What makes a leader: Leading groups effectively

Another busy week, but a week closer to warm weather! Whooo!

This week Brady and Josh lead the learning session about leading groups effectively.  They had a very cleaver (and maybe a little odd) question about your talent in the Miss America pageant.  They did a very good job referring to the book and incorporating that information into the lesson this week.  One thing they did that I thought was very helpful was having us write down some qualities needed to be an effective leader.  Although my list wasn’t very long, I think that you could make a list that would go on forever.

At the end of our chapter this week it talked about problem personalities.  I thought this was a very important part of the chapter, because we are likely to run into a few people with these types of personalities in the fall.  So, we have to learn how to deal with them effectively.  First there are monopolizers who will dominate the group verbally and draw attention to themselves.  This type of personality can lead some members of the group to withdrawal and not participate.  The next type of personality was manipulators.  People with this type of personality will do almost anything to ensure protection for themselves and to have a sense of control.  The third type of personality is distractors.  In my mind these are your typical class clown trying whatever they can to get off topic.  Then there are aggressors who create disturbances in groups.  The final type of personalities the book mentions is harmonizers.  They try to prevent conflict at all costs which is bad when it is a topic that needs to be discussed.  Knowing how to deal with each of these personalities will be a useful skill in the fall.

This week was also a peer mentor retreat.  Woot! Woot!  I hope everyone had a good time and didn’t leave too depressed after hearing how much debt we are likely to be in when we graduate.  Even though we hate to hear it at least we are aware which is better than a lot of college students.  Hope everyone stays safe this week.  See you Wednesday!

ISCORE!

I was able to attend two sessions at the Iowa State Conference on Race and Ethnicity on Friday.  The first session I attended was Nine Digits of Freedom: Analyzing Inherent Privileges that Come from Being a U.S. Citizen.  One of the main topics the student panel discussed during this session was the view of Latinos in this country.  They discussed how many people in the U.S. believe that illegal aliens are Latinos who don’t want to work or pay taxes.  This is all untrue.  The majority of illegal aliens currently in this country are not Latino.    Another large topic was the Arizona SB1070 law and how it seems a lot like racial profiling.

The next session that I went to was Dumb Things We Need to Stop Saying and Other Practical Steps to Increase our Effectiveness around Diversity.  Luiza Dreasher discussed four different concepts that can help you to stop saying things that may offend people without you even realizing it. The first concept was Intent vs. Impact.  This is a concept that has been a reoccurring theme at the last few conferences.  Concept two was the Pile on Principle which is when one thing upon another weighs on the person.  One thing you can do to help that person is to demonstrate empathy towards them.  The third principle was to recognize our privilege.  It is important that we recognize that our privileges give us a head start, but the most important thing is what you do with that privilege.  The fourth and final principle Luiza discussed was Raising the B.A.R.  B stands for breathing.  Taking a break to breath not only relaxes you, but it also buys you time to choose a better way to respond in a situation.  For example try to talk while taking a deep breath… you can’t do it.  A is for Acknowledge.  You should acknowledge the other persons points by asking and clarifying what they are saying.  Last, R stands for responding.  This is different than reacting because you need to think before you respond.

I enjoyed ISCORE and I wish the best for Kat and Sebastian at NSCORE this Summer.

Understanding Group Process

              This week Kat and Tyler taught the learning lesson about understanding group process.  I’m not going to lie after reading the chapter for this week I was a little nervous for the activities that they would have us do would be ones like having to cross one arm over the other, grabbing other people’s hands, and trying to untangle ourselves without letting go.  Not that these activities are not fun, but they are just ones that are well known and to be honest I find them difficult to do.  Instead I was pleasantly surprised by the activity they had us do.  It was one that I had never done before which made it exciting.  I thought the guys did a good job maintaining their composure and continuing on with class even though we were rambunctious this week.

                My favorite part of the day was probably the question of the day that Kat and Tyler posed.  It was very creative and fun.  The answers that we came up with were anything from practical to downright silly.  It’s good to have something just for fun every once in a while.

                I enjoyed the discussion about different groups that either worked well or did not and why.  We’ve all had experiences with both types of groups and it helps to be aware of the different ways that can cause a group to be unsuccessful.  Two things that came up were communication within the group and getting individuals to take responsibility for their responsibilities.

              In the chapter it gives a list of ten things that define people as a group.  I thought it was fun to think about how each of these ten things related to our peer mentor group.  After doing this I would have to agree with what Kat said in class; we are going to make an excellent peer mentor group for our students in the fall.

Problem Solving with Individuals and Social media week

Well, another week has come and gone.  Time does seem to fly by faster these days.  This week is another exciting one for all of us in UST311 because it is social media week!  Wooo!  I’m doing more tweeting on a regular basis than I usually do, so hooray for that.  Hopefully everyone will enjoy the remaining couple of days.

                The lesson this week was taught by Sebastian and Brad.  I thought you guys did a great job making sure that the directions were clear and that the class knew what was expected of them.  I also liked the fact that you took turns when explaining the activities so that you each explained one.  It showed me that you both were interested, but not stepping on each other’s toes.  Although, that could have been an entertaining and inventive way of visually demonstrating how students could implement problem solving.  Just a wild thought.  Seriously though you guys did a very good job.

                One thing that really stuck out to me in the chapter this week was the strategies for problem solving section.  To be more specific the goal setting section is what caught my attention because it reminded me of our SMART goals.  Like SMART goals the book states that goals should be attainable, clear and explicit (in other words specific), and that they need to be measurable.  There were a few things that the book says about goals that are either not specified when I’ve talked about SMART goals in the past or that were just plain never said.  The first thing was that goals should be relevant to the person.  I feel like this was not clearly stated when I’ve done SMART goal setting in the past, because it is assumed that the goals you are making mean something to you. 

Something that the book brought up that I had never heard of before was that goals should be stated positively.  I think this is a very import thing to keep your moral up when you are working towards a long term or especially challenging goal.  The first activity that Brad and Sebastian did during their lesson had to do with stating goals positively and I think that was a very good choice.

Well I think that’s all for today so I’ll end with a quote from the goal setting part of our chapter.  “If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know if you’ve arrived!”

More interpersonal on communication

I think I will be making a tradition of complimenting every group that does their learning session during the week.  So, here it goes.  Katie and Coreen I think you guys did a wonderful job of making sure that everyone in the class was involved.  I also enjoyed your scenarios, because they definitely helped us realize that most situations call for a combination of interpersonal communication skills and advise giving skills.

 

On to the next topic. The next activity we did in class was to pick an individual we admire and write a list of traits that describe them.  When we compiled all of our answers together, we had a very comprehensive list of about 36 items.  There are so many more that we could add to this list with just a little more brain storming and a little more time.

 

Allie wanted us to focus on the characteristics of a helping relationship in our blog posts.  There are ten characteristics of a helping relationship that the book mentions.  I thought that some of the key ones are that a helping relationship is meaningful, that it has a clear structure, it demonstrates respect for individual self-worth, and finally that a helping relationship is designed to produce change.  Each of these is important in its own way.

 

I hope everyone had a great time at the retreat today.  I know I did!

From cultural profeciency to interpersonal communication

This week Easten taught his learning session over cultural proficiency, so I thought I would comment on what I thought was good about his session.  I thought he did a wonderful job keeping his energy up and keeping everyone enthused during the class period (I’m sure we’ve all had those classes that just drag on because there is no energy in the room).  The “All My Neighbor’s” activity that he did with us was very fun and a clever way to help us realize the some of the many similarities and differences that exist within our small group of peer mentors.  I thought that the activity was a great way to facilitate talking about differences that arise within groups.  Finally, the worksheet that we worked on in class was a helpful way to identify the things that shape our own personal culture that others may not necessarily share.  To sum this up, I thought Easten’s learning session was a great example of what we should be doing and he set the bar pretty high.

The other thing I thought I would discuss this week was the chapter in the book.  This chapter covered interpersonal communication skills.  The first important thing I took away from the chapter was that, as a peer mentor, it is vital that you do not just “give advice” to our students.  Giving advice does not allow the student to learn from their problems by themselves. 

The chapter goes on to discuss a model the book uses to help train people in the skills of interpersonal relationships and creating the helping interaction.  This model consists of five steps: skills of preparedness, skills of attending, skills of understanding, skills of responding, and skills of resolution.  Since the first skill set was covered in chapter four, this chapter only goes into the middle three skill sets.  The final set will be covered in the chapter we read next week.  Of the ones that were covered I found the skills of responding to be the most interesting.  They focus on how you can ensure that you are not just giving advice to your students.  These skills will become very handy next fall if/when any of the new students come to me for help. 

Mid-year institute and ISLE

Over the last few days we have had a couple of different opportunities to learn about different aspects of leadership and how we can apply them in as peer mentors and in our own lives as well.  Friday during the Iowa State Mid-year Institute I was able to attend the highlighting your peer mentoring on resumes and in interviews by Roger Bently.  Not only was this session pretty informative, it was partially interactive too.  We had the chance to talk to some of the other learning community members in the room using some action verbs that were provided.  I think the most important thing I got out of that session was S.T.A.R. which stands for Situation, Tasks, Actions, and Results together these make a framework that can be used to answer interview questions.

The second session I went to on Friday was Community Building in Your Learning Community by Andrea Ramos and Kari Teitjen.  There were a couple of things that really stuck out to me in this session.  One of these was the number of trainings that the WISE peer mentors take some of which may benefit us as Hixson peer mentors.  The second thing was Intent vs. Impact in communication.  Intent is what we mean to say where as Impact is what someone else gets out of what you are saying.  Sometimes these two things are not the same thing.  An example would be when people use the word “gay” when they really mean dumb, unfair, etc.  These are things that many of us do without even realizing it or how it could affect someone else and until you make the conscious decision to stop using such words.

Saturday was ISLE at the MU.  The beginning key note speaker Dr. Darin Eich was very interesting to listen to and his energy made me excited about the day.  The first session I attended was Maximizing Leadership Potential and although it didn’t sound like I would be interested in the topic I found it very useful.  We were given several chances to go through our elevator speech which is something I’ve never worked on before.

After a delicious lunch of free subway, I went to “Say Whaaaa??”  (Which if you were near me you probably heard me say the title reminded me of the minions from Despicable Me because I love them.)  This session reminded me a lot of the second session I attended on Friday and in fact it was actually taught by one of the ladies who taught the Friday session.  This one was more focused on the Intent vs. Impact. We did an exercise in which we looked at a list of phrases/words that can be offensive to groups of people.

The final session of the day I attended was about emotional intelligence.  This is a topic that I feel very familiar with yet I felt that it was still important to go and refresh my memory.  One thing I learned was that you should try to turn a complement into a request when you are working with others to try and minimize potential conflicts.

I had a great time in all of the sessions, but I think my favorite part of the day was winning a subway gift card.  I mean who doesn’t like winning things. J