leadership

We have just completed our unit on Power and Leadership, and now I will reflect on:

• How what learnt connected with what I already knew.
• What extended my knowledge?
• What challenged me?

HOW DID MY NEW KNOWLEDGE CONNECT WITH ME?

Throughout the unit, as I was learning about power and leadership, I felt that what I was doing connected to me in some way. For example, I already knew that power and leadership were somewhat dependent on one another, as a good leader can use his power well and a bad leader can use his power badly, so when we began discussing traits of a leader, I had some background knowledge on what to expect from a good or bad leader. When it came to presenting information, I felt that the way that the information was meant to be displayed was familiar to me, as I knew how to create artistic ways of presenting new knowledge. Also, when I started to analyze Osama Bin Laden, I felt that, even though I was analyzing a distorted version of my religion, it still made the unit have a more personal affect on me.

WHAT EXTENDED MY KNOWLEDGE?

When I began the unit, I thought I had a deep understanding of Power and Leadership. However, I was soon proved wrong as I realized that power can be taken in many ways based on people’s objectives. When I was analyzing the movies Captain Phillips and The Power of One, I discovered that power can be used in other ways rather than wealth or strength, such as knowledge or language. I also figured out that power can be used badly due to past experiences, and that is what I analyzed in my essay, along with people’s objectives. Lastly, I found it as a good way to exercise my writing abilities, and go further toward analytical writing rather than creative writing.

WHAT CHALLENGED ME?

Many things challenged me through the course of the unit. Before I began writing my essay, I had to develop a new way of analyzing sources to help create a viable thesis statement. This involved gathering a broad range of ideas, gathering the similarities between them, and then using them as evidence to help support my thesis statement. Up to writing my essay, I used to believe that more ideas resulted in more quality in the essay. However, after submitting my draft, I realized that too many ideas can make the essay lack focus, and so I needed to find a way to support my thesis statement using less ideas and more focus. I also used to believe that more words resulted in more quality as well, but then I realized that, in order to build focus, I needed to get my ideas through in as little words as possible.

Overall, I found the tasks that we took part in very engaging, and I think that they greatly enhanced my view on power and leadership.

P.S. The title is Latin for “the job is complete”.

  Over the past few weeks, we have been working on our Power and Leadership unit in Language Arts class. We worked on projects demonstrating a certain aspect of power, and now we are working on an essay to confirm our knowledge of power, leadership or both. My thesis statement for the essay is “the way people use their power, either for the good or bad, depends on their individual needs and goals.” I came to this thesis statement after compiling my notes and analyzing any similarities between the literature I read and the movies I watched. I saw that each character in the sources I was analyzing had a specific objective that influenced the way he used his power. After witnessing this, I became interested in the topic, and created my thesis statement. I have started work on my draft, and am going to use the sources I read and watched as evidence to support my thesis statement. I will patch in once more when the job is done.

Last Friday, my classmates and I presented our projects on power and leadership. My infographic received applaud, and many people learnt from it. However, in this post, I wish to talk about what I learnt from other people’s presentations. One of my classmates, Camille, did a very intriguing presentation on the power of groups. I learnt about how the individual affects the group, but also how the group affects the individual, and how power in groups isn’t always a good thing. Joey’s presentation on how power causes corruption taught me that power can define a person if the person cannot control it him/herself. In Mert’s blog post on edublogs, which you can read at http://mertgirginer.edublogs.org/2015/10/07/power-leadership/ , he talked about Osama Bin Laden in a different lens from how I saw him. He talks about how he was very kind and generous but became corrupted, and also described many events in his life that could have contributed toward Osama’s outlook. Jay’s Prezi that he put together, which was a “fun” power point, talked about many revolutions that occurred in China, and how the people involved displayed power and leadership. From Margot’s visually appealing sketch note, I learnt about the characters in the books she was reading and the movie she watched, and how the three all displayed aspects of power and leadership. Bruce’s interactive presentation, which he carried out using paper interpretations of characters from the book “Animal Farm”, talked about the pig in the book, Napoleon, and how he, when he came to power, became greedy. I learnt that power can be twisted into different positions, and that one must be able to control their power before they can use it. Jan displayed creativity through her “experiment” that she did on us. Each of us got a card with a color on it. People who had the same color sat in one group and so on. Everyone got lollipops, but then had to share them with others. The end result was that one person had an exceeding amount of lollipops than the rest. From her presentation, I learnt that power isn’t always fair, and that the person in charge can do things that suit him rather than the majority. Lastly, Taewoong’s presentation compared and contrasted the books “The Wave” and “Che Guevara”, and also the movie Gladiator. He analyzed the characters from each source to see how they showed power and leadership.

Overall, it was a fun project. I had interest in me throughout, and I am glad I learnt so much from others, and I hope they learnt as much from mine.