The first session I attended was presented by the Elementary Education Learning Community Advisor and it’s the five peer mentors that make up the team. They basically provided an overview of what their program does and how they prepare students to be successful in elementary education. They do a great job of connecting with their student’s mid-summer before classes and maintaining that contact into the first week. One aspect of their learning community that I was impressed by was their grouping method. Students were assigned learning community groups by their location on campus. They also had a CyRide rep come into their class during the first few weeks and gave a presentation on how to read schedules and bus riding etiquette.
Next was a presentation focusing on how to facilitate one-on-one meetings with students. The Women in Science and Engineering are an impressive group. Each one of their students takes the Strengths Quest test and is discussed in their class. They also have a one-on-one with each of their students monthly. One thing that came to mind was potentially using blackboard for scheduling outside of class meetings. Another interesting idea that was brought up was an “office hours” of sorts, but less formal. A peer mentor would just have a set time and location somewhere on campus that they will be during the week for when students would like to meet. This is something I would love to implement with other Hixson students.
The first session I attended on Saturday was titled “Thinking Within the Circle”. The thought being that if everyone is thinking outside of the box, then we are all thinking the same. They then showed one of my favorite TED Talks – How Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek . The general idea being: “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” As part of the presentation we were instructed to come up with a personal mission statement using a Why?>How?>What? thought process. I came up with the following: “I want others to be successful. I do this by using my experiences and talents to provide support, encouragement, and constructively criticize those around me. I am able to do this through my role as a mentor, facilitator, friend and brother."
The last session I was able to attend was by far the most interesting. We got a swift overview of Group Dynamics. I am looking forward to using some of the information in my lesson later this week. They used demonstrations and called people out in the room to give real life and real time examples of group dynamics. It became very obvious how important this topic was to being a peer mentor.
Overall it was a busy weekend filled with tons of valuable information that I am excited to bring back to my roles as a peer mentor.
Not only do the "office hours" sound like a good idea to try for the Hixson program, but I also thought that the idea of setting up groups by their location on campus could be important as well. I found it hard to get the chance to get to know people outside of my resitation section last year. Knowing you whatever you learned from the session on group dynamics will be interesting.
ReplyDeleteI love the office hours idea! My original plan was to do something like office hours last semester but my free time consisted of 8pm-12pm on the weekdays and I felt like my students wouldn't want to venture out to Hixson to ask me any questions that late at night.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed the group dynamics session as well!