Learning Reflection

When I first started taking KNR 171 I had never really put too much thought into my leadership abilities. This course not only taught me how to be a more effective leader but also how to think about being a more effective leader. My biggest takeaway from the semester is that I am capable of leading people and that any struggles I had in the past with leading people were because I wasn't confident enough in my ability to be a leader. I learned a lot about collaboration in this course as well. I think that the most important thing I learned in this class is how to be an effective collaborator. That is because I imagine that there will be many more times in life when I will need to work with a group to accomplish a goal but not as many opportunities for me to be the leader of a group. A great example of these collaboration skills being put to use was during the group facilitation project. The entire group had to work hard to come up with ideas and themes for our project. We had a special case as well, because my group had differing schedules, we actually didn't have a lot of time to meet as a full group. We had to have split meetings a few times, meaning that I had to come and meet with one partner individually and then we would all meet together and then my original partner would have to leave to go do something else and I would stay with the other person to finish what we had been working on that day. It wasn't always easy to do that but in the end it helped me get used to working with a group even if the conditions weren't ideal. That leads me to believe that the things that I have learned in KNR 171 will help me in my future endeavors. In the future, I hope to be in  a position of leadership and I will need to be able to effectively work with people in order to get the job done. One area of my leadership abilities that went from nothing to hopefully being pretty good was my ability to facilitate. At the beginning of the semester I didn't even know what a facilitation was so I had to start from the beginning with learning about it. I know that I still have a lot of room to improve with facilitating but I am happy with the start that I now have. 

​