The following is a report of a qualitative inquiry regarding a team of novices and their journey in developing shared expertise and social creativity in the domain of group facilitation and process consultation. Using the format of public reflection, the participants engaged in an intensive collaborative process of meaning making, along with the university instructor as expert, while being teaching assistants in a course about group dynamics. Using the framework of evolving systems, the methodology employed an instrumental case study approach, with the case defined as the group. Data sets included videotaped debriefing and planning sessions, individual and group interviews, and written reflection diaries, covering the entire lifespan of the team. These sets were transcribed and subjected to an examination of the unfolding cognitive and metacognitive, creative, value, and social processes embedded within the team interactions. The process patterns do demonstrate that under the conditions created within this context, novices can pool together expert thinking skills that can collectively compare favorably to those of an expert. Social creativity also emerged as a property of the system, and these processes seemed to piggyback onto the socially shared expert thinking skills. Values acted as tacit rules governing and shaping the social interactions. Ones that showed a strong association to the development of shared expertise were: supportiveness, care, listening/questioning for clarity, helpfulness, openness to disagreement/feedback, and plurality. Values that showed a strong association to the development of social creativity were: supportiveness, listening/questioning for clarity, helpfulness, and openness to disagreement/feedback. Humor was an ever present element to the system and acted as a lubricant producing social ease. The patterns that emanated from this inquiry were placed into two larger theoretical frameworks, socially shared cogni
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85200 |
| Date | January 2004 |
| Creators | Reilly, Rosemary |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Educational and Counselling Psychology.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002209047, proquestno: AAINR12935, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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