topic they wanted to facilitate on April 27th.  Unfortunately two of my team members were not present that evening but i was not worried because we had already chosen out topic.  So, to follow up I sent the missing team members and email updating them on the missed class and informing them of what to read and what to be prepared to to for the next class.  Upon arrival on April 20th, one team member came prepared to teach the class.  when questioned, he stated this is what he understood the email to say.  the other team member also was confused but took it one step further and called another team member to question this and discovered she only needed to be prepared to discuss the material we were going to present.  this goes to show that it is easy to misunderstand what a person says and we all need to question the information especially if it does not make sense to us.  This was a lesson well learned to all of us but, to the early reflectors it was humorous to see the productive procrastinators be prepared early!!

Last weeks  class was a real thinker!!!  The topic of paradoxes was a difficult one but i thought that the infrareds did an excellent presentation.  The examples that each team member expressed on how they personally understood the idea of paradoxes allowed different opportunities for classmates to relate to.  The infrareds allowed opportunities to ask questions so that if there were questions they could be cleared up.  They also kept a keen eye on us and when we looked confused they questioned us as to our understanding  of the class.  The exercise where we worked in groups to choose one of three topics to compare the paradox helped cement the idea of a paradox..  Even after all this i still would not want to tackle this topic for a presentation!

The other topic, Intergroup Dynamics, was a lot of fun.  The activities we participated in made you stop and think how you interacted with others in your group, and  how you and the  group came to  decisions and consensus. My group did not have any real conflict but discussion and reasoning why we made the choices we did.  Now, I  can see some of the thinigs i am learning in class being used in my ereryday work life.  There are small but important decisions that are made and we must agree upon decision before we can move forward.  This class is helping me guide my workmates in a smoother process without their even being aware of it.  Everyone appears to be happier because even if we do not go with their choice, they have at least had a chance to express their opinion.

The second assigment is now completed! I must admit i was very nervous with the teaching stragety that we chose because i had never participated in a debate. But i do believe that it was successful in achieving our goals.

The 4 screwdrivers chose “power and conflict” as our topic to engage the class in joint discussion and activities. As we met, we decided to use the movie, “Remember the Titians” as the basis for the discussion. Now, what format to use?  One team member strongly favored the debate format.  The other members were very skeptical. We were not familar at all with this style and nervous about pulling this off successfully. Here our group had a small but healthy conflict.  Members questioned how a debate works and how it could be applied to our topic. In the end, an agreement was settled on and we proceeded with developing the debate.  My team is awesome.  Each member is eager to volunteer to take a task and to complete it on time. Thus on the night of the presentation, everything came into place.  The concept of the debate was a little hard to explain the to class, but the participants were eager to try the debate and it was successful.  I think they actually enjoyed it.  I feel that the class as a whole is great! Everyone volunteers quickly, thus making teaching an easier experience.   GO CLASS!!!!!!!

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Finally, we completed the paper, Twelve Angry Men. It was a long process, but I must admit an interesting one and a learning experience. I found it quite interesting to work with three other people on a paper, something I had never done. Every day I would go to the wikki to see what was posted and to my surprise nothing was there. You know the new students are a little anxious to get started. So I decided I would attempt to make my contributions. I was amazed how much time I spend writing, then rewriting my paragraphs to make the sound better or to make sure I got my point across. When my classmates began to make their contributions I found it quite interesting to see how they viewed the same material. Then I got brave and started adding comments to their entries and vice versa. Seeing other classmates thoughts got my thoughts going and I could see things in a different light. It allowed me to make those comments without fear of reprisal. In the end of the paper I did panic because I felt I needed a person to talk to just to confirm everything was on schedule. After two phone calls my fears were put to rest and I had contributed as much as I could. I heard many people in the class comment that they did not like writing the paper as a group, but since I have not been in class in many years it was reassuring to have someone to bounce ideas off and to encourage me.

From this experience I can see that it takes a commitment from each member to be successful. The members must hold up the commitment by submitting their information in a timely manner, meeting the agreed upon deadlines, and compromising to make the project come together. When everyone does all of this you come up with an acceptable project to everyone in the group. I feel that our group did all of this and the end result was a very acceptable grade. We achieved our goal. An A. YES!!!

Wow, it’s hard to believe that 30 years have passes since i took my last college class. To say the least I was nervous about attending the first class. Funny how things turn out. I actually knew two people in the class and had a few things in common with others. The professor is amazing. She makes you feel comfortable in her class and  she isvery encouraging for those of us who are new at this.

I have had two weeks of reading and digesting the material and slowly i am able to see what the text’s are talking about in my own work place.  I now understand why certain things are not working and why others are. I think this class will help me in my approach of others in my workplace when we are given and assignment.  I am excited about this class and hope this adventure continues to go well.

Wow, It is hard to believe it has been 30 years since i was in a classroom as a student. It is scary and exciting at the same time. I am not sure what to expect, how much time will it take to do the reading assignment, homework, writing papers-oh no, i haven’t done that either-HELP.  I am taking this class to help me decide if i want to presue a masters program in adult education.  I am approaching retirement at my current job and cannot see myself sitting at home doing nothing so . . .  i need to prepare myself for the future, and besides there maybe a full time teaching opportunity at the School of Dental Hygiene in the near future. I think on of the intimidating parts of all of this is the computer end of it . i don’t have to use it very much at my current employment. oh well here we go wish me luck and lots of FUN!

Can you believe I survived the first week of class and it was fun.  Everyone was so nice and encouraging. I think they remembered when they were in my shoes and trying to make the decision to try something new or not. Anyway, I had to read the material two times before it made any sense to me but I think part of it was because I was not use to thinking in this way. But it is getting better. At least I partially understand it the first time I read it and enjoy it the second time.  Now I find myself looking at my job and seeing why things at work don’t always run smoothly. People having hidden agandas, groups receiving rewards and the individuals doing all the work getting ignored and resentment building up.  This class is opening my mind up to a whole new world.