Reflective Learning Essay: Team Building and Conflict Resolution

Part One: Recounting critical incidents during the course

Completing any management course is a valuable learning experience in itself.  Completing a course that is highly experiential in nature can be even more valuable if it includes a reflective learning component.  Hence, the purpose of this assignment. 

During the Team Building and Conflict Resolution course, you have spent as much time in your teams as you have in the classroom with the instructor.  While we hope that the classroom time has been well spent in terms of learning content, we are just as focused on the learning of process.  The time spent in your team groups has been the learning laboratory for process.

The structure of this reflective learning essay is based on David Kolb’s theory of adult learning, which states that a complete learning experience emerges from a four-stage cycle.  The first stage is the experience itself, in this case, the work you completed during your internship.  The second stage of learning occurs when you reflect on the experiences, or process them, and begin to record the observations you made about the experience.  The Kolb model pushes the learning even further into two more stages.  In the third stage of Kolb’s model, we generalize our learning by formulating “principles” that can be applied to other situations similar to the ones we have just experienced.  For example, “Strategic selection should include a review of the Human Resource Plan” might be a principle we could extract from an internship.  The final stage is focused on applying the principles to future situations.

With this model in mind, your Experiential-Reflective Essay should follow the outline below.  You may want to review the narrowly focused reflective essays you wrote as the course unfolded before outlining part one of the essay.

Introduction:  A brief introduction that previews the content of your paper.

Part One:  A recounting of the highlights/lowlights or critical incidents during the MGT476 semester.  Select three to five junctures of the course that you feel were most helpful to your learning about teams.  Briefly describe each as they happened and your reactions “in the moment.”  In other words, report on them as a journalist would but add your “gut reactions.” This section should be written in the past tense.

Part Two:  This section should be written in the present tense.  It should include the reflections and reactions you had to the critical events in the internship right after they happened or now that some time has passed.  You should be asking yourself if they feel different to you looking at them “in the rear view mirror” as opposed to in the moment

Part Three:  This section should be written in the present tense and should be the most substantive in terms of the learning you are taking away from the internship.  It should also include specific linkages to theory and concepts you learned in the classroom.  For example, you might include a reference to Dyer and Dyer, MBTI, FIRO-B Conflict Dynamics or other models we explored in class.  Finally, it should demonstrate how you have connected “theory to practice” with regard to working on teams.

Part Four:  This section focuses on the future, although you can write it in the present tense.  It should outline how you anticipate using the learning you gained during the course in the future.  This might include future jobs, graduate school, or any other setting where you feel the learning applies.

Summary and conclusion:  This final section should weave all four parts together into one whole, integrated unit.