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.

Resoures to be familiar with

Hopefully everyone had a great break and didn’t have to much trouble getting back into the swing of school.  I know that I had a busy week last week with it being last week to drop, so I was glad when Friday came around.

This week’s learning session was taught by Megan and Jessica.  It was all about campus resources and how you can refer these resources to your students.  Let’s start off with the Hixson intro which was “If you could be famous for one thing, what would it be?”  This was clever and very different.

Having the class brainstorm all of the resources we either know of or have used was a good way of getting everyone involved.  It brought up some resources that some of us hadn’t used or may have never heard of like McFarland Clinic First Nurse.

I think the whole class can agree that the best part about your learning session was the Jeopardy game even though we didn’t make it all the way through the game.  It was very obvious that you put a lot of work into the slides and it was a fun yet informative activity.  For instance, a large portion of us had no idea about the biofeedback program at the student services center.

Overall, I think that the two of you did a great job.

The handout that Chelsee gave us at the end of class looks like it will be a good resource for us as peer mentors to help us suggest resources to our students in the fall.

Finally, I want to comment on the little flyer that Debra gave us about our MBTI.  I thought that most of the nouns on mine seemed pretty darn accurate of my personality.  Some of them are even words that were on mine I have even used to describe myself before we even covered MBTI.

Not what I expected- Diversity event

This past Wednesday I attended a lecture entitled Extra-Ordinary Experiences and the Emergence of New Visionary Movements-Mormonism and the Golden Plates by Ann Taves for a diversity event.  I thought that this would be an interesting talk for a couple different reasons.  The first was that I had a Mormon friend in high school and the second was that I like to learn about different religions. 

So, around 7:30 I headed to the MU without thinking since all the other talks I have attended have been there.  Soon I realized that this was wrong and after a few confused minutes I quickly headed to the Sceman Building.  Apparently I need to learn to read a bit better. OOPS!

Unfortunately, I was disappointed in this lecture.  I guess I went into the lecture thinking that there would be some explanation of the core beliefs of Mormonism and the significance of the Golden Plates.  Instead, the main topic had more to do with whether or not the Golden Plates actually existed or if they were a delusion.  Dr. Taves went into some philosophical reasoning which I find really hard to follow.  In addition to it being hard for me to follow, it was a very dry talk in general.  It was clear that Dr. Taves knew what she was talking about, but I think she had a harder time connecting with the audience.  I found myself watching the American Sign Language interpreters most of the times while still listening to Dr. Taves speak.

 This has been the first talk that I can honestly say that I did not enjoy at all.  Yet, I still am walking away with something and that is the motivation to take some time an research Mormonism on my own to satisfy my curiosity.  I think it is important to at least be familiar with different religions and that is what I try to do.  I find that learning about other religions allows me to examine my beliefs and to decide how happy I am with them.

"Harlem" shake & Strategies for academic success

This week was a little different.  We spent the first half of the class discussing the “new” Harlem shake dance.  It is true that when most people are viewing these videos on the internet they do not think to look up the history behind it.  Most of the time people are just viewing them to laugh at the newest internet fad.  It turns out that there is a long history behind the Harlem shake, but not the one that these newest videos are depicting.  The real Harlem shake originated in Harlem around the time of the Harlem renaissance and is described as moving just your upper body with rhythm by some Harlem residence.  After hearing the history of the real Harlem shake, it is understandable why the residences of Harlem are offended by the “new” Harlem shake.  To Harlem residences this “new” shake is making fun of not only the old Harlem shake but their culture as well.  I think it was really important for us to talk about the history of the Harlem shake before we include it in our digital storytelling, but it was also important to just hear about it in general.

The second half of class consisted of Shelby and Steph taught their learning lesson over strategies for academic success.  I thought they did a good job of switching back and forth and giving clear directions to the class.  I liked that they used their resources and had the class take a short quiz to find out their learning style.  One thing that the girls did was to leave the class with the following question: how can you apply knowing your learning style and the strategies associated with it to improve your academic success?  The best answer I can come up with right now is that just being aware of your learning style so that while you are in class, taking notes, and/or studying that you employ some of those strategies.

Well that's about all I can think of to say about class this week so I hope everyone has a great Spring break!

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!