Personal Reflection

This reflection will discuss personal diffidence and how it has influenced my academic studies, including my practice within placement settings. Gibbs reflective cycle (Gibbs, 1998) has been utilised as it illustrates a clear structure for the process of reflection. To conclude this reflection will draw together the themes which have emerged and highlight a clear action for future learning that will be used in order to enhance my future practice.

NCSSM Residential and Online students must have a high level of maturity, whether living away from home or working daily without teachers or supervision. Please help us understand why you are mature enough to manage your own deadlines, schedule and academic interest.

When I arrived at the agency, the room was crowded and many people were waiting for their turned to be served at one of the several tables. The person that I interviewed for this assignment was Emily Hampshire, the coordinator of one of a program called 180. Emily has been with the agency for over a year and is currently the coordinator of the agency’s newest program. This program is a gang prevention and intervention program and was created for the local at-risk youth in an effort to prevent gang related crimes and help youth “change their life around”, as Emily mentioned. This program was created in collaboration with the local Police Department and the Mount Diablo Unified School District and in

1. Empathy with students and the struggles they may experience in specific units of study and/or their transition to university study

In the past year I have produced three different pieces of writing with different purposes and intended for different audiences, but they all share a common theme of family ties. The first piece of writing was a creative piece centred on fixing family bonds and bringing the family closer together. The creative piece was intended to entertain a more adult audience and was based around a real life even that happened when I was younger. The next piece was an exposition arguing the point of technology creating a divide between adult and child, it was made to inform and persuade the audience on my point of view, I chose this piece as it seemed a good topic to debate and related to the theme of family. The final piece was a magazine article, this piece was made to inform the audience of which holiday destinations are best for families and there is to do in the suggested towns or cities. In that the magazine piece was created for a target audience of parents with younger children. This piece is heavily linked to my creative piece as the knowledge I gained to create that piece was acquired through my travels as a kid and was based around what places I enjoyed most as a kid.

In my first course at Walden University, Dr. Beebe asked for the reasons I am pursuing my advanced degree and gave her reasons why she did hers. It was part of our discussion board topic of igniting your passion to drive the work that we do. Her reason was similar to mine but I was caught off guard because until yesterday I was not ready to accept that I was doing this degree for me. It felt wrong that I was doing something for me because the world has so much issues and I am here dedicating a large part of my life and finances to do something for myself. After some reflection I was ready to accept it and embrace it without the feeling of guilt.

The 2016 presidential election was a thought-provoking, exciting, and pivotal time in my life. The campaigning and debates leading up to the election inspired in me a sense of lasting political engagement; even the fact that I was 17 and could not actually vote in the election did not deter my enthusiasm. As exhilarating as those few months were, however, they also provided me with a rather tumultuous identity crisis. 2016 was a hotbed for political discourse in America, and while I was thriving on it, I was also facing contrasting influences from my peers and family on my political ideology. I was realizing that my stances on various issues fell on both sides of the aisle, and unfortunately there was no seat in the middle of the aisle. I did not know what to call myself. I was reluctant to use the ‘independent’ label for fear of not belonging in our two-party system, so I gave an ambiguous, politically-confused answer: fiscally conservative, socially liberal. While accurate, in the vaguest sense, I now realize this answer was imprecise. After taking the eye-opening and life-changing Introduction to American Government course, doing some individual research, taking some online quizzes, talking to some politically active people in my life, and copious self-reflection, I now have a better answer: I am a pro-business democrat. I find this label satisfying because while I strongly believe government regulation of businesses and higher taxes (across the board) are detrimental to

This week at the Jasper County Health Department, I had a variety of tasks. Due to session cancellations, the first couple hours I was at the clinic, I helped with filing patient files as well as working at the front desk to check in clients and schedule future appointments. I learned a large amount of interesting information just by looking at patients files. A lot of information goes into each file and I was surprised and lucky to have the chance to view these files and learn from them. Patients varied from DUI’s to mental illness. As I spent the first few hours of the day up front working with the women up there, I learned a lot about the billing systems. I had not planned to learn so much about how they charge and when they can charge and when they cannot. I learned the difference between insurance, Medicaid and self-pay. One of the secretaries informed me that they have a crisis counselor always on call. If a client calls in and is talking suicidal the on call counselor will get them help. From talking with her, I learned that in these kinds of cases, clients cannot be charged any fee. I was never aware of this for these situations.

Throughout my rigorous academic career, I have written numerous pieces of literature from research papers, poems, academic essays, and even tweets. In my rhetorical analysis, I will be analyzing a college essay in which I submitted to Bowling Green, Xavier, Toledo, and Ohio University. The reason I selected this piece to analyze is because this essay played a crucial role in determining where I would go to college, and it also describes me as a person, and my love for the city of Cleveland.

The central focus of my lesson was comprehension. I wanted the student to draw on their inferences to better understand the story. My lessons have built on one another because I have focused on different areas and made them more challenging. I first started the lessons with decoding, once the student mastered that I moved onto blending and finally comprehending. Each lesson up to this point has focused on what the student has learned from each tutoring session and building upon those areas to better understand the text by strengthening her fluency. I know that the student does not enjoy reading, therefore I make lesson plans that I believe she will enjoy by using subjects, text, and fun worksheets to engage her learning. I support my student’s literacy learning by creating engaging lessons and finding strengths in her reading that they may not notice. I try my best to compliment and support her progress by praising her when needed. My main focus in the beginning was to create trust. I believe once she trusted me that I want her to succeed, but to also trust me in the sense that she should do her best work, I began to notice that she tried her best once the moment of trust was built. I also try to create rapport with my student by getting to know her better and relating to her for a personal level. How I know if the student has mastered a topic in the lesson plan is based on the summative and formative assessments. The goal of my lessons is to improve my student’s fluency in

The nature of a human person is to learn new things and improve his capacity as days move on. Experience is described as the best teacher by many psychologists and people are encouraged to include their experience even in job application. This shows how important experience is. Positive psychology assists so much in asking questions which in themselves when answered can have a very positive impact on an individual (Kolb,2014). It is mostly concerned with things that are tasked to make the person happy. A famous saying says that the secret of happiness is to count your blessings while others add their troubles. The question asked at this stage is to ensure that they inspire and cultivate positive emotions and nurture relationship with the major aim of making the person happy.

Is your life integrated? Are you able to be the same person in all aspects of your life—personal, work, family, community, college, classroom? If not, what is holding you back?

During my studies with the University of Oklahoma, my selected area of focus was counseling. In addition to selecting many courses that focused on theoretical approaches to counseling, I also completed the graduate certificate “Helping Skills in Human Relations”.

While reading Systems Thinking, The Systems View of Life and Learning as a Way of Leading, I felt as if I was experiencing many contradictory things at once. I felt as if i was in the past and the future, i was growing and shrinking, peering into a microscope and peering through a telescope all at the same time. I was taken on a journey through the micro and macro while weaving simultaneously through my own internal and external mental models of the world. This immersive reading experience sparked a strong desire in me to seek new perspectives and try to understand what others internal and external mental models look like, what they mean and what they feel like. The concepts and theories presented in the readings have helped me to solidify some of my own thought processes and ways of thinking about the world so I can put them into action and apply new practices into my community work and in turn create change. I do know one thing for sure, I want my contributions to be positive and go towards the common good. The readings reminded about how interconnected everything and everyone is and how fragile life can be. The readings have reinforced my desire to do good, be creative, think of others more than myself, but to not lose touch with self.

I first came face to face with finance in a school project where I designed a Christmas product and sold it in the school stalls. I managed the budgeting and designed part of the product. Then I became even more engrossed into finance as I attended the investment Banker challenge where my group came second on the return on investment category by 0.01. I was the trader so I had to bid on commodities and shares, reacting quickly to real-time information, demonstrating my analytical and decision-making skills.