For the Leadership and Social Change minor, I had to take various classes. Many of which will help me greatly in jobs and help me in my own personal life.
Class 4: Elements of Team Leadership
I took the course Elements of Team Leadership in the spring of 2020. “The focus of this course is to enable students to develop effectiveness in leading, delegating, and communicating within a team environment. An emphasis will be placed on emotional intelligence in teams, team management, and effective team processes.” (HokieSPA) This class was at first an in-person class until the pandemic happened. After that, the class was online full-time. Just like this current class and all of Dr. Rateau’s classes, we had leadership blogs where we would do research on a leadership action that is important to us. These blogs allowed us to learn separately on our own. Originally for this class, we were to have a case study on an organization in the area, but due to the pandemic, we were unable to do this.
This course had 5 objectives: 1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding in specific team leadership competencies: team communication, team management, and effectiveness in creating and leading teams. 2. Assess and analyze effectiveness in team management, task accomplishment, and project management. 3. Demonstrate knowledge of comprehensive team dynamic theories. 4. Obtain working knowledge of motivation and motivational techniques relevant to team leadership. 5. Engage ineffective team interactions and communications.
This class prepared me in many ways despite the setback of the pandemic. The blogs gave me the ability to get better at writing and research. These blogs also helped me better understand leadership concepts that were being taught in class. Aside from the blogs, we also had knowledge inventories called RATs or Readiness Assurance Tests. These tests were short quizzes that tested to see if we understood the material being taught inside and outside of classes. This class was the first time I really started to gain a lot more knowledge on being a leader, which has helped me in prepared to get and start jobs.
In terms of the social change model, this class focuses on all three parts of the model, society values, individual values, and group values. Within society values, this class teaches students to serve their communities and how to serve their followers as a leader. Within individual values, we had to commit to this class in order to fully develop ourselves as future leaders. We had to commit to our teams and study for the RATs that way we had a good group grade. This flows into group values as well. We had to be there for our team members and always show up to class. We also had to be civil with one another if we had a conflict.
Artifacts:
Lou's Blog 