Connecting Students to Resources

Discussing campus resources in class this week brought me right back to being a peer mentor. Everything from helping students with CyMail, AccessPlus, tutors and even CyRide was suddenly fresh in my mind. It is easy to take for granted how much we know about this campus and the services that it has to offer its students. Take it a step further and we make ourselves aware of other resources we weren’t even aware of and now we are tremendous resources to one another and to first year Hixson Scholars.  The challenge for us then becomes how well we can communicate these resources and have students actually take advantage of them.

            It’s easy to show students resources and easier yet to simply talk about them. We can spend hours lecturing about things students should be doing in order to be successful but I think we all know how impactful a lecture is. It can be tremendously more effective to actually demonstrate or have the group participate in an activity around the resources. Visiting the biofeedback center as a group or setting up time to take a student to the physical location.

            If we can think of creative and motivating ways to get students to take full advantage of what Iowa State has to offer its students then we can better serve them. There are dozens of resources on campus and it’s an integral part of our job to expose those resources to Hixson’s.

Learning Styles

This week we identified and discussed learning styles. More importantly we discussed the importance of different learning styles as it pertains to being a peer mentor. It is not only important to be able to identify they way in we learn best and also recognizing the learning styles of others. We putting together a lesson or doing an activity with a group we must remember to appeal to all learning styles within the group.

All of us have spent a class period listening to a professor talk at the group for 50 minutes. Unfortunately many students today do know learn well from this teaching method. Think of a class or lecture that you have attended that had a demonstration or activity that went along with the topics in class and how much more beneficial and engaging the lesson was. Some may learn best from simply hearing the material presented to them. For me personally I need to be doing or seeing something tangible in order to learn best. Learning styles can vary from person to person and can also depend on what type of material is being discussed.

As peer mentor, we prepare lesson plans weekly so that our student will gain particle information and skills in our recitation as well as the large lecture. By including a variety of delivery methods within a lesson more students will retain more information and thus be more successful in the course.  It is important to include some lecturing and discussion, but also activities that require students to talk with those around them and even move about the room.

Creating a resume for example. It is great to discuss all of the important pieces of information to have on a resume. But you can also have students bring in what they have so far and provide feedback to one another on improvement they can make.

It will be of the most benefit all around if we prepare lessons to appeal to different learning styles. Be careful not to favor your personal learning style when preparing a lesson because there will likely be someone who learns very differently than you.  

Leading Groups

I was facilitating a workshop at a leadership conference a couple years ago. We had groups of about 25 freshmen rotating through different rooms in the school. Between the first few rotations I had been hearing about a student who was being a disturbance during the presentation. I remember when the student came into my classroom he reminded me of Justin Bieber, he was a shorter kid with shaggy brown hair and he was wearing a flat billed hat. He was already chatting with the people around him and it was clear he was going to keep up his behavior from previous groups. We started the workshop by introducing ourselves as the presenters and then I immediately addressed the student who had been causing so much trouble in other workshops. I addressed him in front of the entire group and commented on his cool hat. I mentioned that I appreciated his since of style but I would be grateful if he would take his hat off being that we were inside a building. The student could have said no, could have disagreed but he didn’t. He took his hat off and was a totally different person than others had described him as. What was different? I leveled with the student. Instead of taking an authoritative position of power over him, I put the two of us on the same page. I used something as simple as wearing a hat indoors to address an even bigger problem before it arose. The student participated throughout the rest of the workshop and even had some good things to say about our topic. This is something I have always remembered throughout the workshops and presentations I have done as an FFA member and as Peer Mentor. 

System or Group?

Kat and Tyler led the class on “Understanding Group Process”. They opened up with an interesting activity that related well to the lesson. One part of their lesson that really stuck with me was the video they showed of the fish. How the whole group of fish worked together so well as to survive and avoid predators. Not that we have predators to be avoiding as peer mentors, but that by working together in a cohesive group we are better off.

Our book describes a group as a system that description really appealed to the engineer in me. When I think of a system I think of heat transfer, mass flow rate and work being done. It is defined as a set of connected things or parts forming a complex whole. Our book defines it as a complex set of interactive variables. I think all of these are accurate. Take any group, lets use a group a mentors as an example. (Completely random I know, but go with it J)  Imagine all of us bringing different ideas and viewpoints into the group. This is like our mass flow, but it’s not always constant and is most certainly not equal among all inputs. There are many variables that determine the amount of information, time, and energy we can all bring to the group/system. With this combination of variables, the system is changing and often work is being done. (Totally an awesome metaphor if you’re an engineer). Something is being produced and it is often to the benefit of those involved. We could get real crazy and have some mass flow out of the system when things are going very smoothly. Or increase the pressure within the system when the group is under a quickly approaching deadline.

No matter how you look at it, having an understanding of group processes is an important key in being successful. Everything from group dynamics to basic communication plays on role within groups of all shapes and sizes. It is important that we continue to engage with the group and share common goals while bringing our own experiences and views to the table. 

#ISCORE2013

Just last Friday I had the opportunity to attend the Iowa State Conference on Race and Ethnicity (ISCORE). Although I wasn’t able to attend the morning address, I heard wonderful things about the speaker. Throughout the day I attended a variety of sessions.

The first session I attended, “The Changing Faces of Iowa”, educated us on the history and impact of immigration in Iowa. I found the presenter to be very personable but was not very impressed with the presentation overall. He presented accurate and informative data about the trends of immigration in Iowa and addressed a few common misconceptions. Although I agreed with most of his presentation, I couldn’t help but notice the gaps in information. I would agree that the Latino community is an important part of Iowa, but in my opinion, he failed to show the whole picture. Immigrants in Iowa are stimulating the economy and are doing a lot of goods things. The situation overall isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. I want to see the good with the bad. I want to see how much money our government is wasting on successful programs or how see how this is changing our public school systems.

At one point during his presentation he posed the question, “Who thinks farming is Iowa biggest industry?”, and then corrected the audience by informing us that manufacturing was in fact the largest industry. He did this in an attempt to dispel the stereotype of immigrant workers on farms. I am curious as to what his definition of “farming” is, and how much of modern agriculture in actually encompasses. Does his definition of “farming” include crop and milk producers? Does this include the men and women working on these “farms” providing other services than what he sees as “farming”? A man that grows crops and raises livestock is a farmer, but what about the man he pays to milk his cows or repairs the equipment? I would be curious to know the scope of his statistics. Immigrants of all types play a role in American and Iowa agriculture and to brush it off as insignificant is a mistake. (I promise I’m finished with my ranting.)

Next I attended “Nine Digits of Freedom: Analyzing Inherent Privileges that Come From Being a U.S. Citizen”. It was eye opening to see how difficult things like attending college can be for undocumented students. It was especially surprising to find out that the states of Alabama and Georgia do not all undocumented students to attend any of their public university.

I cannot finish a blog about ISCORE without a shout out to Cassie Glidden, a fellow Hixson, for her great job co-presenting a session. Their session, “What Are You?”, challenged its participants to evaluate how they view identity. It was definitely on of my favorite sessions of the day.