“By acquiring much worldly knowledge you could develop arrogance; with spiritual study there is greater and greater Humility”
“Unless I develop Self-respect, I will remain under someone else’s foot”
“If I am impatient to experience the results of my efforts, it is like trying to eat unripe fruit”
“There will always be the opportunity to learn for those who desire it”
“The Harmony that exists within the minds of individuals will be reflected in harmonious society”
INDIAN WISDOM
What does it mean “Working in groups?” First of all, it means to have right information about the participants and be ready to communicate with them effectively. It is important to know who may be a role-model in a group.
The first task of the leader, a teacher in our situation, is to know everything about the group from the position of the content and possibilities, mental, communicative, psychological and personal, of course. To know the participants is the first task. A teacher starts with the theme of the so called “role-models”. All participants of communication possess information about role-models and use it in communication.
A school’s, colleges and University’s vision and teaching philosophies are carried out and translated into our teachers’ development plans. Teachers and students should be made aware of the connection between international communication and leadership, as personal achievement and common benefit. That is why it is so important to know about working in groups as much as possible. That is why we have analyzed the results of our pedagogical experiment on the Topic where we suggested that all the students should take part in activity we called “Understanding more about me.” So, participants must (not less!) be able to recognize objectives:
- Be able to explain the different types of attitude to people and know which they prefer;
- Describe their attitude towards life, living values, personal responsibility in a society, intercultural communication;
- Define extrovert and introvert and understand which type of personality applies to them and their attention to communication and leadership as two combined definitions.
Different forms of group ‘activity, oriented to such approach offer each participant of group’ activity chance to explore his/her personality traits and attitude to friendly practice in class. It shows that participants are always enthusiastic and quite anxious to understand “More About Me” [1, p.23].
Preparatory work with students helps teachers to open the students’ Whole-Brain thinking learning styles. There are many ways to discover it, but let us remember the most effective ones. Interfaith Council on Ethics Education helps us to use Global network of pedagogical and psychological methods of work with students of all ages. Doing like this we searching for Mentoring Model, so useful for activating group work of any kind. It is known that participants discuss their ideas, initiatives, goals and fears in life with their role-models. The participants transform in his/her immediate environment with this tool for sharing their experience and encouraging. The intellectual aim of teaching as communication and communication as teaching is reflecting on the experiences of others that serves as inspiration to get better control over of his/her life. Adult role-models support the participants’ learning by demonstrating ethical practices [2, p.58].
A great volume of information contains discussing with participants the concepts of optimism and pessimism, positive thinking and negative thinking. If the first option is “How would you describe your life?, the second one is “Think of your life in your country”. The both options have much in common, that is why there is “List “Do you know yourself?”. It is about positive and negative thoughts and feelings, that being put in positive or negative columns can describe positive or negative look of the students at the multinational group, team of communication, personal position and role of all participants as leaders, communicants and peacemakers. Sometimes participants, taking a few negative comments in a group work get a new knowledge about the subject and object and turn them into positive comments.
As far as teachers are concerned, they may use “Indicative independence test-research agenda for the students” for teaching them positive comments, denoting knowledge and skills. In practice it is a great amount of vocabulary as terms of any kind, idioms, professional terminology, poetic ones, dialogue and monologue’ schemes for a real practice of communication, models of special grammatical schemes and instructions for different spheres of communication, writing skills, listening skills and so on.
Scientific approach to learning as a whole takes into account Monitoring progress of school, colleges and University students, using rational and effective methods of explanation material, demonstrating traditional and modern skills of penetrating throw material of different levels of complication. Concerning a groupwork is getting the final positive effective result as “Working together to transform myself and the World”. It seeks to motivate young people to work together to bring about social transformation. For Teachers’ united practice it may be called Learning Log. International Teachers’ Association has been working on the program for many years, demonstrating good results, proving the slogan “Our common work in a team is a prolonged workshop Dialogue of professionals and friends” [3, p.17].
Discussing intercultural communication in the world without wars the students answered the questions:
- What does respect mean to you?
- Write down moments when you have shown respect to others in your school, college, University, family or community.
- Also think about moments when you have shown disrespect to others.
- Write in your Learning Log about moments when you have experienced others disrespecting you.
- Write down in your Learning Log two commitments you are willing to make to be more respectful to others.
- Write down one thing you can do now to have solved a situation around you that is harming mutual understanding.
- Write down in your Learning Log a change you need to make in your life in order to be more empathetic.
In order to solve such difficult problem of peaceful and productive communication UNESCO suggested Methods of Assessing Participants’(Students) Learning as five evaluation models designed to help students of all levels, teachers themselves and even parents (!) to look within and reflect on how they have changed during the Peace – Education.
Programs. Giving advantage of practice, includes scientific, not less, points, useful in group practice on all themes learned and trained. There are some of main advice - demands from its’ content. Look at your and their relationship with others and how these have been challenged and changed by the interaction with others; Reflect on who they are and who they want to be; Look at themselves and their relation and interaction with the world. A final task of this work in command (team) students and teachers is called “The Truth is within You and Those Reliable Ones”. In our real practice actions looked like:
- Write down 10 the most important words describing teal true right communication;
- Write down 10 or 5 the most important words describing international Communication;
- Write down 10 the most important words describing Youth Leadership in particularity and as a whole;
- Write down 10 most important words describing Living Values;
- Write down 10 most important words describing Human Personality as and a Leader.
This preparatory work was assigned for definition of necessary actions to be made for getting advantage in group work. The students had to compare all the words chosen to each point and realize the core of the Youth Leadership. The work appeared to be very effective and interesting. In a final work on results, the students described the point as: “Our common work in a team, in a group was a prolonged workshop dialogue of future professionals and friends, every day creating new skills as Educating for a sustainable world”.
The main positions must be taking into account and described by a teacher in a detail in order to explain not only meaning of the communication aim, but the importance of detailed approach to each word and sentence for understanding each other as a key to understanding the personal development. They are:
- Respect the communication of feelings;
- Be tolerant when others discharge emotions;
- Reward behavior you want;
- Disengage from power struggles;
- Don’t retaliate;
- Avoid nagging and criticism [4, p.100].
Psychology and high professionalism those teaching form optimistic, innovative, effective, psychologically right process as a core of guaranteed effective a leaders’ activity in a society of leaders.
