For my final leadership reflection in LDR-101, I chose to respond to the following prompt:
3. How has this course promoted your development of critical thinking, public speaking, writing, digital literacy, and/or teamwork skills, and how this has contributed to your understanding of leadership or your capacity to lead?
LDR with Dr. Brandy was a unique experience that I feel extremely lucky to have been a part of. She encouraged us to think critically in ways that I hadn’t yet thought of; the ways she prompted us to analyze the papers and talks we listened to went beyond basic high-school literary analysis.
I also appreciated the digital literacy she encouraged us to learn; while I consider myself fairly technologically literate already, I had little experience with wordpress beyond browsing other’s blogs on my own. Learning how to moderate a digital portfolio combined with the resume and CV experience I received from BIO-110 made me feel much more confident in my ability to navigate the professional world online.
While we learned much more from Dr Brandy’s class, I feel like one of the biggest and most important skills I had to improve upon in her class was my teamwork. Completing teamwork over zoom is a unique challenge in itself, but actually having to do critical analysis and discussion with people as opposed to just completing a worksheet or a quiz is a whole new monster. I struggled with learning how to let other people do their parts and not taking over the entire project, as I’m inclined to do, but Dr Brandy and Maggee’s careful moderation of how we went about our debates and projects was a definite help.
In the end, I learned how to both step back and step up – seemingly contradictory, but both aided me in completing the course. Stepping back helped me not to be overbearing and overwhelmed – people work on different timelines than I do. While we should all get things done by the deadline, and try not to leave things till the last minute, at the end of the day I cannot control if other people procrastinate or do not participate.
Stepping up, on the other hand, was more about me changing my own habits. As much as I’d like to sit back and do my part alone with no input from the team, it is no longer a sustainable practice like it was in highschool. LDR taught me that teamwork extends past one meeting or discussion, and we need to incorporate it into every facet of a project. This doesn’t mean every sentence I write needs to be analyzed and approved by my team, but everyone being on the same page goes a long way to a successful, cohesive project.
