Engagement in Learning Communities

Before I even paid my tuition to attend Lamar, I knew that I needed to establish a learning community amongst my peers in the program. Near the end of my undergraduate program, I began to fall off the saddle – can you tell I’m from small town Texas? I went from actively participating in class and in group to preferring independent work or doing the bare minimum just to get by. Whether it was laziness or acceptance that I just needed to pass to graduate, I let myself put forward less than exceptional work, and it is one of my greatest regrets. Now that I am in graduate school and have drive and aspirations again, I want to excel. And I know I needed a group of other like minded individuals to lean on.

Hence, our group was born. I have been so fortunate to work with Angela, Brenda, Kacie and Priya. We have relied on each others’ strengths throughout the two courses we are all enrolled in. Each member has brought plenty of valuable information and skills to the table so that we run like a well oiled machine. Personally, I have benefitted a lot from their knowledge on structuring and executing a literature review, creating annotations and attention to detail. Sometimes, I like to move too fast for my own good. I have so many ideas, I want to develop them as quickly as possible so I can watch them grow and move on to forming the next one. However, I have learned to slow down and pay great attention to all of the not-so-fun, but necessary components of our work. This growth has improved the quality of my work and made it more credible, and I thank my group members for that.

On the other side of the coin, I have been so grateful that my group members have sought out my strengths on the technology side of things. I have assisted a couple of group members with their portfolio development (if they were using WordPress) and even recorded a mini lesson on how to use Canva for video production. I’ve developed these skills with the work I do, and I am thankful that my group members were receptive to the information I presented them.

To ensure we documented our work and could easily reference each others’, we created a group collaboration document. Here, we posted links to our work, work processes, rubrics, links to previous students’ work that we could pull layouts from, and the link to our weekly (or sometimes more frequent) Zoom meeting. During the meetings, we discussed upcoming assignments, how we personally are approaching those assignments, and asked each other questions and requested feedback. We feel that we found great success in this format and plan to continue the development of this document as we all proceed through the program together. We have discovered something great within the relationships we share, and we plan on staying connected, program and beyond.

To access our group’s collaboration document, click on the image to the left.