Senior Project Reflection

1. What I am most proud of about my senior project is that I now have much information and better idea of what I will be getting myself into once I start my career as a psychologist.

2a. I personally think I deserve a CR, because after looking at my presentation after I was done I saw that I could have had more sources throughout my presentation and talked more about the research that I have done. I also should have talked more for each of my answers.

2b. On my overall senior project I would give myself at least a P, because I completed and turned in all the interviews, blogs, research counts, etc. on time so I have nothing missing even though a lot of times I had to force more time into my day because I was so busy to be able to complete everything that was required.

3. What worked for me in my senior project were my independent components, which were Peer Mediation. This worked for me because it was almost directly related to how a psychologist has to be with their patients, and I really like that I was able to do this because it was during school so I  didn't have to cram more work outside of school into my already busy schedule.

4. I don't think the Towers really helped much, if at all, because we already had our articles/research in our WB so we could always refer back to that if we needed to, and honestly, I think it was a waste of paper/ink.

5. Like I said, I now have much more information about what type of work a psychologist does, and thanks to my 3rd and 4th interview, Mrs. Tocco, she gave me an insight to the type of work I'll be doing once I become a psychologist based on her experiences and from what she has told me.

Revised 2 Hr Presentation

Revised 2 hr Lesson Plan

2-Hr Presentation

2 Hr Lesson Plan

Service Learning

Log of Hours

       Throughout service learning, I worked along side with Jo with Mrs. Ortega as our supervisor, and in the beginning of service learning our focus was to create lesson plans and presentations so that we can go present them to Golden Springs Elementary School. The first lesson we created was on bullying (I couldn't pout the power point on here, so if you want to see it just tell me and I'll show you); we chose this as a topic to present to the students because not only were they having trouble with this issue at the time, but because it also ties in with psychology. Bullying is something that is common for a psychologist to be approached for among children, as well as teenagers, and for a psychologist to be successful then they need to be able to know how to approach these cases. In the Bullying presentation we let the students tell us what they though was considered as bullying, then we gave them examples of what is considered bullying, we showed them the differences in bullying between boys and girls, and we gave them suggestions on what to do if they were being bullied. We also handed out some bullying pamphlets I created that has links about bullying so if they ever want to learn more.

        As a follow-up lesson we chose to do the lesson on Conflict. For this lesson we didn't have a power point, we explained to them what types of approaches to conflict there were, and we handed them a worksheet with the explanations so they can have them as well and on the back we gave them a sheet where they can see for themselves what they tend to do when confronted with a conflict :

                                       

We also read to them a few scenarios of conflicts and the students say which type of conflict they thought was used. A few examples of some types up scenarios we read:

After we finished presenting to all the fifth grade classes, we put our focus to coming up with a video that showed an introduction to conflict. We came up with the whole script ourselves:   (click here for script) the video is still being edited, but will most likely be put online once it's done.

             The most important thing I gained from my service learning is that, while we were presenting to the students at Golden Springs Elementary, it gave me the opportunity to observe how children in particular react when meeting someone new that is put in place of their teacher. For example, we went in and stated teaching and presenting to them, something which normally their own teacher would do, I got to see how each child reacted to us being their and how their reaction matched their personality. For a psychologist, it's important to see what kind of personality a person has immediately because then they can change their approach to them, and the initial approach to a patient is excruciatingly important because this helps establish a sense of trust and comfort-ability between psychologist and patient. Having a successful initial approach helps bring a more successful recovery for the patient, which in turn implies that the psychologist was successful as well. 

            During a few of the conflict presentations, a couple of the students asked for advice on what is best for them to do to resolve a conflict, and by using the information that I've learned while creating the lesson both me and Jo were able to answer them. 

 

Room Creativity

Activity for Answer 2:
Ink Blot:
For this activity I plan to show pictures of ink blots like those used in psychology sessions, I'll show them on the projector and I'll have the groups come up with what they think the picture is, and based on that they'll come up with which part of the brain came up with that emotion. For example, if someone saw a picture of a monster, monsters are associated with fear, and fear is associated with the Amygdala part of the brain. We'll all talk as a group about what and why they think they saw what they did.

Room:
Because I'm going to talk about the brain, I'll have pictures of brains and the specific parts that I'll talk about around the room. Other than that I'm going to 'Try' to make the room as calm looking as possible because it's very important to have a calm environment while in therapy.