And your co-leader for the Fall is...

After a semester of suspense, we found out who our co-leader and when we are teaching our recitation session for next Fall this week.  My co-leader is Sebastian. Woot!  I had my suspicions that Sebastian and I would be paired together after looking at our MBTI results.  We are complete opposites.  I am an ESFP and he is an INTJ.  Hopefully this means that we will be able to bring the best parts of everything to the table for our students in the Fall.

Sunday was our peer mentor reception.  I am so happy the weather was beautiful!  Allie was nice enough to have us over to her place for hamburgers and hotdogs fresh off the grill. Yummy!  It was nice to just be in a more relaxing setting to bond even more.  Two groups had to do their icebreakers still since our last retreat was cut short due to the incoming snow.  During Haley’s ice breaker, which was 2 truths and a lie, Brad decided let the whole group know that he and Katie are dating (Awwww).  What an interesting way to do it I’ll give you that much. J  We also talked about the Hixson retreat in the Fall.  I hope that it will be an amazing time for everyone and with our group of peer mentors I don’t see how it couldn’t be.

Hope everyone’s dead week goes well and good luck on your finals next week.

Learning session & some traits

Last week Tanner and I taught our learning session.  It was mostly a review chapter which made it a little difficult to come up with what we should do for our activity.  Overall though I don’t think we did too bad at all.

Chelsee had us read an article entitled “Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership.”  I thought it was a very interesting article and it reminded me of some of the things I have covered in my psychology courses.

At the end of class Chelsee suggested that we pick two of the social intelligence traits that the article mentioned that we think we excel in and one that we may be lagging in.  The list of traits we had to pick from were empathy, attunement, organizational awareness, influence, developing others, inspiration, and teamwork.  I think I excel in empathy and attunement the most out of these traits.  Empathy is when you can understand how someone else feels about a situation or their motives behind their actions.  Attunement is being able to pick up on someone else’s moods and being able to appropriately respond to them.  In my opinion though, these two traits go hand in hand a majority of the time.  It’s difficult to be empathetic towards someone without being attuned to their mood.

The trait I feel I lag the most in would have to be influence.  It may just be me, but I think I can be seen more of a friend or ally rather than someone who has some type of authority.  Influence can also be hard to judge.  Someone may not show you or tell you how you have influenced them.  Not knowing if I have influenced someone makes me a little leery of this trait. I think once next semester begins I will really know for sure if I am lagging in this trait pretty quickly.

Hope everyone had a safe Veishea weekend!

Ethics and Strategies for Good Practice

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve had a blog post.  Last class period and Sunday were work days for our digital story telling project.  It seems to be going good so far.  We just need to finish the last little bit of filming soon.  I am excited to see it when we are all done.

This week Haley and Cole taught the class about Ethics and Strategies for Good Practice.  They posed some different situations that have to handle delicately as a peer mentor and had each group discuss how you would use different ethical principles.  They did a wonderful job of walking around to the groups to see if there were any questions and to see what was being discussed.  The suggested to blog about which five learning principles we thought were the most important and why.  I think that maintaining privacy and confidentiality as long as it protects the person being helped.  If you are going around talking about people’s private lives, you look like a gossip and they have the perfect reason to not trust you.  Showing respect and dignity is another important principle; if you don’t show it then you don’t deserve it.  Working appropriately with someone you feel aversion to is essential in a class period.  You are unable to escape them for the whole semester and not working with them can create friction in the classroom that everyone can feel.  A principle that I think is important, but will be challenging for me, is knowing and managing your emotional responses when helping another.  I am a very emotional person at times, but adding your own emotions to a situation that is already emotionally charged accomplishes nothing.  The fifth principle that I think is important is remembering that you are a role model.  The “Do as I say. Not as I do.” Approach does not work and I’m sure we all know that.

Next week Tanner and I are teaching the final learning session so I hope you are all excited.