Experience: Recreation Programming and Leadership
Essential Skills Learned: Work in a team structure; plan, organize, and prioritize work; make decisions and solve problems; obtain and process information; communicate verbally to all levels of audiences; create and/or edit reports; and demonstrate technical knowledge.
Application for Future Goals: Although I am no longer pursuing Recreational Therapy, the skills learned in the program continue to generate opportunities for my career. I have been able to gain strong personal connections through the interpersonal skills learned in the course, and have been able to better communicate my research to others. Without the leadership skills learned through my amazing mentors, I would not have been able to effectively work in my lab group and delegate needed tasks for my research to get done. It has improved my presentations of research to better explain why research is so important, and allowed for many students to come to me to ask how to get involved and start their own journey in research.
Reflection: Personal accountability was taught through this course by having students actively plan and implement activities to a public audience, for which each student held essential tasks. One activity we planned implemented and were held accountable for was the Monarch Triathlon, in which we all designed advertisements for the event, contacted staff faculty and community on the event, cleared and checked pathways for the event for safety hazards (i.e. picking up broken glass by the tennis courts, painting on large bumps in the sidewalk to prevent people tripping, making sure people with disabilities of all kinds are able to participate, etc.). During the event we each had self-assigned stations in which we were responsible for vital tasks (i.e. making sure police were accessible in the instance of an emergency, guiding participants along the pathway, monitoring people with conditions such as hyperglycemia, etc.). At the end of the event we completed surveys to see what could have been better and how we felt our groups did (individually assessing each peer).
For leadership skills and abilities learned every student was assigned a group of preschool students at St. Patricks School for a Field Day. Activities were led with thought out intentions of teaching skills, such as non-verbal communication or conflict resolution or problem solving. Each activity was written and discussed. Each student had problems with a student at one point, whether it was a loss of interest in a group activity, hitting, crying, or any other typical preschool emotion commonly expressed.Each group consisted of three to four people, who had to take turns delegating tasks and managing the group as a team. We had to effectively and quickly work together to accomplish common goals and we had to implement all activities taught in the class.
Below is the program created on our own, with a full design and implementation plan.
PROJECTPLAN.NoStringsOnMe.docx