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.