Browsing by Subject "teamwork"

Personal practical theories (PPTs) of early childhood education and care (ECEC) professionals have not been widely studied. Personal beliefs, values and theoretical knowledge form the PPT that affects the decisions a professional makes in everyday work. Therefore, PPT can be considered as an integral element of professionalism in the ECEC field. Professionals' PPTs are often hidden and if not acknowledged and discussed, mutual understanding among professionals may be difficult to achieve. This qualitative study aims to provide some insight into the beliefs, values and knowledge of ECEC professionals, and describe the commonalities found in the PPTs of professionals. The data in this study was gathered from nine (9) semi-structured interviews in Finland. The respondents equally represented different disciplines that prevail in ECEC: pedagogy, social pedagogy and child nursing. The ‘onion model of levels in reflection’ developed by Fred Korthagen (2017) was utilised as a framework in formulating the interview questions and when interpreting the data with reflexive thematic analysis. The main finding in this thesis was the complexity and paradoxical nature of ECEC work which the professionals described. Similarly, the PPT of ECEC professional could be described as a region with a variety of complex dimensions. There were some common themes to be found in the data, one of them being advocating the best interest of children. Another important finding was the understanding of the cruciality of teamwork in ECEC. Consequently, the various PPTs of ECEC professionals should all be valued equally as this enables striving towards shared goals. Furthermore, discussing about PPTs among team members in genuine dialogue may foster the well-being of employees, and ultimately of children in the group. This study suggests that all ECEC professionals should engage self-reflection in order to recognise their underlying beliefs and values that affect their everyday work. This is a practice which enables professional development and also demonstrates ethical responsibility.

Teamwork as a method is very common among employees. Working together and achieving goals craves a lot of communication and knowledge sharing among colleagues. When working with people, it is fact that there are many different personalities and communication habits. Purpose of this study was to examine how knowledge is created in teamwork. The process of the knowledge creation was examined through communication and knowledge sharing among team members. Purpose of this study was to bring up the problem points in this team and through that develop knowledge sharing and make teamwork more effective. The theoretical framework of this study concentrates to examine Nonaka and Takeuchi's (1995) theory of knowledge creation through knowledge conversion, but phenomenon is examined also through other researchers point of view. Results are viewed through this knowledge conversion model. The data was collected from one company's team in October-November 2015. Team members answered to a questionnaire and wrote down memories about their knowledge sharing. I also interviewed eight team members and observed two team meetings. In this team they are communicating a lot, but still there are problems with the knowledge sharing. Team is split in to two different teams, where only one half gets all the information and also shares it. Part of the team members feels that they cannot openly communicate with other team members and cannot bring up development ideas, which affects to knowledge creation. The results show that there is problem with the knowledge sharing between researcher and some research assistants.