Final meeting for the Spring

This week was our final meeting for the Spring. L We were lucky enough to have some Jimmy Johns during class this week.  Thanks so much for that. 

For the first few minutes of class we each discussed what we were doing this summer and what we were most excited for.  I was surprised how many peer mentors are staying in the Ames area this summer.  It’s a majority of the class.  So far my only plans for the Summer are to work at the gas station I’ve worked at since I was 16 and to watch my little brother play baseball.  He has been playing baseball for the last four years and I think it is so cute to watch.

We spent the majority of our class filling out co-leader agreement forms and writing a mission statement for our group with our co-leader.  I think it is nice to have the time we plan to meet during the fall to do our lesson plans written down somewhere.  Sebastian and I had some pretty similar ideas in our individual mission statements that we used to write our combined one and our goals for the Fall.  Now I am even more excited for the Fall.

Since it is now finals week, good luck on all of your exams everyone.  

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!

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

MBTI Step 2: A better look

Woot MBTI!  I think we can all agree that this was an exciting week for the peer mentors all thanks to our new MBTI results.

I kind of had an idea of what I was not only from last year but also just because of the review before Debra gave us our results packet.  I was indeed an ESFP, but this step two of the MBTI goes more in depth so now I guess I am a Conceptual, Original, and Planful ESFP.  I have been carefully reviewing my results to help understand how they arrived at this conclusion.  Even now, as I write this post, I keep finding little things in the report that set off little bells in my head and make me go “That is just like me!”

Since I could easily fill a page or two explaining each facet of each letter, I will just go over one or two from each, the things that were out of range for the items, and anything else that sparked my interest.

Extraversion

Extraversion was one of my strongest traits overall.  The thing that interested me the most about it was not what parts were considered in preference for me, but the one thing that was in the middle the gregarious-intimate scale.  I was reading the characteristics that they list for someone who is in the middle and two in particular stood out to me: like large-group activities or one-on-one conversations at different times and appear outgoing at times and reserved at others.  I thought both of these “hit the nail on the head” when it comes to me.  It all depends on my mood for that day.

Sensing

Out of all my results I found sensing to be the most interesting.  Under the sensing trait I had two facets that were considered out of preference: conceptual and original.  While I was reading the details below the thing that kind of shocked me was that it said conceptual people may be more attracted to an academic career rather than being a practitioner.  This is definitely not true for me.   I plan to be a practicing child psychologist and the idea of an academic career sounds terrible in my opinion.  The other thing that was out of preference was being original which again “hit the nail on the head.”

Feeling

The thing that stuck out to me was not an extreme; in fact it was the opposite, in the facet of tough-tender I was exactly in the middle.  The descriptive points that were provided confused me a little at first but the more I keep reading them the more they make sense to me.

             Perceiving

                I was considered out of preference under the planful facet too.  I like to have a plan, but I do not have to follow my plan to a T and that is pretty much what the points were describing. 

               The MBTI is a perfect tool to help you understand yourself on a deeper level.  Not because it is telling you what type of person you are, but that it makes you think/reflect on all of the facets that make up your personality.

Cultural Diversity: A lesson from last Spring

This week our book talked about cultural diversity.  Cultural diversity is something you are taught about in school, but unless you actually have some experience with individuals whose culture differs from your own you never really get a full understanding.  In my home town there was not a lot of cultural diversity of any kind.  So in an essence I was in a bubble.  Coming to ISU gave me so many more opportunities to interact with people whose lives and cultures differ from my own and from the bubble that I grew up in.

Last spring I enrolled in a one credit human sciences course called dialog on diversity.  I’m not going to lie the only reason I enrolled in the course at first was because it fit into my schedule and it meets on of the U.S. diversity requirements you have to have to graduate.  With that said, it is vitally important that I mention that by the end of the class I was so glad I had enrolled and I would now recommend taking the course to anyone.  Especially to students from towns like mine where there was very little diversity.  The course met once a week and each week had a specific topic of diversity that ranged from sexism to sexuality and how we view ourselves.  One topic that we covered in class was also talked about in our chapter this week which was the majority privilege.

The thing that probably resonated with me the most from the dialog on diversity class was the week we talked about sexuality.  The instructor had four volunteers who identified as being heterosexual sit in chairs in the front of the room and face each other.  Then she asked us all to answer some questions including “Why are you heterosexual?” or statements like “I think your sexual preference is wrong.”  The idea behind this is that the questions and statements are ones that many heterosexual people pose to homosexuals.  Not only did this exercise open my eyes to how rude these comments were, but also it made me want to be more aware of how I approach people who are different from me in general.

Coming to Iowa State has definitely changed my view on diversity, but I know that there is still much to learn.  I’m just happy to say that I have been making the right steps to change my thoughts an actions when it comes to being aware of diversity and accepting/embracing it.

Well it's a new year and a new round of blogging for the Hixson Program.  Although blogging is not my favorite thing, to do I do think it is a good chance to get to know each other on a level that you may not be able to reach in person.  The things we write reveal more than you realize so I guess it is a good thing.  I guess I don’t like blogging because I sometimes find it difficult to find the words I want to use.   But that is enough complaining for today.

I’m really excited about being a Hixson peer mentor.  I am so happy that I am getting the opportunity to give back to the Hixson program, and the change to get to know more of the Hixson scholars.  So far our course this spring is going well.   I think it seems like it shall be a fun and insightful semester.  I am a little nervous about the learning sessions, but that is mainly just because I do not know what to expect out of them.  Hopefully those nerves will go away after seeing Easten’s presentation and a few of the other presentations too.  I am kind of looking forward to going to the Iowa State Leadership experience and the Learning Community Mid-year Institute.  There were several sessions that sounded really interesting.  I hope that I will be able to get some useful information from the sessions I have signed up for.

I have started reading the first to chapters in Students Helping Students.  So far I like how it is organized.  The discussion questions keep you engaged and give you something to think about while you are reading.  It is also nice to have a clear definition of the different types of student helpers on university campuses.  Overall from what I have read so far I think this should be a book that will actually be interesting to read rather than just another textbook.