Jackson Simpson

Organizational Field Experience Essay

Tuesday, May 7, 2019
1. Overview
a. The organization that I worked for is Smithton Middle School. Their mission is to
effectively prepare students for their futures and to provide them a quality and
successful education.
b. During my experience at Smithton I spent my time helping students that participated
in the after school guided study. The students who came to guided study were
struggling in one or more subjects, so my job was to help and guide them to get a
better understanding of the class material. I primarily helped students struggling in
math because there were many of them and I felt very comfortable explaining the
concepts to them. My contributions help Smithton accomplish their mission because
there is a large number of students that participate in the guided study and there are
only 1-2 teachers so many students do not get the extra help. When I and other
volunteers are at guided study it allows the students to get more one on one help in
the area that they are struggling which then helps them to be more successful in their
classes.
c. One stakeholder would be the students at Smithton Middle School. The students are
affected by every decision that is made and by all of the rules that are enforced by
staff. They are also receiving their education from Smithton so they are essentially the
“customers” of the school. The faculty at Smithton is another type of stakeholder
because working at Smithton is how they provide for themselves and their families.
The faculty can be drastically affected by things such as budget cuts because that
could mean the loss of their job. Another stakeholder is the surrounding community
and residents. They are a major stakeholder because the taxes that they pay fund the
school. If the school is pushing for an increase in their budget that would mean an
increase in taxes that the community pays. The community and surrounding residents
are also interested because a good school system will raise the value of their property
on the housing market which is very beneficial to them if they are trying to sell their
house.

2. Competencies
a. The five competencies we learned are Empathy, Teamwork, Establish Relationships,
Valuing Differences, Managing Conflict
b. I think empathy means being able to relate to how someone else is feeling in a
situation and understanding why they might feel that way. Teamwork means being
able to work with people for a common goal even if you may be working with
someone that is not your favorite. Establishing relationships means creating a positive
relationship with your coworkers and managers where both parties are comfortable
being able to communicate with one another. Valuing differences means that it is
important to have a diverse group of people on a team because it promotes creativity
and that we should value that everyone does not come from the same background.
Managing Conflict means knowing that there are many types of conflict that you will
run into in life and it is important to think about how you will handle and solve the
conflict, in the workplace conflict is bad for the companies efficiency and it is
 important to get it resolved rather than just pushing it to the side and ignoring the
conflict.
c. I developed my empathy competency by working with the students at Smithton.
Many of the students come from lower income families and don’t have a very good
basic education like I had when I went to elementary and middle school. Many
struggled with basic addition and subtraction which was surprising to me. I had to put
my self in their shoes so that I could try to help them understand the math concepts
that I was trying to explain. Since I came from a different educational background, I
had to get a feel for how the students were going through the problems and why they
were taking the steps they did to complete the math equations. I worked on my
teamwork competency because there were three of us volunteering together as a work
team. All of us on the team had certain subjects that we excelled in. I excel in math
while the two other team members were very good at English and science. Since we
all had different emphasis areas, we decided that if a student needed help, we would
ask what subject they were struggling in and the volunteer who excelled in that
subject would help the student. This was very beneficial because it allowed us to help
students in the area that we were the most confident which then allowed for the
students to get the most effective support. We were an effective team because we all
had the common goal of helping the students and we each had different strengths
making us a diverse team. I also worked on my establishing relationships competency
by getting to know the students that I would routinely work with every week. By
talking and getting to know the students I could teach them and work through
problems more personally for each student because I could get a feel for how they
learn and understand concepts.

3. Organizational Field Experience

a. Smithton met my expectations because it was similar to the guided study that we had
at my middle school. Everyone was expected to be sitting and working and using the
time effectively to get the help they needed. I was also expecting students to get
distracted and need help focusing and that was exactly what happened and there were
multiple occurrences where I had to get a few students to stop talking and playing
games on their Ipads.
b. Something during my experience that was different than my expectation was that
many of the students were missing basic concepts that I assumed they would have
already mastered. There were multiple occurrences when I was working through a
math problem with a student and it involved very basic addition and the student
needed to use a calculator because they couldn’t do the addition on their own. It was
somewhat shocking that multiple students in middle school where unable to do
addition without a calculator.
c. I saw professionalism expressed on the first day when me and the other volunteers
went into Smithton and shook the hands of the faculty and they explained what we
would be doing in guided study. I felt I expressed professionalism by email the
faculty member that was in charge of the volunteers when I knew that I wouldn’t be
 able to make it to guided study that day so that they would be aware ahead of time
that I would not be there.
d. I saw unprofessionalism a few times when the other volunteers were texting on their
phones in front of the students. During orientation we were clearly told that if we
needed to use the phone it was acceptable to excuse yourself from the room to do so.
However, we were not supposed to use our cell phones in front of the students. We
also were supposed to roam around the media center when you weren’t helping a
student so that if someone needed help you would already be walking around but
there were multiple times that is saw volunteers sitting down at a table and not
noticing that a student had their hand raised.
e. Overall, I have learned multiple things from this experience. I learned that everyone
learns differently, and it is important to connect with someone to figure out how they
process and solve problems. I also learned how working in a team with different
strengths made the team much more efficient and productive in helping multiple
students at one time. I also learned how people come from many different
backgrounds and educations that are not all the same. People from different schools
can be on completely different educational levels. Also, the quality of an education
can vary a lot from the city and location of the school

4. Resume Section
a. Smithton Middle School Columbia, Missouri

Guided Study Volunteer February 2019- May 2019

• Asist students with subjects they are struggling in

• Keep students focused and on task
• Help students catch up on classwork they missed from absence
• Use the same professional conduct as the faculty would